DDKS E2005 Wiki links

Links from the course Digital Culture and Sociology fall 2005

September 6 - Technology and Culture

You can find the ppt for this week here

Search engines

Search Engine Watch
-Provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.

Baidu
-A popular Chinese search engine.

Metacrawler
-A search engine that searches the "Internet's top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, About, FindWhat, LookSmart" and returns the "best" results (read: probably the top 10-20 ranked sites). Interesting for comparisons.

google-watch
-A site that monitors the ever-expanding google. Some interesting points on the google eula, but actually not the page I hoped to find.

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline
-Flash-film about how the Internet may evolve, Google plays one of the major roles in that evolvement.

StumbleUpon
-New and interesting option to search on the internet, extension for firefox.


Filtering and Blocking

Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
-and their filtering project


September 13 - Remix Culture, Regulation, and Commodification

Mashups and Remixing

Whether or not remixing, reappropriating, and reconfiguring is something new or really just the work of culture more generally, there are some good resources out there to help you explore the phenomenon a bit more.

HorizonZero's issue on remix
-Various articles, including one by DJSpooky.

Postdigital remix culture and online performance
-UC Riverside's website on their exhibition on the subject. Lots of good links, short articles, and tidbits on the subject.

DJ Spooky's site
-Lots of resources here, not just articles but an interesting interview at radio station WNYC and music as well.

Bushwhacked
-Link Found!!! - Also check out Microsoft's Steve Balmer

Bush and Blair love duet
-More fun stuff

Hatten är din
-A tribute to the late webpage come.to/hatten which contained the legendary flash production "Hatten är din".

Boston Mashup Project
-Make sure to check out their links. For some general background on mashups check out the Wikipedia entry (starting to say that a lot here!)

OverClocked Remix
-Specializing in game music remixing.

Star Wars Kid
-Collections including the original and various remixes of the infamous Star Wars Kid video.

All Your Base
-One of the older, and now classic, examples of remix meets photo manipulation. The Wikipedia entry also contains a lot of good info on the phenomena.

genesis
-this piece of net.art created by Aureia Harvey and Michael Samyn, shows a really impressive way to remix elements from our popular culture in an artistic and immersive way. Be aware that the piece is pretty hard to get into - after all it's art - but it is worth the time. It actualy exsists of four different pieces, the first one is genesis. There are links to the other pieces at the bottom, numbers is the one that uses remix the most. If you like you should have a look at their website http://www.e8z.org they do make impressive stuff, it's a bit hard to navigate, since they don't like usability, but like to think of webdesign in terms of abusability :-)They also made a websearch engine - also containing remix elements - that are interesting in relation to our talk last week www.sixteenpages.net/

Ascii history of art for the blind
-Vuk Cosic made these different pieces of art accessible for the blind, by converting them to Ascii and haveing them read aloud. Remember this is for the blind, so you should ctrl a if you want to see which piece is read aloud.

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
-This is a visual bombardment of popculture remixes made by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung - it is massive!

The Grey Album
-When DJ DangerMouse (who, by the way, produced some tracks of the new Gorillaz album) decided to mashup Jay-Zs "The Black Album" and The Beatles' "The White Album", he not only created an instant masterpiece, but also made some powerful people quite angry, and started a useful and interesting debate. The linked page contains links to other sites, such as the EFF, on the case. And the album is pure gold. There is a video, too: Encore

The Kleptones
-In my opinion, The Kleptones are only a step down from DangerMouse, but their "One Night at the HipHopera", a mashup tribute to Queen, is so popular that the Disney Corporation swarmed half of the educated web, which mirrored this album, with cease-and-desist orders. Obviously, because it is way better than most of what they care to produce. And it is still out there.

The Bubble Project
-Remixing the public space.

Google Maps Mania
-Check out how people are doing a kind of mashup with Google Maps. Also see the New York Times article on the subject (free registration required).


Fan Fiction

People have long been reappropriating their favorite characters and settings from television and movies into fan produced fiction and artwork. Though originally shared and circulated via homebrew fanzines, at fan conventions, etc. the internet has allowed another point of distribution and connection amongst fan communities.

Fan Fiction Net
-One of the largest sites collecting not only tv and movie fanfic, but that riffing on games and books

FanArt Central
-A site with lots of links to art/images

Chilling Effects FanFic info page
-There are a number of fascinating, and often contentious, legal issues around fan fiction and fan reappropriation. Chilling Effects is an excellent resource for some background info on the subject, as well as links to various cease & desist (C&D) orders that have been given to people for their fan produced work


Fan Movies

One of the more interesting things that has happened in part as a result of movie editing software becoming more widely available and the internet as a collaborative and distribution tool has been the production of fan movies. These are movies, often based on well established intellectual properties like Star Wars or Batman, produced by fans, amateurs, or semi-professionals. Their intent is not to make any profit (though sometimes they serve as a kind of "portfolio" experience for people wanting to get into the industry).

Star Wars Revelations
-Impressive in its scope and production values, this 40 minutes movie is based on the Star Wars setting and universe, but incorporates an original storyline and actors. It is notable for its use of a distributed world-wide pool of contributors. Make sure to check out the FAQ.

StarTrek New Voyages
-A few guys taking StarTrek back to the original vision created by Gene Roddenbarry and continuing the 5-year mission led by James T. Kirk and his crew. So far 2 episodes have been made with more to come, all downloadable from the site

Star Wreck
-Star Trek parodies made by a Finnish aficionado. The author was 12(?) years old when he made the first one with Deluxe Animator.

Batman: Dead End
-Another fan movie.


Machinima

People "shooting" their own films inside virtual realities. Using game engines like Half Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims or the Quake engine, the viewpoint of the player becomes the camera. Machinima films have been shown at film festivals, in the television and have won rewards. See Henry Lowood's article High Performance Play for some good analysis and background.

www.machinima.com
-A site hosting a large collection of Machinima. In particular, check out Fake Science, the fan produced promo for PlanetSide, Machinima best picture winner Anachronix, and My Trip to Liberty City.

Leeroy!
-A now fairly infamous movie from World of Warcraft.

The Machinima Academy
-Their mission is to "advocate, develop and advance the arts and sciences of Machinima", also hosts the Machinima Film Festival.

This Spartan Life
-Easily one of the smartest, funniest machinima out there. This is an interview show filmed in the Halo environment.

Red vs. Blue
-Another Machinima filmed in Halo. Some of the humor will be lost on those who never played it, but it's worth a look.

Sims movies
-The Sims boasts a lot of fan produced films, including The Strangerhood, an episodic production. The horror genre provides an interesting twist on them though.

MTV's Video Mods
-Proof that Machinima has made its way into mass media, music video remixes using popular game characters and engines.


Modding

Taking a retail game and redesigning some or all of its content, also termed "modding" (as in modifying) really kicked off in 1993 with the release of ID Software's Doom and the open distribution of its source code. Later came a number of editors that would allow would be game makers to design new levels and put in new graphics for the game. Counter Stike, a popular first person shooter, still played extensively today, came to be as a modification of the Half Life retail game and was later bought by Valve software and bundled with the original Half Life. Today modding is a thriving community that is often taken into account when new games are released. Half Life 2 for example comes with an extensive development kit and editors for making complete modifications of the retail games. Interestingly Valve has promised to distriute such mods through their Steam network, giving modders an easy channel of distribution, but also giving Valve an invaluable first impression of how well a mod is received and as such if it is worth investing in or not.

SelectParks Art mods
-Julian Oliver's site hosting a number of mods of popular games with artistic ambitions, also hosts a number of Machinima, open source projects and more

www.crymod.com
-A modding portal for mods made with CryTeks game FarCry

Curse Gaming WoW AddOns
-A mod need not be a complete remake of the game content. For Blizzard's World of Warcraft a scripting language was supplied which allows players to alter the game's interface or create one entirely new.


EULAs

The End User License Agreement (sometimes also called the Terms of Service - TOS), is a sort of contract between users and developers/publishers. In the case of games it specifies the rights of the players, what they can and cannot do, as well as dictate what interllectual property rights, if any, the players have over the content that they help create, by playing. Violating the EULA allows the developer to take certain actions against players, from a simple warning to complete suspension and closure of their accounts.

Chilling Effects
-Excellent resource for issues of law, technology, and regulation.

EverQuest EULA
-The EULA from Sony Online Entertainments EverQuest, pretty much sets the standard for EULAs. You should also check out the ToS as it covers another aspect of using the product.

World Of Warcraft EULA
-The World of Warcraft EULA

Second Life TOS
-Second Life tries to take another approach to virtual property and content by allowing the players interllectual property right over the content they create: ”Participants can create Content on Linden 's servers in various forms. Linden acknowledges and agrees that, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, including without limitation the limited licenses granted by you to Linden herein, you will retain any and all applicable copyright and/or other intellectual property rights with respect to any Content you create using the Service.”

Project Entropia Conditions of Use
-Project Entropia is MMOG that takes yet another approach, granting players the ability to exchange their in-game cash for real world cash (dollars/euros), naturally their EULA will differ from the classic.

Napster EULA
-From the music downloading service. Also see the companion Terms of Service.

Windows XP Home
-Microsoft's version.

Blogger ToS
-One of the popular blog hosting services. Note that when you look around the site you can also end up at Google's info since they bought them.

Software that reads EULAs
-In this age of automated processes, some might even see as positive this kind of software - you don't really need to read the text, the machine will do it for you (while gently patting the user in the back, I suppose).

RTF EULA
-Article that tries to (playfully) state in plain English what some of that wordy EULA stuff can mean.

CoH vs. Marvel lawsuit as examined by law.com
-City of Heroes, the MMOG that lets you jump into a tight spandex suit and play it out as a super hero, had to face a lawsuit from comic book giant Marvel. Here the case is examined by law.com


September 20 – File-sharing Case Study

Filesharing

Filesharing software enables people to distribute files freely over the internet through a range of technologies. Most notably is properly Napster, which was the first filesharing software to stir the uproar of media companies, as their products (mostly music) was being freely distributed and shared over the internet. Napster used a centralized server based structure, which made it somwhat easy for media companies to close down the service and place the blame. This lead to a next generation of filesharing services based on peer to peer (p2p) networks (KaZaA, BitTorrent, SoulSeek), a decentralized structure much harder to dismantle.

Napster
-The good old Napster, now a pay service owned by Roxio, the creator of CD copying software, the irony...

SoulSeek
-A p2p filesharing service, primarily for music

KaZaA
-Probably the most used p2p filesharing network on the web i.e. lots of fake files, vira and spyware

BitTorrent
-The official BitTorrent site, it's really a p2p protocol used by a range of programs, a list can be found here

The FreeNet Project
-FreeNet is a distribution network which is completely decentralized with all its users anonymous. Joining FreeNet means you share a part of your hardrive and bandwith which then becomes part of the network. Information is encrypted. All this is to ensure "freedom of speach" and the free distribution of information

AntiPiratGruppen
-A Danish organisation representing large parts of the media industry, fighting the illegal copying and distribution of film and music

Piratgruppen
-A Danish organisation advocating the free distribution of cultural products

www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_1/kasaras/#k5
-Kostas Kassaras - Music in the Age of Free Distribution


September 27 – Reframing the Expert?

Traditional Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia Britannica
-You can access the full version online while at the ITU if you go via the Intranet. Otherwise they offer some free limited access.

The Faith Based Encyclopedia
-Critical take on Wikipedia by former Encyclopedia Britannica editor in chief, Robert McHenry.


Wikis

A Wiki is a website that allows anyone to edit its pages, without necessarily being logged-in or identified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
-The Wiki as described in the Wikipedia

www.wikipedia.org
-The Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia edited by anyone

www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/SwitchWiki
-A list of all known public Wikis

WikiMania05
-The first internationnal WikiMedia conference, you can find the list of papers here

http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=71
-Jean-Baptiste Soufron's "The political importance of the Wikipedia Project: The Only True Encyclopedia of Our Days

://reagle.org/joseph/2004/agree/wikip-agree.html
-Joseph M. Reagle Jr. - A Case of Mutual Aid: Wikipedia, Politeness, and Perspective Taking

Analysis of Heavy Metal Umlat Wiki page
-Fascinating close reading (video) of one Wiki page and the changes it has gone though.

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
-An article by Yochai Benkler that deals with free software but, for the purposes of this week, also articulates a notion of "commons-based peer production."


Innovative Uses

Semapedia
-Merges semacode and wikipedia into a ubicomp annotating system.

Placeopedia
-Connects wiki articles with their place


Pod Casting

Udell on podcasting
-An audio interview with Jon Udell, columnist for Infoworld, on podcasting.

Wikipedia entry on podcasting
-Just to complete the loop! Lots of links to helpful info, directories, etc.

Podcasting Wiki
-A wiki for podcasters and their listeners. Lots of good info, including how-to's, stuff on "pod safe" music, etc.

iPodder
-A cross-platform OS application for easily subscribing and listening to podcasts. Doesn't require an iPod (despite the name).

www.podcast.net
-A directory of many podcasts

www.apple.com/podcasting/
-Apples podcasting service

www.podcastingnews.com/
-A news site concerning anything potcasting related


Activist Blogs

America In Denial
-Political commentary and discussion

www.andrewsullivan.com/
-Andrew Sullivan's blog, as mentioned in the "Into The Blogosphere" article

www.poynter.org/
-The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists.

Is America Safe?
-Dedicated to defending Americans and the Homeland. How safe do you feel, let us know your views, opinions and comments.

Bush Watch
-A blog commenting on George W. Bush


October 25 – Private Lives, Public Spaces

What is a weblog? Wikipedia knows

Personal blogs (diaries)

Zoe's blog
-Enter the life of Zoe Freedman, Student English and Comparative Literary Studies

Jon's Jail Journal
-From behind the bars in a prison, Santa Rita, Tucson, Arizona, USA

Diary of a flight attendant
-Well...daily happenings in the life of a (now fired) flight attendant


Other blogs

http://kottke.org/
-Kottke.org

www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
-Joho the Blog

www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/
-Eric's Archived Thoughts (CSS guru)

http://bayosphere.com/blog/dangillmor
-Dan Gillmor's blog

http://binarybonsai.com/
-Binary Bonsai

www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/
-Steven Berlin Johnson

http://grumpygamer.com/main
-Grumpy Gamer

www.blackwood.dk/weblog
-Blackwood.dk

www.gamegirladvance.com/
-Game Girl Advance


November 1 – Social Networks & Online Communities

Online matching

Online networks that allow people to create a profile and find professional partners, jobs, friends or just someone to talk to. Usually connections are made through trusted networks of friends or colleagues.

Orkut
-”We are committed to providing an online meeting place where people can socialize and make new acquaintances who share their interests”

LinkedIn
-”With LinkedIn, you find the people, jobs and services you need through the people you know and trust, while you strengthen and extend your existing network”

Friendster
-Find friends online. Supports matchmaking based on horoscopes, filesharing and photo albums


Mobile blogging

www.flickr.com
-Say it with a photo - the site that Søren showed us

www.audioblogger.com
-Why not share your voice with the rest of the world as well?


Usenet

http://groups.google.com/
-Google news groups with the integrated 20 years of usenet archives. Look here for some interesting posts from the past.

www.usenet2.org/
-And attempt to bring usenet back to where it started, without the spam and advertising, a place where people do actually communicate about things that matters to them


Mailing Lists

Yahoo! Groups
-Hosts a number of mailing list/bulletin board based groups on a variety of subjects.


November 8 – Identities, Bodies, Technologies I

MUDs

The predecessor of modern graphical based mmorpgs. A MUD let's you run around in a virtual world with hundreds of other people online, slaying dragons, finding loot alone or in groups, all through a text based interface.

www.mudconnector.net
-A site with links to more then 1000 different muds, great place to start.

Introcution to MUDs
-A brief introduction and history of MUDs

zMUD
-While you can play a MUD through a simple telnet client, a dedicated MUD client will make the experience a lot more accommodating.


MMORPGs/Online Worlds

The modern graphical based massive multiplayer online game. Thousands of players meet online to socialize, kill monsters, form player-run guilds and progress their characters/avatars over the course of many months, sometimes even years. Below are a few examples of MMORPGs, some of them free

A Tale in the Desert
-A MMORPG largely governed by the players themselves, free trial, Win/Linux.

Anarchy Online
-The first Sci-fi based mmorpg, launched 2001, free to play (without the expansions) Win only.

Second Life
-An online "game" with a main focus on socializing, free basic account, Win only.

Habo hotel
-Online world for kids, socializing

Ultima Online
-The first commercial success within the genre of mmorpgs. 2D isometric view, Win only.

EverQuest
-Probably the most famous mmorpg, the first 3D based game of the genre (actually that was Meridian 59, but didn't become a commercial success), Win/Mac

World of Warcraft
-The largest mmorpg with more the 4.5 million players world wide.

EVE-Online
-A starship/space based mmorpg with all the players on one server, holds the record of most players online at the same time on one server - 17k, Win only.


Resources

Project Massive
-A massive online survey currently in it's 4th wave, investigating mmorpgs and online gaming in general. Concerned with ”communication and organization in PC based, Massively Multiplayer games...[and]...the impact of online play on the players' real life activities, perceptions, and experiences.”

www.mmorpgchart.com/
-An ongoing project of cataloguing mmorpgs and their subscription bases. Has some analysis and history as well.

www.virtualworldsreview.com/
-”Virtual Worlds Review is a basic guide to persistent online 2D and 3D virtual worlds that emphasize social interaction”

www.mmorpg.com
-A site dedicated to mmorpgs, previews, reviews, interviews and more


November 15 – Identities, Bodies, Technologies II

Second Life links

Second Life Starter Guide
-The Second Life official starter guide

The Second Life Herald
-Comments and thoughts on Second Life, The Sims Online and social games in general

Second Life Teaches Life Lessons
-A wired news article on Second Life as more then mere entertainment

Second Life at Clickable Culture
-Assorted articles on Second Life

New World Notes
-Blogging from Second Life

The Second Life Convention
-An offline convention for second life residents

Second Life Events
-Official forum events board, this is where you find a party online (login required)