I’ve been tracking thesixtyone for a bit. The first version of the site matched social gaming with music discovery. The newest incarnation has taken a slightly different approach one which is more discovery focused with a mix of simple challenges called quests that encourage you to listen to music and gain reputation points.
The part I love about the new design is the simplicity and richness of the interface.
A visual snapshot of internet consumption – provides an interesting look at the state of the internet in 2009.
More than a decade ago it was “search” that was driving innovation and large investments in both infrastructure and talent. When Google first started indexing unique URLs in 1998 there were already 26 million. Two years later the amount of indexed pages had crossed the billion mark. Flash forward to this winter and the amount of unique URLs exceeds 1 trillion.
We are swimming in a sea of data. On average Americans wade through 34 gigs of information a day according to a recent report by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. The ability to “filter” this information will drive future innovation. How people are posting, commenting and clicking will greatly impact the ways films are created, curated and shared over the next decade.
The desire to tap into social data is evident in recent deals that have Google, Microsoft and Yahoo lining up to access Twitter’s feed in an effort to improve their own traditional search results. The fact that three leaders in search are interested in something as small as 140 characters of information points to the value of social streams. From breaking news instantly, in many cases before traditional outlets, the power of word of mouth threatens to devalue massive ad spends by the studios; the ability of people to connect and communicate in real time through handheld devices is challenging many established industries while at the same time enabling a new form of social curation.
This past week I came across two filtering / aggregation projects which were both developed within internal lab divisions – one from url shortening service Bit.ly and the other from Google.
Bitly.tv takes the 2 billion plus links that flow through the service and filters them to find trending vids. Based upon Bit.ly’s own bitrank algorithm which measures popularity, persistence and velocity in an attempt to predict what could go viral. I would imagine Bit.ly is swimming in interesting trending data that can be monetized in a variety of ways. This marks the first of a number of filtering projects that the company plans to rollout.
Living Stories is a collaboration between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. An experiment to rethink the presentation of the news in an online environment. The effort aggregates a collection of stories surrounding a topic, presents a nice timeline view and attempts to harness a community discussion around the newsworthy topics. It’s early yet but you could see this merging at some point with google reader. I’d love the ability to trace linkage and timelines between news stories.
In the winter issue of Filmmaker Magazine, I talk about how data can be used to discover, curate and create stories. I’m fascinated by the concept of marring various real-time and social data to generate a type of “storystream.” A perfect example is “We Feel Fine,” which crawls the web looking for the phrases “I feel” and “I’m feeling.” But where We Feel Fine is a document of what is actually occurring online it represents more of a hybrid documentary then a “narrative.” In terms of narrative usage I’ll post later in more detail about some of things we’re developing around my newest transmedia / feature project HiM but for now I’d like to highlight another use of social data as a communication/story path for a game.
The recent release of a Sherlock Holmes’ version of TweetDeck represents an interesting usage of the streamreader. A streamreader similar to a feedreader is a way to aggregate your social feeds. The Sherlock Holmes skinned version of TweetDeck acts as a companion to the AQKA / Hide and Seek designed game 221b which leads players directly into the first scene of the film when it opens Christmas Day. The skinned TweetDeck is intended to be a simple way to keep up with updates and the conversation surrounding the game.
“We Feel Fine” an expansive project that has mined the web since 2005 for the phrase “I Feel” has expanded to include a beautiful book that captures the project.
I’ve been following the “We Feel Fine” project and a number of collaborations between Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that harness data in interesting and artistic ways.
Here’s how Sep Kamvar describes the project on his site.
“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).
Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”
