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Hack Day TV - for Y! UK Hack Day

For those of you who could not be there in person at the Y! UK Hack Day, we’ve got a video treat for you. Want to see what hacks were presented? Want to see how people held out under the 90-second presentation rule after 24 hours of straight hacking? But you don’t want to slough through hours-long video footage? It’s cool, you don’t have to.

We’ve made a whole new way to watch long form video on the web, in snack-bite sizes, just the way we like our TV. In Hack Day TV, you can see a list of all the hacks (including which hacks won the judges awards), you can launch URL demos for many of the hacks, and, best of all, you can jump to any hack instantly to watch it (no waiting for it to load or fast forwarding through the video to try and find things). We’ve also displayed the list of hacks directly on the video time line, which makes scanning around for hacks incredibly simple. When you select a hack, the URL will change to point to that part of the video. This way you can directly link to an individual hack, for example check out the Best Overall hack from the NYTimes R&D Lab.

Surf over to Hack Day TV - UK and check it out.

Creative Acts beyond Dissemination

Last week Ryan and I were in DC at Creativity and Cognition 2007 (C&C) where we ran a workshop on Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination.

In its 6th year, C&C addresses creativity in both theory and practice. The research aims to provide us all with a deeper understanding of the creative processes. The conference was amazing and we were excited to be there: see it in Jean-Baptiste’s Flickr set. All of the attendees have a similar goal: to enable more people to be creative more of the time.

In our workshop, we began to think about new forms of digital creativity, one with a blurred distinction between creator-centric and experience-centric creativity. In attendance, we had a diverse set of participants (artists, dancers, research directors, business consultants, and a few computer/information scientists). Bringing together this set of people to discuss a common theme was a phenomenal experience. Each of us presented and discussed our perspective on how creativity works across a variety of domains. It’s good to see how artists and engineers intersect and connect ideas (we built a concept map of the work to show some of these connections). We then reconsidered models that cleanly separate the two, and began to seek out new models in which the user of a creative work takes on a generative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.

Zync: a new way to share videos

Today, we are happy to announce Zync, a video sharing plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger.

Like a lot of people, I tend to watch a lot of videos online. Most of what I watch, I share with my friends. No big surprise. Sometimes I’ll email a video to my parents and then call them later and ask them if they saw it. With my friends (more connected than my folks), I’ll fire off the link in Yahoo! Messenger. Then I wait. Occasionally I’ll type “did it load?” or “are you watching it yet?” More often, I’ll have to type “did you see the snowboard jump yet?” or “let me know when you see the puppet try to login”. It’s kinda difficult and not fun. If two people are standing by my laptop watching a video with me, we talk, pause, rewind, and chat about it, together.

So we built Zync: a plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger that allows videos from Yahoo!, YouTube, and Google to be shared in a synchronous manner. To the right is a screenshot of Zync in action. It allows people to watch videos together with their friends, in sync and in real time. Instead of just IMing URLs and waiting for friends to watch, Zync allows the users to converse about a video (pausing, jumping back, and watching together with a friend). Both people control the playback and both videos stay in sync.

Want to dive in and get started? You can check out this IM-it button:

You can check out more information about the plug-in and how to download it on the Zync website. If you are a little savvy and want to embed the IM-it button on your website or automatically embed the IM-it button with Greasemonkey, check out Zync on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

A Call for Creativity and Cognition

Creativity is very important for many people, including many of us here. Everyday we are creating personal and social media: photos on Flickr, movies remixes on Jumpcut, blog posts on various topics personal and professional, discussions on each other’s creative ideas and works. When we are not tending to our personal media (read: at work), we are thinking of and building tools to allow people (including ourselves) to be even more creative in new and exciting ways (check out our work on Remix and TagMaps).

We have begun to think about creativity, what it means to apply some structure to creative acts, and how we might better understand the creative process. The act of formally structuring some process is at the heart of software design. Yet, when it comes to the creative process, structure is often frowned upon and the process remains in the realm of the unexplainable, shrouded in mystery and mysticism. Drawing from the work of artists like Kandinsky and Duchamp, we want to better describe how digital creativity happens, so as to build better tools for supporting it. Along the way we hope to make visible new forms of creativity and expression which will suggest new goals for the greater research and design community.

Sound good so far? Have you been thinking about creative processes? We are hosting a workshop at ACM’s Creativity and Cognition 2007 on Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination and have an open call for position statements. We encourage anyone interested from all walks (pro or con, artist or engineer) to check it out and submit a short position statement.

See you at the conference in June!

Do you listen to your cell phone?

Really, do you really listen to your cell phone? Does it compel you to take photos? Can it remind you to SMS a friend to meet at the park? Or maybe tell you to lay off the double-double at In-N-Out burger?

Last Friday, a few of us were on the greens of Stanford University trying to find some answers. Fortunately, that day members of the Persuasive Technology Lab were hosting a day long workshop on Mobile Persuasion which focused on several aspects of persuasive mobile technologies from games to advertising, from health to design.

The question of `how can mobility persuade you’ was addressed from several angles. Alex Kass, from Accenture Technology Labs showed a demonstration of a mobile coaching device which would remind you not to grab that candy bar from the machine or point out the stairs next to the elevator as the healthier option. Something about mobility being that little voice in your head captivated the attendees.

Thinking about mobility as location, Ian Bogost demonstrated Airport Insecurity: a game about inconvenience and insecurity in American airports. A game for Series 60 Nokias where you get to be the TSA agent screening passengers against a changing security checklist. Ian suggests the game is played best while waiting in the airport security line. It’s actually quite fun, but I haven’t had the chance to play it in situ yet.

Mirjiana Spasojevic from Nokia Research presented several principles for mobile design, reminding us to think of mobility not as a mini pc but as an ever present technology (not just on the go but also on the couch). The idea of mobile ‘web browsing’ was generally discouraged, rather technology should be proactive and provide what is essential just in time.

And while there was much discussion on social collaboration and connectivity, many of the speakers did not account for the phone’s contact list as a persuasive artifact. It’s clear that my phone can motivate me to do cool things, but I find I am more persuaded if a friend from my contact list sends me an MMS video message. I listen to my cellphone; I respond to to my friends.

Our own Mor Naaman presented a study the lab ran on the sharing motivations with geotagged images from Flickr using ZoneTag. In the talk, he presented a taxonomy of motivations for tagging and a breakdown of privacy considerations. We will post more about this soon; I have to go—my phone is telling me to get that double-double…