Internet
The internet, coming to a big screen near you
May 25th
The recently released Prince of Persia film is the latest addition to a growing list of films based on computer games – an interesting reversal of the usual ‘film then computer game’ marketing and production process. This reversal isn’t a particularly new development, as the 1993 UK release of Super Mario Bros illustrates, but it’s one that’s becoming more and more common with 8 films making the leap from computer game to film in the last 2 years. Admittedly, not all of the films were Hollywood Blockbusters, but you get my point.
This growing trend might illustrate the fact that film studios are beginning to run out of interesting stories and ideas to mine and are therefore being forced to cast their nets wider to other possible sources. Perhaps the penny is beginning to drop that audiences might not be that bothered about seeing yet another ‘reimagining’ of tired classics like Robin Hood (don’t hit me Russell).
Given the rapid convergence of media channels it’s almost inevitable that at some point an internet based phenomenon will make the leap to the silver screen and a big step was taken towards that happening this week. It was announced that the popular Twitter feed ‘Shit My Dad Says’ has been commissioned by CBS to be made into a TV series starring Captain Kirk (William Shatner).
As far as I know, this is the first commission of its kind, but it could be a watershed moment. It’s likely that other entertainment companies will be jealously eyeing CBS’ move and that they’ll now be increasing the focus of their search for content ideas onto the internet.
LOL cats the movie anyone?
DASH: Sony Reveals Pocket Internet Device
Jan 7th
We’re at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Sony has just revealed a pocket device for surfing the web. It’s called Dash.
In a statement, Sony says: “The dash device accesses a wireless home network and continuously updates information designated by the user. That information is then delivered by more than 1,000 selectable free ‘apps’ to give consumers customized Internet content.”
Here are a few other things we’ve learned:
- It is a touchscreen device designed to surf the web
- Dash has a 7″ color touchscreen. It’s meant to be portable.
- The device can either be placed flat or stand upright.
- The device has software to run Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It also has an audio component, though we can’t tell what exactly it has from the promotional video they played here.
At first glance, this device is nifty, but nothing revolutionary. We’ll relay more information as it comes to us. Here’s an image from the event:
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
Tags: CES, CES 2010, CES2010, Dash, gadgets, internet, sony
Teens Banding Together to Cut Down on Facebook
Dec 21st
There’s no doubt that for many of us, Facebook consumes a goodly proportion of our time; on average, we spend 5 percent of our time online. For some teenagers, time spent on the 350 million-strong social network has gone beyond time spent and into time sunk. It’s prompted a spate of young users to devise ways of cutting down, taking breaks or simply deactivating their accounts altogether,
” target=”_blank”>according to The New York Times.
Some are even banding together to provide social support for curtailing the Facebook obsession. Two teens at San Francisco University High School, Hally Lamberson and Monica Reed, made a pact to only log in on the first Saturday of every month. Ann Arbor, Michigan, sophomore Neeka Salmasi enlisted her sister to change her Facebook password for her every Sunday evening and not give the new credentials back to her until the following Friday.
Other strategies include giving up Facebook for Lent, “punishing” Facebook usage breaches with embarrassing Wall messages, deactivating an account temporarily or going cold turkey for the entire senior year after Facebook proved too distracting during college applications. Psychology professionals and school administrators alike acknowledge that usage of the social network can all too easily reach problematic levels of distraction. Dr. Kimberly Young, director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, said she’s worked with dozens of teens trying to break the habit: “It’s like any other addiction… it’s hard to wean yourself.”
Author and teacher Rachel Simmons credits the new Facebook Live Feed format with exacerbating an already addictive online medium: “You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying. You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”
Do you or someone you know have a preferred strategy for limiting the time you spend on Facebook? Do the parents out there have any guidelines they use to help teens maintain a healthy relationship with their online networks?
[via eSchoolNews]
Reviews: Facebook
Tags: addiction, facebook, internet, Internet addiction, social networking, teens
Australia Plans to Filter the Internet. Again.
Dec 15th
According to the AP, the Australian government plans to start filtering certain web destinations in an effort to block harmful content from users in the country. The obligatory filter, which is likely to be implemented in 2011., would make Australia one of the strictest democracies as far as internet regulation goes.
As always, the cause seems a noble one: it’s supposed to protect children from sexual violence, child pornography and crime-related websites. But it’s still a bad idea.
First of all, having a government maintain a blacklist of forbidden sites opens up potential for abuse. According to Communication Minister Stephen Conroy, the blacklist is supposed to be transparent, but no details were given, and details like “transparency” can get lost in translation when it comes to implementation.
Secondly, you can’t block child pornography merely by blocking a bunch of websites. What about chat rooms, IRC networks or P2P networks? The illegal material will still get through, only now users in Australia will have one more thing to worry about: whether their government is filtering out something they shouldn’t be.
Finally, one has to look only a couple of years in the past to see that Australia had already spent obnoxious amounts of money on an internet filtering system – and failed miserably.
This initiative will likely result in very limited success, but as free speech lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) rightly points out, lots of damage to Australia’s reputation. As EFA vice president Colin Jacobs put it, “our sense is that people will be much more worried about the fact that the government will have a secret blacklist that is not very compatible with our status as a democracy and a free society.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Nikada
Reviews: Australia, iStockphoto
Tags: australia, freedom of speech, internet, privacy
Information Overload: Americans Consume 34 GB of Data Daily
Dec 10th
They say the soul weighs 21 grams, and now we have a measurement of the American mind on any given day: 34 gigabytes. According to a University of California, San Diego, study highlighted by The New York Times, the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day, including a whopping 100,000 words of information.
The report clarifies that we don’t necessarily parse a full 100,000 words per day, but that that rather astounding figure does cross our eyes and ears each 24-hour interval via multiple channels: the Web, TV, text messaging, radio, video games and more.
The study goes on to break down which of those media tend to occupy most of our time. The big winner is still television at almost 45 percent of our daily allowance, but the computer is a not-too-distant second at about 27 percent. In all, we spend about 11.8 hours per day absorbing mass quantities of information, sometimes multitasking in front of multiple screens simultaneously.
Video games saw the biggest leap in recent years; we now spend 2.5 percent of the day on computers, consoles, and on an increasingly popular selection of social networking games like FarmVille and Pet Society. And although pundits and sociologists have been quick to decry the decline of print as a corresponding decline in literacy, the increase in time spent on the Web actually means people are “reading more than ever,” according to co-author of the study Roger Bohn.
Do the results of the study seem realistic to you? Would you classify yourself as above or below the American average in your data consumption diet?
[via Lifehacker]
[img credit: iStockphoto, enot-poloskun]
Reviews: Lifehacker, iStockphoto, pet society, video
Tags: america, data, information, internet, study, tv, video games, web
MIT Team Wins DARPA Balloon Challenge
Dec 7th
On December 5, 1969, the entire 4-node network for ARPANET was completed, building on the first host-to-host connection from some months earlier. The technical core for what would become the Internet was born.
Forty years later, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off a contest asking teams to locate the longitudes and latitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned in stationary locations across the continental United States. Although the contest was officially open for 7 days, it only took nine hours for the team from MIT to locate all 10 balloons, winning the competition and $40,000 in prize money.
The goal of the project wasn’t to see who could answer the question, but how. More specifically, “the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.”
Now that MIT has won, DARPA plans to meet with teams to review various approaches and strategies used to build networks and collect information.
In the MIT team’s case, it looks like they had a pretty solid information infrastructure set-up prior to the contest even starting. Potential team members could sign up to join the team from the group’s website and then invite friends using their own identifiable link. The tracking link makes it easy for the team to distribute the winning funds to not just the people that identified a balloon, but the person who invited them to join the team in the first place.
The site also had a form where team members could enter in balloon locations or even DARPA coordinates. MIT also encouraged team members to post their personalized invitation links to sites like Facebook and Twitter.
It will be interesting to get an actual break-down of how many people were involved in directly or indirectly identifying all 10 balloons.
Reviews: Facebook, Twitter
Tags: DARPA, internet, mit, Network Challenge, research contest
Internet Vices: Twitter is Crack Cocaine [PIC]
Nov 24th
Social media is surely addictive, but can we be more specific? Patrick Moberg gave it a good shot in his Internet Vices cartoon, comparing various social services to their consciousness modifying equivalents both legal and… less than legal.
Twitter’s similarity to crack cocaine: “Yuppies do it on their iPhone. Cheap. Short. Fruitless.” YouTube, Facebook, digg, MySpace and more are also suitably parodied with clever illustrations. Now we need some clever new startup to invent a social media hangover cure.
Check out all the social media vices and let us know: did Mr. Moberg nail them all? Do you have alternate analogies? See you at the 12-step program!
[via Waxy]
Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: cartoons, digg, facebook, funny, internet, trending, twitter, youtube
