Web 4.0

While waiting for the coffee to brew this morning I glanced at Twitter and the first post on my screen read “Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” released…” (props to ijafri for being first on my radar with the news). As the song playing in an endless loop in nearly every store in New York says, “It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas.”

Seriously, references to obnoxious holiday music aside, I’ve been waiting for v2.7 ever since I met the founding developer of WordPress Matthew Mullenweg who tipped his hand to what was in store and I’m excited it’s finally here.

The most obvious change is the redesigned Dashboard, which is almost endlessly customizable to your way of seeing and doing things. In the process, this reduces the number of clicks needed to do anything: post, edit, illustrate, prioritize, upgrade, moderate comments or assassinate comment spam… one click and it’s done right from the Dashboard. Nearly every other screen can also be customized to your liking, too. How cool is that? Here’s a video that shows what I’m talking about:

You can find out more about version 2.7 from Matt’s post on the WordPress.org blog.

If you’re running WordPress give me a shout about upgrading. And if you choose to do it yourself please make a backup of the database and all the files before you go for it. Though WP code has been thoroughly vetted by our global user community some elements of your site, particularly if its older or you haven’t upgraded in a while, may not be fully compatible. We can address these issues pretty easily but it will be a lot less stressful if we’re not working under the influence of a broken site.

The inspiration for my post Burning Down the TV came from Jen Simmons presentation at Wordcamp New York last Sunday. The other speakers that day included Matt Mullenweg, co-developer of Wordpress and a partner in Automatic, bloggers Aaron Brazell and Shay David, Jeremy Clarke on running a blog network, and Jen on Wordpress and video.

If you’re curious about where Wordpress is going in the next release (due out in November) and what else you can do with this CMS besides writing text-blogs you’re in luck: videos of Wordcamp NY are now online. Here’s the beginning of Matt Mullenweg’s introduction and below it, a link to videos of all of the presenters.

Click here to see the rest of Matt’s talk and the other presenters sharing the Wordcamp New York stage, with thanks to Jonathan Dingman for posting these videos and to Sun Microsystems for the generous use of their conference facility.

I’m not really turning Japanese as this post’s title* suggests, but as a blogger and a Blogfather I was fascinated to learn that according to reports last year in Technorati and The Washington Post, Japanese has become the dominant language of the blogosphere.

Why Japanese? With a vast middle-class nearly everyone can afford an internet connection, and with daily commutes that can be hours long people have time to blog from their phones and assorted digital hand-held devices. Thought the subjects of personal blogs tend to be quite different in Japan than in the West, could this this video report from The Washington Post be a glimpse into our future?

Note: although these percentages date from 2006 and were quoted by the Post in late 2007, they’re still striking and the cultural spin in the video intrieguing, prompting this post. For the most current data see Technorati’s 2008 Report from the Blogosphere.

* Props to Max Praver for the translation.

David Byrne sang about burning down the house and now it’s time for burning down the TV thanks to Miro, the open source video player.

Think TIVO for web, but without buying any hardware or software (sorry AppleTV). Think millions of programs packaged as pre-programmed channels, or search the web and make a channel with the video you like — Grateful Dead TV? TED Presentations? Knitting for Dachshunds? You got it. Finally, think open source and open format — Miro plays MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format. And those are only some of Miro’s features and specs.

But don’t take my word, go and download it (free, fast, stable for PC, Mac, Linux) and you’ll see why Miro vision for the future of web video is so compelling. Want to hack it? Download the source code too. Want to program and brand your own channel? Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel you can put your name on. Once you search the web for the content you want, Miro displays an iTunes like listing with program details and links to download, save, organize, or share the video.

Where did Miro come from? It’s the core project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA and founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

Television is the most popular medium in our culture. But broadcast and cable TV has always been controlled by a small number of big corporations. We believe that the internet provides an opportunity to open television in ways that have never been possible before. Miro is designed to eliminate gatekeepers. Viewers can connect to any video provider that they want. This frees creators to use the video hosting setup that works best for them– whether they choose to self-publish or use a service. It’s the kind of openness that the internet allows and that we should all demand.

Lastly, special shout outs to Jen Simmons of Milkweed Media Design who talked up Miro in her presentation on web video at last weekend’s Wordcamp in New York, to Bill Sobel of NY:MIEG and to Bob Sokol at Sun who promoted and hosted the event.

I trust you all tuned in last Friday night to see if McCain was going to show up?

After such a tough week for the old maverick — suspending his campaign, parachuting into Washington, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative,  and keeping everyone guessing if we’d be watching Barack debate himself — it made for quite the drama and a weird preview of a McCain presidency. As Gail Collins wrote in her Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds. [And] on Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

But I digress – this began as a post about Twitter mashups. Maybe you’ve been at a conference recently where the presenter invited the audience send text feedback, projected on a screen above. What if that happened on a national level?

We saw that in the pre-convention debate sponsored by CNN (who’ve been out front on weaving Twitter into news broadcasts). Now Current TV, the independent cable television network founded by vice president Al Gore, has broken new ground by incorporating audiences’ 140-character commentaries from the microblogging service Twitter into their broadcasts.

How cool is that? For the whole story go to Wired for their post Current TV Hacks The Debates and visit Current TV’s Hack the Debate for more episodes. I can’t wait to watch this during the VP debate on October 2nd.

I began playing World of Warcraft when I was a suit for Pearson. Though I worked my way up to a L20-something Paladin, the daily 4 hours as a commuter and on the phone, and 10 hours at the computer and on the phone killed my interest in grinding higher. Still, WoW was compelling and deep, and I acknowledge was my gateway drug to playing and working with the new - and next - generation of MMORPGs and virtual worlds.

From the beginning I saw beyond games’ entertainment value to their high potential to be used as teaching and learning simulations. That led me to the first several Serious Game Summits that were held in Crystal City, MD just across from the Pentagon. From the spook-to-wonk ratio of attendees there, it was clear the military-industrial complex was on to the potential of games to train, too. In a Presidential season with both sides all puffed up about their ability to defend the country, the constitution and the borders, Wired reports today that:

American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans. Continues here >>>

At first I rolled my eyes thinking here’s more fodder for the haters to bash all video games. But all that palaver about terrorists training in WoW got me to wondering: which Presidential or VP candidate can see WoW’s nefarious underworld better from their home state: Obama-Biden or McBush-Impalin?

More importantly does saying you can see something — Russia, polar bears thriving in the melt, or World of Warcraft — mean you understand its subtleties and nuance, or is that only maya, the dangerous illusion?

Click image to stop on one picture, mouse up or down to pan, click again to continue.

Here’s a whole new take on the global market and media mashups. This kaleidoscopic stream displays 35 images I shot at public markets in London, Seattle, New York City, in Ariquipa and Urubamba, Peru, and in Seine Bight, Belize. 

It’s made with a cool new service from Viewvox.com that allows you to mix, create and blend personal media - video, photos and music - and share them as live streams on your own channel, in email or embedded as it is here. Look for more here soon and comment with links to ones you make - let’s discover everything Viewvox can do.

Several weeks ago in Hooked on Twitter I pondered whether microblogging had spawned a new literary form. Evidently it has, as Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times last weekend:

You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it.

Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.

Introducing the Twiller. Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

Really, so first half of 2008. For more, visit Matt’s site and go pick up a copy of Hooked from Amazon. See you in the tweet-stream.

Earlier this year Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg suggested on his blog that the future of Wordpress MU (multi user) is social media. TechCrunch covered the story too. As a user of Wordpress and advocate of the new convergence I think it’s great news. From the BuddyPress site:

The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). BuddyPress also has a core plugin that all other plugins require, it contains shared functions and performs the basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

When using the default theme, BuddyPress will move the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, and onto the actual member profile. However, members can still blog and use all the blogging features they would normally expect from WordPress. When someone uses BuddyPress, they will be going there to build or enhance their profile first, and write something on their blog second. The blog is turned into another component of BuddyPress.

Everyone is asking me about Twitter lately: “What is it?” Microblogging. “Does it serve any purpose?” Lets you follow and communicate — 140 characters at a time — with friends, colleagues or (from the Twitter home page once you’re logged in) everyone who tweets. But invariably it comes down to the last question, “Why would I want to?”

The first two questions are easy but I admit to being pretty dodgy about answering the last one. I know of a professional librarian who uses it to query her colleagues around the world, and of at least one remarkably large company with a staff tweeter who monitors the bit-stream for customer insights and respond to any complaints that bubble up from the chatter. But what about smaller companies, professional practices, consultants, creatives, writers… you?

In my short life as a tweeter I’ve found a few business uses — it’s gotten me back in touch with a colleague for a possible collaboration, for one — but really I’ve gotten hooked on Twitter to follow the “story” that some tweet-streama reveal. For example take Ingen Bio Group, “the leading private human pharmaceutical development company in the world” and Dr. Leonard J. Kendall who tweets as IngenBio and has said:

05:38 PM July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne log> I wasn’t able to stop him. Kendall was killed in the explosion. 03:46 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne, Sgt. Garrett - INTRAGEN EXPOSURE >QUARANTINE HOLDING 4.30.95 >Ingen Bio - Security Command >ITC CLEARANCE LEVEL - RE … … 03:17 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
. …- . .-.. -.– -.

02:47 AM July 29, 2008 from web
http://tinyurl.com/6qom2q

09:12 PM July 28, 2008 from web
The Salt Lake Times - Warehouse Explosion Kills Cancer Scientist April 16, 1995 - 10:13 a.m. CT

08:48 PM July 28, 2008 from web
KENDALL LOG//DELETE - FILE RECOVERY INCOMPLETE / UNABLE TO RESTORE

12:38 AM July 28, 2008 from web
1:08:00:00 FIGHT.SURVIVE.INFECT.

Wait… back up… “Fight. Survive. Infect?!

Then I played the video Dr. K linked to this morning… and have to conclude this is either one of the best viral marketing campaigns or social media art works I’ve seen. Very cool. Though the excitement of discovery has passed the intrigues of Dr. Leonard J. Kendall and the Imogen Bio Group continue amaze and entertain. And I still don’t know if they’re a corporate security breach, a marketing promo for a movie or video game, or an emerging literary form.

What do you think?

Update – I just ran across a January post called 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger that expands considerably on my post. What caught my eye was this chart of Darren’s traffic since he started “taking Twitter seriously.”

Suffice to say that if you found my post of interest and you’re a blogger you want to check this out.