The KAOS Room

Just received this from my mate Chris:

I saw the new Artshouse renov for the first time yesterday – some good and some bad and some very ugly. They have chosen to keep some interesting bits of history, including the kaos logo above door (which now goes to the main entry). Apparently the room at the back will still be called the kaos room and is one of two rehearsal spaces now…

KAOS was the Australian arm of KAOS Theatre that I once directed in Australia. Nice to see this footprint in the sand.

HOWTO build a home phone-exchange

I am proud to record that I just made my first BoingBoing entry.

HOWTO build a home phone-exchange

Cory Doctorow: Phil sez, “I sent my Dad your HOWTO on building an intercom with an old telephone because it reminded me of something he built when I was a kid. He said: ‘Mine was much posher! I made a miniature telephone exchange so that you could dial a specific extension which would then “ring”, just like a “real” phone. To cap it all I had antique phones which looked good. The design was from February 1972 Practical Wireless.’” Link (Thanks, Phil!)

Oxygen or Poison?

Kevin Marks:

“My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives. The old generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again.”

It’s no surprise that Flickr began life as a game.

"You smiled, right? That's the point".

Chris Pratley writes about that extra 1% for art when making software. The ‘art’ is the reason people stay loyal to software. For example, you may not download Picassa in the first place because of the nice way that it the UI animates changes, but it is that pleasure that keeps you a fan.

Download is the new "F**K"

Lucas Gonze: ‘Download is the new fuck.’

Xavier Leret Gets Digital

My mate Xav has started to feed his extraordinary writing onto the Internet under Creative Commons licenses. Check it out here.

Perpetual Betas

.Net magazine asked me:

A recent article on the Wall Street Journal’s site questions why software stays in beta for so long these days (http://tinyurl.com/aueuh). The article quotes Peter Sealey, a marketing professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola Co., who says he knows of no other industry “where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed or inadequate product [and] it helps grow your user base.” Why are web applications being released to the public in beta stage and who’s really benefiting from this – the web service provider or the user

My reply:

Products should never leave beta. Out-of-Beta means ‘finished’. Users are repelled by this idea because it means that there is no room for them in the experience. Out-of-beta is so ‘Web 1.0’, ‘one-way web’, ‘consumption of other people’s crap’ instead of a participatory, living web of interestingness.

I don’t think anyone uses beta as an excuse for bad code, or crashing software. Beta just means that the product is alive. It is the experience that is in beta, not the quality.

Ning – What the…!

I read somewhere once that Bill Gates’ remarked that one day everyone would be a programmer. I thought I understood this idea when I, a theatre director, got sucked into Java-script because a) I had the need (to create a simple mouse-over effect) and b) it was quite simple to understand. Before I knew it I was writing complex web applications and coding seemed to be the new thing – build software instead of hardware… it was easy. Another humanoid assimilated.

Ning just raised the bar on that idea by creating a product which is just an API for generic services. This means anyone can use its functionality to build software applications for niche markets. I have not seen the API yet, but I understand that it is very simple to use and you don’t really need to be a ‘programmer’ to use it.

This really is the ‘long tail of software’, where new web applications will emerge that are only intended for very small audiences. Ning, potentially, makes this an economically reasonable idea.

Many of us have understood for a while that it is important to make software ‘remixable’ so that users can mould it to their needs – this takes that idea all the way.

THE CODEX is extraordinary long tail entertainment…

Look what you can do with some networked X-Box 360s and a sprinkle of imagination. Chris Anderson says his kids are raving and the site has had 13 million hits.

“If you’re not sufficiently impressed yet, consider this: My children’s favourite film was not made by Disney, but by a dozen Dallas teenagers playing a videogame in one of their parents’ basement. By Hollywood standards, the film cost essentially nothing to make and is free to download. It’s had 13m viewers so far. There is now a DVD and a soundtrack CD.” Chris Anderson

Performance/Cyberspace Ideas @ NYU

“I am starting to use the term ‘Communitek’ rather than ‘theatre’ so that we do not get confused. I am not talking about grafting existing artforms onto new media I am talking about new environments for interactions – new artforms – new entertainments – new media. The structures we will eventually create for Cyberspace over the next ten years are yet to be designed” (Me: 1995)

Always good to see ideas get people thinking.