Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Have you visited mikearauz.com lately? This new banner photo was taken during a ferry trip from Goteborg, Sweden to Frederikshavn, Denmark back in May. You'll also notice a sharp new color palette for the Fall season.

This is probably the best speech I've ever seen Sen. Clinton give.

The folks at Mozilla Labs are up to some very cool stuff. (via TechCrunch)


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

more details here.

(Don't miss the moment with their daughters at the end.)

Now that information has become so easily accessible, our ability to pick out the most relevant bits, to interpret what we find, and to gain insight from that information is more important than ever before.

In all the breathless discussion about the emergence of the blogosphere—the threat it poses to main stream media, and the imminent demise of journalism and literacy that it was bringing about—one of the most basic aspects of the change it represents often goes over looked. The online universe of blogs thrives on the initial assumption that there’s more value in what we do with information than there is in acquiring it. Bloggers rarely break news. What most bloggers do is provide commentary on publicly reported facts and events. The blogosphere has flourished by cultivating audiences of readers around the activity of uncovering the most interesting aspects of a story, by explaining those elements, and by seeing something that no one else noticed.

Remember Twistori? This simple, yet profound, website created by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs helps us to make sense of all the random thoughts on Twitter. Twistori searches Twitter’s public timeline of messages for a few words related to feelings: love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish. Twitter messages that include one of these words are collected and displayed on the site in a global stream of consciousness. Hoy and Fuchs took information that was freely available to everyone, and created a new lens for us to see it through.

These innovative ways to communicate with an audience online do not take advantage of unique proprietary information. Their success, whether the small single site Twistori or the huge network of blogs, is not derived from knowing something that no one else knows; their success is the result of what they do with something that everyone knows. Twistori’s service is so simple and effective that it’s hard to believe that every major brand hasn’t commissioned Hoy and Fuchs to build an iteration of the site for their own purposes, aggregating a continuous stream of feedback about their own brand and their competitors.

We live in a universe with an endless sky full of stars. Some people are still worrying about trying to claim individual stars for themselves. The rest of us are creating new constellations.

via Bud Caddell

I've been kicking around this notion of a Functional Collective Conscious for a while now (here, here, here). The idea is that digital communications are leading us to a point at which as soon as one of us knows something, we all know that something. My friend Brian Fountain, who started Prototype 161, sent me this fantastic case study (PDF) of the iconic ARG, I Love Bees, written by the game's lead community designer, Jane McGonigal, PhD. The following anecdote is a perfect illustration of what I've been theorizing about.

In Summer 2004, the game design company 42 Entertainment created an immersive alternative reality game to promote the upcoming release of Microsoft’s videogame Halo 2. Over the course of the game more than 600,000 individuals collaborated through the internet to collectively solve a series of puzzles and challenges that took place both online and in the real world.

One of the central modes of the game focused on a world-wide network of over 1,000 public payphones. The players were given GPS coordinates pinpointing the locations of the phones, and then were challenged to get to specific phones at specific times in order to receive a call and collect a new clue. After several months the players had continually impressed the game designers with their collective intelligence and ability to coordinate action by using a combination of online message boards, player-notated online maps, and mobile phones.

The designers decided to up the ante by creating a challenge called the “relay mission” that would expose the limits of the players’ abilities. As Jane McGonigal, PhD writes in her paper, the designers expected the players to “eventually hit a wall past which they could not coordinate and perform.”

The actress playing the operator would begin by making a live call to a particular pay-phone. When the player picked up the phone the operator would ask them a simple personal question—like, “Tell me something that you’re especially good at.” Once the operator got her answer, she would inform the player that she would be calling another phone within one hour, and whoever answered that phone needed to know what that player had told her as the answer. She didn’t tell the player which phone she was going to call; the player needed to make sure that all of the other players in the field who would potentially receive the call knew that information.

The designers shortened the time between the calls throughout the day, planning to reach a point where the players could no longer relay the necessary information quickly enough. But, to the designers’ surprise, they never reached the limit of the players’ capabilities. By the end of the day, the players were able to broadcast the pertinent message from one individual to a world-wide network of teammates in the real-world in less than fifteen seconds.

The collective wisdom that the players of I Love Bees were able to create illustrates what knowledge in a digital world looks like. And remember that the year of this anecdote is 2004. Only four short years later, many of the tools that the players of I Love Bees had to create for themselves are now readily available to all of us. They were limited to 1-to-1 mobile text messaging, rudimentary online mapping tools, and basic online message boards. Today we have 1-to-many mobile text broadcasting via Twitter. Google Maps has become an open system for collaborative map-making, accessible both online and on mobile devices. And individuals can even broadcast live pictures and video direct from their mobile phones to any number of connected viewers on the web via Qik or Kyte.

The game designers at 42 Entertainment were forced to re-calibrate their notion of what a player knew. Through our use of digital technologies we are constructing a new meaning of knowledge for ourselves. We are creating a world in which the knowledge possessed by any one of us individually is functionally the same as the information collected and shared by the network of individuals.

The NYTimes T Magazine has a great little article about the small army of teenage fashion bloggers that have sprung up over the past couple years (unfortunately it's trapped inside the awful T Magazine flash website).

I've been reading Style Rookie for a few weeks now, and I'm constantly amazed by the 12-year-old author's vision, creativity, and writing talent. A swear she's going to be the next Anna Wintour before she even gets to college.

I've been a casual participant, but avid observer of fashion since I was in junior high. And it's been inspiring for me to see how the internet - self-publishing and global communications - has totally broken the control that brands like the Gap had over national fashion trends 10-20 years ago. Young people now are inspired by street photography on Face Hunter and their peers on Flickr's wardrobe remix as much, if not more, than they are by Vogue and Cosmo.

Here are a the other teen fashion blogs that are mentioned in the article (all of them are worth checking out):

Childhood Flames - http://childhoodflames.blogspot.com/
Fashion Robot - http://thefashbot.blogspot.com/
Fashion Toast - http://www.fashiontoast.com/
That's Just My Vibe - http://thatsjustmyvibe.blogspot.com/
Fashion Pirates - http://fashionpirates.blogspot.com/

(by the way, CNN let's you embed videos now)

In Fall 2000, I took my first long-form improv comedy class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. I was fortunate to have a living legend of improv as my teacher, Ali Farahnakian, who later founded The PIT. One of the things that made Ali a great teacher was that he had a fairly hands-off style. He mostly just asked us to get up and do scenes, and then he'd give us his advice after we were done.

Frank Black was by far the least talented performer in the group. We discovered this quickly because Frank Black was also the most eager performer of the group. Whenever Ali would ask, "Ok, who wants to do a scene?" Frank Black would be up out of his seat to volunteer before most of us had finished hearing the question.

So, by about the third week, the rest of the class realized that if we weren't as hungry as Frank Black, we'd be doomed to sit through another of his horrible scenes.

If you hesitate to get off the bench because you're afraid that you're not ready or you don't have the skills, just remember that there's always someone less talented an more eager waiting to steal your opportunity.

Ricky Gervais and Louis CK were on a small charter jet together. Gervais had a video camera, and captured what happens when two of the funniest comedians of our time think that they're about to die.

(Language is NSFW)

"Klondike held a contest recently where they asked users to create and upload their own commercials for Klondike bars. The only real restriction was no 'violence or acts that appear to cause harm.' And we tried. We really did. We even hired a beatboxer to star in it. But, well, we are what we are."

If you've seen Batman The Dark Knight, then this image probably looks familiar to you. It is a picture of an art installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, called Listening Post. As they describe it, the piece "culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens."