vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Protest Sketch

From an email I received today:

VogBrowser

Kenyatta’s VogBrowser made Wired.

A Guide Dog’s Blog

It’s a Guide Dog’s Life is a blog by a guide dog. Well, not really but you get the idea. It’s written by the owner of the dog, and came as a result of a suggestion by one of the students who started blogging in network media this year.

John Tolva

John Tolva has a blog, and I’ve just added it to my rss feed. (Thanks Matt.)

John co wrote the Hypertext Cafe paper from several years ago which used Storyspace to mock up a multilinear video narrative. What is significant in the paper is a series of terms and ideas that John (and David) introduced. These are all things that can be done reasonably easily in QuickTime, things like time based links, responding to mouse events, and so on. Just wish I could invent the time to make it.

SCENARIO: Wide shot of a cafe with several busy tables. Mousing over individual table lets you hear that converstion. Click will introduce a new video with is a Medium Close Up of that specific table. (When you click makes a difference.) Eg, table three has three women talking about their weekend. If you mouse in and listen at the beginning, and click, you will hear episode one about, let’s say, the kids birthday. But if you mouse in later on, or click later on, when they’re talking about a rumoured affair, that is the conversation you will see and hear. The combinatory possibilities are complex – after all when you zoom back out imagine if because you heard the conversation about the rumoured affair and you then moused into table one, one of the parties to that affair was discussing it. This would only happen (perhaps) if you first heard the affair via table three. Or vice versa. A similar scenario could operate around the children’s birthday party. This would be a multilinear, multisequential video work. It is ergodic because the users actions are non trivial in relation to the text – when you do something fundamentally affects what happens. This is a key feature of something that is genuinely interactive. Interactivity must have consequences in and for the work itself.

Apologies and Gender

Over lunch I’m trying to catch up on some blogs. Since the Info Tech boys here turned on the firewall all sorts of things are broken. For instance my rss client. Luckily there is a proxy I can use that doesn’t require authentication, and that’s what I’m using at the moment. Until they turn that off too. Which brings me to Liz’s entry on apologies. It would be nice if the IT people actually apologised for the problems they’ve caused. Most of my software can no longer auto update, rss got broken, pings from student blogs don’t appear to be getting through, and so on and so forth. A good apology, as Liz notes, would go a long way.

But that’s not what drew me to Liz’s post. It was the overheard phone conversation between a man and a woman. This I enjoyed because, well, I’d be that bloke. My immediate reaction would be that something needed fixing and that it wasn’t that big a deal. Unfortunately lots of blokes think or act like that. Which is frightening and dumb, and why wars start. Empathy is all that is needed. That’s why apologies work, they are empathetic because they recognise responsibility and the position of the other person. Acknowledgment is important, so Liz’s post is good as a reminder of what ought to be done.