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        <title><![CDATA[Internets]]></title>
        <link><![CDATA[http://www.metronews.ca/blog/232422]]></link>
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                      <title><![CDATA[Together we freedom]]></title>
                      <description><![CDATA[Playing with this tool tweeted via William Gibson , we're totally Twitter BFFs. Cut-up machine works along principles of beat-writer William S. Burroughs ' cut-up experimentations. Mixed results below (which still left me feeling thrillingly subversive) of portions U.S. President Eisenhower's famous &quot;Military-Industrial Complex&quot; speech, mashed with Dubya's announcement of the Iraq invasion. Latter-day beatniks and nerds worldwide take note: Burroughs was mashing words 50 years ago. I wish I could lingering sadness of war and Democrats joined together on the -- as one who knows that steps of this Capitol, singing &quot;God another war could utterly destroy this Bless America.&quot; And you such an important time. All of a definite sense of disappointment. As America was touched on the evening one who has witnessed the horror of the tragedy to see Republicans and the our enemies, is so sharp and apparent I justice will be done. I thank confess that I lay down my the Congress for its leadership at official responsibilities in this field with how to compose differences, anger, and anger to resolution. Whether not with arms, but with intellect we bring our enemies to justice, and decent purpose. Because this need or bring justice to Tonight we are a country awakened Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, to danger and called to defend is a continuing imperative. Together we freedom.]]></description>
                      
                      <link>http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/266996</link>
                      <author><![CDATA[]]></author>
                      <category><![CDATA[/Blog]]></category>
                      <keywords><![CDATA[Cyberpunk, writing, poetry, web, william gibson, william s. burroughs]]></keywords>
                      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:10:09 -0400</pubDate>
                      <author>Dave Carpenter</author>
                      <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/266996</guid>
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                      <title><![CDATA[Web video goes back to the future]]></title>
                      <description><![CDATA[In the supposed cutting-edge business of online video, old looks more and more like the new new, which makes you wonder: is the Web's most evolved content medium actually devolving? Just this week, Yahoo! announced the partial shuttering of Maven , a company they purchased in early 2008 in order to, in their own words , create a &quot;state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”. Not so much. Yahoo!'s Maven-driven vision for the future of web video turned into a 17-month-long nightmare fraught with logistical and technological failures for both Yahoo! and their partners, let alone consumers. While Yahoo!'s capacity to polish the silverware as the ship goes down seems to know no bounds in recent years, the fading web giant has company in failing to advance online video model: Web video shops, such as EQAL, 60 Frames announced exits from the original content game recently, Microsoft has pulled back on its Soapbox video, and the grand daddy of them all, YouTube, still struggles to court premium content providers in hopes of turning a significant buck. And therein lies the age-old quandary the Yahoos of the web world keep asking through to today: How do you make money off this damn thing? There's no doubt people view gobs of video online: YouTube still grows at a whopping rate, up by 16 per cent in April with 16,785,432,000 videos streamed out of the U.S. Yet very few people click on the associated ads, usually at a lower rate than even graphical or text ads embedded in text-based web pages, and thus commanding very low ad rates. YouTube's lucky if they even get advertisers to hawk their wares around videos in the first place, as a majority of the site's content falls in the homespun Cat on Toilet seat genre. You can't blame Starbucks and GE for taking a pass. Putting the medium in the hands of the masses is a fine concept that lies at the heart of the Web's original ethos and still largely egalitarian playing field. But when it comes to top-quality video content that also serves the almighty dollar you have to look an old-school model, which serve as the underpinning strategy at nascent Hulu.com, one of the few bright beacons for the future of online video. For the unaware (which is a lot of us in Canada, as Hulu's blocked north of the border due to rights issues. You can Google &quot;US IP address,&quot; for a &quot;creative&quot; work around, but that's another story) Hulu emerged as a response from major U.S. TV networks, sick of seeing most of their content illegally uploaded onto YouTube without reaping the benefits. NBC, Fox and the rest of the studio/network gang got together to create a video portal, featuring their own popular TV shows in order to court consumers and advertisers through full length shows, such as 'Lost' and '30 Rock'. Think of Hulu as a super-network. Since the TV writer's strike that ended in early 2008, Hulu has continued to gain in popularity scoring, along with the TV network's own individual sites, 53 per cent of the ad-supported online TV market in 2008 and 10 per cent of the total video market share, according to a report by Screen Digest. YouTube has recently tried to claw back some of the premium content market share with its new Shows section, but according to Tubemogul , the 3,215 full-length TV episodes available only average 7,407.9 views per episode. Screen Digest reports Hulu brought in $45 million in ad revenue of a total US online TV market that generated $448 million in 2008. Further, Screen Digest predicts the total revenue for broadcaster-supported online video in the US will grow to $1.45 billion by 2013. Big numbers in isolation. Until you compare them to television, projected to generate $67-billion in revenue by 2013, even as the original boob-tube audience share continues to decline. Video-based web destinations have also seen some success in the branded content concept, whereby one advertiser sponsors original web content, either through video player page &quot;takeovers&quot; or product integration in storylines (See a 'Bruno' movie page takeover here ). But again, the dollars in branded content are still minute, and have shown more success in capturing target audiences' attention through crafty integrated marketing rather than direct profit. Truthfully, even the branded content concept just twists what Ed Sullivan did in the 50s with acts such as Elvis &quot;brought to you by Mercury - the big 'M'!&quot;. It's back to the future all over again. &nbsp;&nbsp;]]></description>
                      
                      <link>http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/254577</link>
                      <author><![CDATA[]]></author>
                      <category><![CDATA[/Blog]]></category>
                      <keywords><![CDATA[web, video, Yahoo!, Hulu, content]]></keywords>
                      <pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:28:30 -0400</pubDate>
                      <author>Dave Carpenter</author>
                      <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/254577</guid>
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                      <title><![CDATA[How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Stream]]></title>
                      <description><![CDATA[&quot;Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes,&quot; wrote TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld recently. Pack a lunch and bring your paddle, there's likely no turning back upstream. If you're finding you're spending less time going to big portals such as MSN and Yahoo! for news and email, and sticking on social media sites, consuming and sharing content with friends, you're mid-stream already, headed toward a rolling river, and perhaps the future of the Web. I've read the big brains of Silicon Valley variously coin this shift&nbsp; &quot;The Stream&quot;, &quot;The River&quot;, &quot;The Real-Time Web&quot;, over the last year or so. Whatever you want to call it, Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms have pushed our interaction with the web, and each other, into overdrive and the realm of nowness (thanks again Erick),&nbsp; where we may soon stop trying to keep our heads above the surface, dog-paddling to keep pace with information onslaught via destination-to-destination web surfing. The much-hyped Twitter and the developing situation in Iran serves as a great example of the power of The Stream's ability to disseminate unfettered information across the web in near-time at least. Do a search on Twitter for ' #Iranelection ', and you'll get back a endless sea of tweets, tweeted seconds ago, that include eyewitness reports - even pleas for help - from Iranians protesting the election results, as they are doing the physical protesting. You'll also find links to unfiltered photos and videos shot from cell phones of clashes with government police and paramilitary posted so quickly that CNN finds itself sourcing Twitter for breaking news and footage. In fact, there's a Twitter search result tagged ' #cnnfail ', deriding CNN's lack of timely, prominent coverage of the election protests in favour of Jonas Brothers profiles.&nbsp; Twitter's crowd-powered heft also has users all over the world changing their location to 'Tehran' on Twitter amid an information war to throw off Iranian government officials trying to shut down actual Iranians protesting the elections on Twitter. 'Unfettered, 'Unfiltered' clearly present the biggest downside to following news on Twitter and other social media platforms, leaving the passive viewer in need of a little context, mid-stream. New site Almost.at does an impressive job at lending perspective to the social media mob-voice by dividing user updates on real-time events that span popular user-driven sites into text, photo and link categories; see what events people are tweeting about on the left hand-side of the screen, then click on related links on the right-hand side, which often go to mainstream sites, such as BBC and NY Times for the broader story. Even on Almost.at, like most social media platforms, communication between users around real world events tend to cling to one element of that event, such as changing your Twitter location to Tehran (which author William Gibson is calling 'Tehraning' via Twitter),&nbsp; and thus drowning out actual updates from the event itself. Google has a product in Beta that's trying to harness The Stream in the soon-to-be released ' Wave '&nbsp; (it's all about water). The book's still out on exactly what Wave is, but the sneak preview sells it as an all-encompassing mega-platform for communication and collaboration in real-time. This could mean: Friend A sends a wave to their pals, which you can see being formed as they type it, that they really want to go to Costa Rica for March Break.. You, friend B, have been to Costa Rica, so you embed a video in the 'Costa Rica' part of their message that links to a YouTube video of that awesome surfing spot you went to last year. Friends A,B,C, and D can see the message, and friend B adds that Nicaragua is actually just as beautiful, and cheaper, and further edits the Wave by sharing Flickr photos and a link to user reviews of their favourite off-the-beaten path paradise on Tripadvisor. But wait, friend B warns that there's been a recent wave of Swine Flu in that region and you should check out his or her link to the related World Health Organization site update. If Google Wave sounds like instant messaging-meets-Twitter-meets-Facebook on steroids, you're right, and it's all happening right now, all at once, and no one person owns it Annoying, dizzying and fascinating, The Stream looks like the future of the Web, so stop worrying and jump in... just don't forget your paddle.]]></description>
                      
                      <link>http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/246500</link>
                      <author><![CDATA[]]></author>
                      <category><![CDATA[/Blog]]></category>
                      <keywords><![CDATA[The Stream, Iran, news, social media, the Web, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube]]></keywords>
                      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:58:01 -0400</pubDate>
                      <author>Dave Carpenter</author>
                      <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/246500</guid>
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                      <title><![CDATA[This is not a game: An ARG primer]]></title>
                      <description><![CDATA[If the instructions &quot;Follow the White Rabbit&quot; or numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 give you a conspiratorial tingle, ARGs may be your bag, assuming you're not already spending your Saturday nights piecing together clues scattered throughout the Web while your pals shoot JagerBombs . ARG stands for Alternate Reality Game, a genre that's pretty much followed the Internet's trajectory into the mainstream since the mid-90s, with The San Francisco-based game Dreadnot laying the groundwork for the many ARGs that have followed. For the lay-paranoid, ARGs can be thought of as interactive stories played in real time, in the real world, where participants collaboratively piece together clues to an overarching mystery while the games' &quot; puppetmasters &quot; throw up the pitfalls and paths for gamers to advance forward and backward. The Internet generally acts as the 'console', where players find clues and communicate with each other through web sites, email and social networks, but also phones and at physical locations. There's no fancy suped -up processor, virtual-reality hand held device, or even dice, making ARGs simultaneously cutting edge and simple to learn. Today, ARGs often serve as elaborate extensions of TV shows or movies, creating a broader and sometimes entirely separate universe than exists in the original canon. They also follow the Web's egalitarian and collaborative underpinnings toward a the resolution of common goal which, no surprise , usually involves the defeat of some evil doer (in the pre - Dubya sense), plotting against the world from atop a powerful hierarchy . The most successful ARGs challenge the most analytical minds yet have fairly clear structure themselves, including logical rules and story lines , rather than loosely structured versions that tend to fail through a series of endless and frustrating rabbit holes. Not unlike when Lost the TV series lost the plot circa season 3, its online ARG extensions (including The Lost Experience , Find 815 and Dharma Initiative Recruiting Projec t )&nbsp; have sadly tended to fail in this manner, leaving players pissed when clues fail to connect or even unintentionally reveal TV show spoilers . Want to know the meaning of the numbers? The impatient can click here .&nbsp; Still, half the fun is in the journey. The thrill and fame that comes from claiming clue discovery in a surreptitiously -placed YouTube video or site's source code satisfies almost as much as a tidy resolution. Used as a promotional vehicle for Spielberg's 2001 release of the movie A.I. , The Beast seems to stand atop the all-time best ARG list. Conceived by creative minds at Microsoft, The Beast evolved into a multi -layered murder mystery prequel to the film, spanning the breadth of the Internet with addicts collaboratively solving riddles so fast, the creators found themselves barely able to stay one step ahead with the next sub-plot. The games popularity continues to ripple through the digital realm through to 2009. More recently, the makers of the upcoming movie 2012 (filmed in Vancouver and starring Jon Cusack and Danny Glover) based on the Mayan end-of-times prophecy, have created an auxiliary online campaign, albeit more viral marketing in nature than a true ARG . Still, Insititute for Human Continuity serves as an entertaining place to get your feet wet (no pun intended for the film's trailer) in the dizzying online ARG pool. At the end of the day, a lot of us like the idea of ARGs in theory, but don't have (or would feel wiser and perhaps more mentally grounded) the time required to become a devoted player. For the rest of you, here's ARG ground zero . The answer is out there... and it's looking for you.]]></description>
                      
                      <link>http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/239429</link>
                      <author><![CDATA[]]></author>
                      <category><![CDATA[/Blog]]></category>
                      <keywords><![CDATA[Lost, ARG, Internet, Web, Alternate Reality Game]]></keywords>
                      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:00:06 -0400</pubDate>
                      <author>Dave Carpenter</author>
                      <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/239429</guid>
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                      <title><![CDATA[How to Win Friends and Influence People from Your Bed]]></title>
                      <description><![CDATA[It's often said that the Internet allows you to reinvent yourself. Even if that's your game, upgrading your identity through a digital persona takes work and some talent. Setting up your goth-themed MySpace page is one thing, but consistently posting believable, angst-ridden declarative statements in the voice of The Cure's Robert Smith can frankly be a little draining. Witticisms in 140 characters or less only count as clever if delivered in 7 hours or less. 'Hotpants147' on Lavalife, whose pants are, in reality, neither hot, nor pants, but an enormous floral-patterned muumuu , best brush up on Photoshop. But as any YouTube mash up artist knows, the creative components for appearing smarter, funnier, more creative or weirder when crafting your personal web brand without breaking a sweat already freely exist online, and beckon you in the name of social media success. Ever wonder how that otherwise dull acquaintance of yours manages to tweet several links a day to those preciously ironic sites, illiciting multiple re-tweets from friends ROTFLing? There's a decent chance they've happened up StumbleUpon , which serves up highly rated web sites within any given category in random fashion at the click of a mouse. Tell StumbleUpon what categories you like, say Humor, Music or Self Improvement, and it will generate a seemingly never-ending supply of great sites every time you 'Stumble'. It also lets you vote on each site, and thus quickly learns and delivers what kind of sites you like, and what your friends probably like, who haven't heard of Stumble Upon, and now think you're the funniest human alive when sharing your stumbles while still managing a full-time job, marriage and little league soccer. Give it a whirl, in under 30 seconds I generated these 3 destinations: #1: Bound to garner knowing chuckles from my buddies via its Girls are Evil equation , #2: A mouth watering, easy to prepare chicken recipe I can share with my frazzled soccer mom crew. #3 A site that creates the illusion that I am thoughtful and environmentally conscious. If cutting and pasting links on your way to the top of your social media tribe leaves you breathless, there is Social Status Generator : pick a category and the tool plays on your sloth and/or natural lack of panache by randomly generating social media status updates for sites like Twitter and Facebook. Assuming the prefix 'Dave is', The 'Funny' tag gave me '...mostly made of water' - perfectly droll. 'Wise' allowed me to bestow this kernel of wisdom upon my circle: 'The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.' Hmnn, indeed. Or for my mother: (Dave) '...Thinks that a day without sunshine is like night.' I could go on, researching and supplying any number of the tools out there that will aid in your quest to to be all you hope to be online, but wouldn't all that work be counter intuitive to the spirit of this post? So, I end with my personal fave: Retweeting Fake Onion headlines without the 'RT@' acknowledgment nor article link. Here's how funny people think I am as of late: Nation Gears Up For Annual Carny Migration. Run-Down Amusement Park Owner Now Lives Out Of Bumper Car. Man Escapes Eritrean Civil War To Clean Martini Puke From Back Of Taxi.]]></description>
                      
                      <link>http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/235255</link>
                      <author><![CDATA[]]></author>
                      <category><![CDATA[/Blog]]></category>
                      <keywords><![CDATA[Twitter, Facebook, Internet, Web, Social Media]]></keywords>
                      <pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2009 22:06:55 -0400</pubDate>
                      <author>Dave Carpenter</author>
                      <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/blog/post/235255</guid>
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