vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Cash

Last night we went to “The Man in Black” a tribute come almost cabaret homage by Tex Perkins to Johnny Cash. Near enough to a full house. The first half was a bit, what? Not flat, but it was like the audience was trying to work what their relationship to this should, or needed, to be. It wasn’t the sort of ‘fuck it let’s just play’ homage you get from something like an Abba tribute band. It was more devotional and respectful. But then this is an inner city, musically kewl audience so, you know, we know he isn’t Johnny Cash (and he’s already told us he isn’t in the delightful opening line “hello…. I’m Tex Perkins”). But the first half finished with a fantastic go at Jackson (lyrics) and from there it got better. I guess we sorted out where we were at, got comfortable with the pleasure of the performers, the familiarity of the songs, and the bitter sweet romance of Cash’s life.

Then today, via Jen Proctor, I find The Johnny Cash Project which is using “Ain’t No Grave” and inviting individuals to contribute their own drawings of Cash as provided by the project. These are being used to compile a video clip for the song, with a pile of features on top to let you filter through the submitted material. Want to see ones with more brush strokes? Or the highest rated ones? Want to pause it and find out more about an individual frame (drawing)? This is not a narrative but it really sits in an interesting spot, doesn’t it? This is I think a different sort of softvideo.

Social Network Project

I am supervising an honours project which is partnered by Parks Victoria. They presented an idea last year for what was basically an internal web site that would help Parks Vic staff who go on international exchanges to collate their experiences so that this knowledge could be made available across the organisation. Essentially, it’s a knowledge management problem with strong social aspects. Reading their business case (which suggested a wiki) I knew a wiki was completely the wrong environment, so I revisited elgg, to see if it was still active and if it had been developed since last I used it (about four years ago). Yes to both questions. Nicely. So Steph, my honours student, did a local install on your PowerBook and it will do pretty much all that we need for the first year of the project.

Which means today I’ve spent more time than necessary trying to get it installed on a test server. I use Dreamhost, and the elgg installer kept giving me a “won’t run on PHP 4″ error. Except I know PHP 5 was there. Could find no documentation anymore, problem didn’t seem to appear in the elgg discussion forums, was really irritating. So, checked the .htaccess file that it writes for me, saw stuff about errors from finding PHP 4, and commented them out. Done. I figure PHP 4 is available on the server too, the .htaccess runs the PHP 4 check first, is true, so stops things right there. Took me more time than I should admit to solve.

Bookmarks for April 21st through May 5th

These are my links for April 21st through May 5th:

• Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you — Engadget – Excellent demystification of the patent issues surrounding H.264. Been a lot of rubbish written recently which has been poorly informed of the situation, let alone the differences between open standards and free things.
• Chris Marker’s Second Life – From the Current – The Criterion Collection – Notes on Marker's work in Second Life. Includes interview.
• Intimate and interactive – Concordia Journal – Concordia University – Montreal, Quebec, Canada – Brief write up of the korsakow project for the Concordia journal.
• It’s Time For An Open Database Of Places – Discussion about duplication in mapping place and need for open database of places (like openstreetmap, etc).
• CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap Surges On Wikipedia-Like User Passion – OpenStreetMap is now at the point where, like Wikipedia, it is a viable alternative to other maps, and in the near future has the possibility to be THE global map.

Marker

The first major hypertext I made was the Chris Marker WWW archive. Written in Storyspace, exported to HTML. Marker is now in Second Life (I’m a fan, but I’m sad about that, it’s like he’s moving more and more to the inside of everything). You can do a tour with Marker of the work, which is seriously exciting.

Home Towns

Jen Proctor describes a crowd sourced student project she is doing. (I think it is over.) Videos from places submitted and then placed online. Lacks mashup functions, so is a blog where the content is manually added. So nice idea to do with the students but will be a short thing since it requires someone to manually add stuff, and also since it is placed based you really do want to be able to view by place.

Korsakow Writeup

Brief promotional write up of Korsakow out of the Concordia Journal (the same Concordia that hosts and houses Korsakow at the moment).