Webware's Top 100 Web Applications

As voted on by nearly 500,000 users, Webware has published its 2007 list of the best web applications in 10 different categories, including browsing, communication, reference, and media:

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html

I love how the results are listed using icons instead of lists - great for quick reading!

ALTX Online Network

"Where the digerati meet the literati"

This site offers a "library of avant-pop novels, collections of new media (h)activist writings, and critical ebooks. These experimental titles are available as free ebook downloads or as Print On-Demand books."

Examples of current offerings include a blog art exhibit, galleries of web art, and conversations, interviews, and audio addressing aspects of textuality, cyberculture, and digital design.

Check out Seattle's McLeod Residence

The McLeod Residence is a home for extraordinary living through art, technology, and collaboration.

They are a new art gallery in Belltown, Seattle. A lounge for members is open Thursday through Saturday.

Check out their exhibits and hours here.

From the desk of "old" media to new media, boingboing.net has started to post reviews of its previous incarnation, a zine started in 1988.

The older zine issue covers have been scanned in, and PDF versions of the zines are available online for a small fee.

Read the review of issues #6 here.

MIT Open Course Ware

A free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Find more OERs on the Internet Archive's OER page, a collection of educational content including coursework, study guides, exercises, and recorded lectures. It is meant for students, teachers, and self-learners at all levels.

New Media & the Global Diaspora Conference
5 to 7 October 2007
Bristol, Rhode Island, United States

This symposium focuses on the migrations of the past 100 years
- how New Media's role, both direct and indirect, in the
transmission by these communities of "living traditions" has
resulted in loss, gain and interpretation.

The symposium has the following objectives:

• To encourage academic discourse focused on transnational migratory populations and the role new media plays in transmitting and sustaining their living traditions.
• To create a forum for researchers in the liberal arts and other disciplines studying the nature, significance and consequence of global migration
• To provide a concert performance of traditional music and dance illustrating the vitality of these living traditions.

The deadline for abstracts/proposals is 1 June 2007.

Do You Feel Fine?

Check out the WeFeelFine website: http://www.wefeelfine.org/

It trolls blogs and picks up statements in which people talk about their feelings, then displays and analyzes the results in several different aesthetically pleasing ways. Limit your searches by geographic area (US and beyond), date, gender, and more.

What a great tool for attempting to capture the emotional state of the blogging population at any one time. One shortfall is that it only trolls the English-language blogs.

Furtherfield

Check out Furtherfield, "an online platform for the creation, promotion, and criticism of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction."

They are also currently seeking reviewers/contributors.

Old Messengers, New Media Digital Archive

A special website set up by Library and Archives Canada - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada - is now accessible, courtesy of Project Manager Don Wallace and doctoral student Joanne Stober.

The site, which is particularly intended to be a resource for students, is entitled "Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan," includes summaries of both scholars lives and works, and a set of short, accessible essays on the topic of "Archives as Medium," with contributions from Robert Babe, William Buxton, Michael Cheney, Terry Cook, Kim Sawchuk, and Lance Strate.

There's also a Forum section for further discussion.

Here's a great article from the NY Times on how podcasting is changing/has changed book publishing.

Newman, Andrew. "Authors Find Their Voice, and Audience, in Podcasts" New York Times, March 1, 2007.

Media Ecology Association
An "organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community."

“Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.” —Neil Postman

International Journal of Communication
This new journal is "an online, multi-media, academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The International Journal of Communication is an interdisciplinary journal that, while centered in communication, is open and welcoming to contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that meet at the crossroads that is communication study."

Museum of Lost Interactions
This is very cool, though I became more suspicious of its authenticity as I browsed through the "lost" technologies they highlight. Turns out these technologies were created/invented by Interactive Media Design students at the Univ of Dundee in the UK, and indeed are not formerly existing technologies. Very cool projects, though.

Social Networking through Singing

Check out www.midomi.com, a music search engine powered by your voice.

"Sing, hum, or whistle to instantly find your favorite music and connect with a community that shares your musical interests....Contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone searches for that song, your performance might be the top result!.....Create your own profile, sing your favorite songs and share them with your friends and get discovered by other midomi users....Features an extensive digital music store with a a growing collection of more than two million legal music tracks."

Hmm, has potential to become an online American Idol talent contest forum...

Web 2.0: The Machine is Using Us

Check out this video (2nd draft) by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It does a nice job illustrating some of the concepts and implications of Web 2.0. On YouTube, Michael says to look for a final draft in late February.

If you'd like to read more about Web 2.0, check out Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0.

Electronic Literature Collection, v. 1 Released

Under a Creative Commons License, the collection is "an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature," published online at collection.eliterature.org.

My favorites among the collection are the non-texual, graphic novel-like multimedia stories. Including:

"Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw is presented in a visual and almost entirely non-textual way, although the piece has a textual basis and its narrative and defamiliarizing aspects can easily be seen. The piece's effect arises from how it cuts off possibilities, putting the reader at the mercy of her exploration history. An interface offers tiny "active" portals, which may or may not carry the story forward; a world changes scale, and unnerving events take some effort to figure out." Maybe it's the Halloween mood, but I love the dark storyline, great modern graphics, and witch-trial atmosphere. The changeable storyline is very "new media."

"Urbanalities is a mash-up of Dadaist technique and VJ stylings, this Flash movie is the product of an "antagonist remix" by babel vs. escha. Seven scenes provide enigmatic observations on the nature of contemporary life, on seeing and being seen, understanding and miscommunication, destruction and creation. The texts in the piece are generated randomly as the piece runs, so the reader's experience of the piece is never exactly the same twice." Amazing graphics, short poems, and a musical sountrack - dada meets West Side Story.

-thanks to gray for sending along the link and collection announcement!-

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion

On Monday, 10/9, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. Read the full story. How this will change the user-driven YouTube site remains to be seen. Check out the featured video, "a message from Chad and Steve" to hear the founders' perspective on the acquisition.

Looks like the dot-com bubble has been re-inflated!

Welcome to the first New Media PNW circular! As you may recall, this effort emerges from the workshop with Anne Wysocki held last February in the UWB Teaching and Learning Center, hosted by the redoubtable Becky Reed Rosenberg. Anne did a marvelous job of taking us into the “Generous Web” by considering how “memory, bodily experience, generosity toward difference, and the pleasures of learning and engagement can be woven into the design process….” We wanted to find a way to continue her efforts and to continue to educate ourselves about our new teaching and learning environment.

Our major goal now—in fact, our only goal at the moment!—is to get a conversation started on New Media and thereby create a virtual Learning Community around a series of questions. What is it? Is there any such thing? What’s “new” about it? What gets mediated? What are its cultural implications? How can we use it, if there is an “it,” in our classrooms? What does it have to do with iPods and MySpace? Cell phones and nanotechnology? How does it relate to the digital arts and scholarship? Is it fun?

We thought we’d start with one or more of these questions, a few short readings, and a little blog. The URL for the blog is: http://newmediawg.blogspot.com –bookmark it today! The blog will be updated (at least) weekly, and we welcome your posts and comments! You may post to the blog from your email by emailing: newmediabothell.blog@blogger.com. Have fun exploring the blogger site while you're at it!

For our initial reading, how about if we look at Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) paper (http://www.cybergrain.com/remediality/borges.pdf or http://www.geocities.com/papanagnou/) and V. Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945) (www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/194507/bush). These are linked to the blog's "links" section as well.

See what you think. Hear what you think. Touch what you think.

What next?

Gray and Amanda