[haptics and hypertext]

"Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read."

Anne Mangen at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research, University of Stavanger published a paper in October on haptics and immersion in hypertexts such as M.D. Coverley's Califia (2000), C. Guyer and M. Joyce's Lasting Image (2000) and there is reference to afternoon.

Mangen's article is interesting in it's approach, taking a phenomenological one. She explains: "If we take the main purpose and motivation for our reading to be that of becoming immersed in a fictional world, then the text will have to provide the necessary setting for such a phenomenological sense of presence – by way of whatever modality telling the story."

Though people do seem to equate turning the pages of print books with clicking a mouse Mangen notes that these two activities are quite different: there is an "ontological" difference.

"The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions – clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens or scrolling with keys or on touch pads – take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book or the mobile phone."

Mangen goes on to explain that the demand to click/interact in certain hypertext stories actually undoes any possible sense of immersion (a la Marie-Laure Ryan).

"The links in a hypertext fiction present themselves as an experiential potential, a latently accessible actualisation of something currently unavailable, which becomes readily accessible with the click of a mouse. The sensory–motor affordances of the computer make it very easy to rekindle our attention, getting access to something beyond our present experience. As such, text or icons that yield (i.e., hot spots) afford haptic interaction with the computer. We experience these as links to be clicked on, and such
affordance is necessarily incompatible with phenomenological immersion."

Though I agree with a large part of what Mangen and others argue, I do wonder whether there is a different kind of reader, perhaps emerging in line with this turned-on, 21st century, tech world, a reader who actually becomes more immersed the more physical the demand of reading becomes? I know reading some narratives like Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood (mentioned in this blog before) which requires a greater degree of haptics (compared with afternoon et al), I found myself more "in" the story, actually moving my own way around. Perhaps gamer-readers won't find this cross-modal situation distracting, though Mangen notes that as a "psychobiological rule" we tend to allow motor senses to overpower cognitive ones.


Read the full article here (if you have access):
Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion, by Anne Mangen in the Journal of Research in Reading, Volume 31, Issue 4 (p 404-419).

See also this article that is freely available: Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, According to Expert in ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008).

[collective indigenous memory and digital archiving]

Gail Maurice says "Every step I take is with my ancestors; my memory in my bones..."

With this quote echoing in my head I'm wondering how this kind of cultural valuing of memory appears in a world where technology can ensure a kind of *archiving* of memory. Is taking a step with ancestors the same or even possible if new generations have access to digital memories? How does the passing on of stories, ideas, warnings, histories change if elders can include recourse to multimodal or hyperlinked creations?

This musing led me to "Designing digital knowledge management tools with Aboriginal Australians" by Helen Verran, Michael Christie, Bryce Anbins-King, Trevor van Weeren and Wulumdhuna Yunupingu. The article can be found in Digital Creativity, 2007, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 129–142.

In the article, the authors explain that "A significant number of indigenous and non-indigenous people respond with horror to the idea of using digital technologies to do collective memory in indigenous communities." This "horror" seems to stem from a belief that computers are anathema to a collective memory that is created together, in person, alongside nature/land. "Computers are actually more harm than good." There is a worry (understandably) that technology (or at least the way it is used) can help inculcate notions that indigenous knowledge is a commodity.

Verran et al call on feminist discourse to help negotiate the role of technology; there is an emphasis on the always-already provisional and partial view of knowledge (via mechanical means or otherwise): "Located accountability is built on what Haraway (1991, p.191) terms “partial, locatable critical knowledges”. As she makes clear, the fact that our knowing is relative to and limited by our locations does not in any sense relieve us of responsibility for it. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere, that it is inextricably based in an embodied and therefore partial perspective, which makes us personally responsible for it. The only possible route to objectivity on this view is through collective knowledge of the specific locations of our respective visions." (Suchman 2002, p. 96)

The article goes on to flesh out some ways of combining technology with the need to archive cultural memories. There are some interesting projects which, I think, can be quite appealing to students - especially aboriginal. Take for instance the TAMI database: "a fluid file management and database system which carries no Western assumptions about knowledge, and which maximises the possibility for the user to creatively relate and annotate assemblages of resources for their own purposes." This means that there are no hiearchies built into the system, no author, then subject etc... but rather: "The only a priori ontological distinction at work in the database is the distinction between texts, audios, movies and images. Apart from that there are no pre-existing categories (as there are in other database where metadata are sequestered into fields such as ‘author, ‘title’, ‘subject’). This provides a certain ontological flatness so indigenous knowledge traditions are not pre-empted by Western assumptions." Image cited in journal article. A project in a classroom might include students using google pages or delicious (though the latter might seem more "western" with the emphasis on text) to craft their own database of memories or experiences - perhaps focused on an emotion, story or single memory and from their build a multimodal archive. Also, rather than searching TAMI with a text string, as we do in google and delicious, users can scan thumbnails of each resource. Sounds a bit like some visual search engines. What the authors note at the end of the article is the ever-necessary importance of "digitally-canny outsiders" who know how to use the technology and are culturally sensitive.

See a map of UK memories here: http://www.nationsmemorybank.com/memorymap/


The image at the top of this post is of Cliff Island, Institute for Northern Studies fonds, University of Saskatchewan Archives, Institute for Northern Studies (INS) fonds – F2100. Binder 10. II. Slides – 4501 to 5000. Database ID: 20263.

[future of creative technologies conference]

14 days until The Future of Creative Technologies Conference - 20th of November at the IOCT, De Montfort University in Leicester.

The conference has an excellent line-up with three of the IOCT's visiting professors sharing their views in the afternoon (Dr Jim Hendler, Professor Howard Rheingold, Dr Lev Manovich) while the morning session lets delegates choose which of three workshops they'd like to participate in.

Places are almost fully booked .

If you'd like to come (it's free!) register online.

[enactive cinema with pia tikka @ the ioct]

From the IOCT blog:

"PIA TIKKA

Enactive Cinema
The Future of Creative Technologies
IOCT Lab
24th October 2008, 4.30pm

***

A New Concept in Cinema

The Enactive Cinema project introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema:

How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator’s emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one's own experience in what happens to the 'others'. This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

• Wanted to reinterpret Eisenstein's dynamic organic film theory of montage
• how to capture the dynamic nature of his theories in today's new media
• so used parachronic reading which is outside of time, recurise: linearity of historical time as put into brackets, or substituted by recursive dynamics of experience, a nowness involving events in a spiral manner.
  
• biomechanics: early Eisenstein and montage of attractions (1923)
• ecstasy : holistic experience auditory and visual
• She jumps over the other people important to Eisenstein - hegel, darwinism, karl marx, vygotsky, alexander bogdanov (political rival of Lenin, retired himself from political scen and in 1928 he died but founded "techtology"

"unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tektology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of Tektology which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in 1970s."

• Pia's theoretical background - emotion dynamics, cognitive ecologism (Ulric Neisser), recent neroscientific views of the human mind (Gallese), emmbodied simulation (Gallese), emotions as cognition (Antonio Damasio), homeostasis theory of cinema viewing (Torben Grodal)
• gallese draws on merleau-ponty: the body is...that strange object...
• Gallese and george lakoff collabor5ations on embodies role of experience, semantic studies and neuroscience (see this excellent article that i read the other day)
• toolbox for authoring and describing intersubjective cinematic understanding derived from Theory of Metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
• a way to get a hold of the cinematic experience via the tracking of sensorimotor aspects and spatial dynamics
• gap between phenomenology and how we describe the experience or gap between the phenomenological and the neurological - how to build a bridge between these
• embodied metaphors
• "My goal is to shed light and define novel perspectives especially on the categorization and attribution of emotions within the cinematic narrative. The artistic and scientific outcome is an “intelligent” cinematic system that anticipates and makes inferences about emotional narrative paths suggested by the spectator-participants' bodily actions. "
• enactive cinema - how the narrative unfolds depends on how the spectator experiences emotional dynamics between the characters
  

• dynamic emotion ecology refers to the dynamic interactinon between spectator and psychophysiological states
• emphasises unconscious interaction between narrative and emotional participation, the invitation to enact is very gentle. 5 chairs invite the spectator to sit down, there are also other biofeedback sensors measuring emotional level etc...

Listening to Pia Tikka's talk i'm wondering what happens with spectators who don't have high or normal functioning mirror neurons (perhaps as has been suggested in the case of autism? And what about gender issues. Some cognitive/neuroscience studies suggest there are gender differences with mirror neurons, deepening the stereotype that women are more empathetic because women's mirror neurons showed signs of stronger stimulation (for one example, see this article - "Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study")


Data that was monitored - heart rate, breathing rate, activity monitoring, non-body contact - all of this information can go into a toolbox for authors on how to create a narrative.

Have a look at the following video for an interpretation of Eisenstein's visual "vocabulary"

[new media writing and publishing, 22 Oct 2008, ioct]

Every autumn, First Year CWNM students spend a week on campus at DMU. This year Campus Week includes a day of discussion open to DMU students, staff, and the general public. It takes place on Wednesday 22 October 2008 at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester. Admission is free and booking not required, but space is limited so arrive early to secure a seat.

10.00-11.00 Meet your Reader Dr Jess Laccetti presents a reader’s eye view of new media writing.

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 African Writing and New Media
Chair: Professor Sue Thomas
IOCT PhD student and novelist Anietie Isong introduces his research into African Writers and the Internet, and Nur Yaryare of the Somali Afro European Media Project presents his plan for a new media African heritage project in Leicester.

12.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-15.00 Writing and Publishing New Media
Chair: Kate Pullinger
Sara Lloyd and Michael Bhaskar, digital editors at Pan Macmillan, discuss Sara’s Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st century, and Chris Meade, former CWNM student and Director of if:book London, presents Digital Livings, a report commissioned by CWNM to assess the potential of new media as a career path for writers.
Preparatory Reading for this session:
Book Publisher's Manifesto for the 21st century by Sara Lloyd
Digital Livings by Chris Meade

15.00-15.30 Break

15.30-16.30 E-Poetry
This year CWNM offers an E-Poetry workshop for the first time. Tutor Peter Howard presents an introduction to E-Poetry including a selection of his own work.

16.30-17.00 Plenary

17.00 End

[digital stitchings: my interview with rachel beth egenhoefer ]

I recently did an interview with digital/textile artist/creator Rachel Beth Egenhoefer for Furtherfield:

Jess: What are the main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work that is to be experienced digitally, and that which is contained within physical material borders (sweets, fabric etc...)? - this is very much a question to you as a *creator*

Rachel Beth: In some ways I feel like this is a hard question for me to answer because my work is very much about bridging these two experiences and pointing out that they aren't that different.

There's lots of clich'e answers like the digital being accessible anywhere on the web and that the material has the traditional sense of making and 'aura', but my work really sits between them and is about bringing the two together. Making the digital tactile, and the tangible coded.

Jess: What aspects of the digital would you like to be able to bring into your future work?

Rachel Beth: My most recent work, and the work I did during my residency in the UK uses motion and acceleration tracking. I'd like to continue using ideas around mapping motion and interaction. I'm not so interested in data visualization but rather how mapping actions and systems can make for new interactions or parallels. I've also begun to work with hacking the Nintendo Wii that has just kind of opened a whole slew of ideas. So I can see myself working more with that.


Jess: How would you define a literate reader/experiencer of your work? (I'm thinking especially of the lovely melting sweets...how do you want your IDEAL audience to participate?)

Rachel Beth: I don't really have an ideal audience. I strive to have multiple entry points in my work. I've had computer scientists view my work who know much more about code than I do but never knew that a knitting pattern looks exactly the same, or ludites who hate technology but suddenly realize there are simple, beautiful concepts in computing. Some people see my work and don't realize it's even a piece, some people spend hours coming back and looking at it. I'm okay with either of these extremes. It's my hope that people find something to grab on to or relate to. Leaving a door partly open allows other people to add their own perspective as well. It's always rewarding (well most of the time rewarding) when people discover things in your work you didn?t see before.


Read more over at Furtherfield.

[ TIR-W Volume 9 no. 2 Instruments and Playable Text ]

From the guest editor Stuart Moulthrop:

"Our work is animated by the desire to evoke from simple rules a plausibly infinite set of expressions. We come at this problem from various perspectives, techniques, and points of the aesthetic compass, and we arrive at happily different results, but a certain resemblance remains.

For Judy Malloy, who was a master composer when I was still learning canon and fugue, the key to invention lies in the artful crossing of pattern and chance, of musical and cybernetic form, in her "Concerto for Narrative Data."

John Cayley, who would be our Che or Tristan Tzara if this were an actual movement, gives us a newly re-engineered version of "riverIsland," an exploration of poetry-as-simulation that continues to define the possibilities of its form.

Next come some younger though no less accomplished talents, beginning with Shawn Rider, a writer, digital designer, and meta-gamer who is represented here with two pieces, "PiTp," a work laid open deliberately to digital intervention, and "So Random," a story that tells itself each time, specially, just for you.

Elizabeth Knipe, another relatively new player, offers "activeReader," an interactive media piece that brings its own interpretation of reader engagement and emergent, open form.

Nick Montfort, equally at ease with aesthetic programming and the long-form palindrome, offers what we might call a minimum instrument, "The Purpling," a maze of recirculating expression built from humble Web pages.

Last in train is my own "Under Language," a sort of talkative poem with consequences, far less credible in its claim to infinity than most of its companions, but still a kind of game, for those who will play."

Read the new issue here.

[blog portfolio]

I've been thinking about other ways to use blogs in the classroom - other than as a way of getting students to participate, answer/ask questions, review books/lectures etc... I've just seen Kim Middleton's idea for a blog portfolio:

"The portfolio should consist of three parts:

1) A numbered list of all of your blog posts, with titles and dates of the post.

2) a numbered list of all of your comments with the title of the post on which you commented, the name of the person’s blog to whom it was posted, and the date.

3) A short (5-7 page) reflective essay based on your posts and comments.

What kind of a reflective essay, you ask? Your reflective essay assignment is designed to surface and articulate what you’ve learned over the course of the semester by looking back on and analyzing your own writing during this time. Your essay should answer the question: how have I learned to situate myself as a reader/writer/English student/literary type (pick one or more of these) in the information age?

To answer this, your primary texts should be the writing that you’ve done over the course of the semester—I’m particularly interested in your posts and comments, but your drafts, your expertise projects, etc. are fair game. With the above question in mind, read back over your writing and locate particular sentences and passages that attest to your learning. In your paper, you’ll quote these and analyze them. In what ways do they show what and how your ideas have changed? What terms, concepts, and phrases provide evidence of the complex ways that your thinking has progressed and shifted over the course of the semester? How do they provide evidence that you can use to answer the questions above? Essentially, you’re going to close read your own writing for evidence of how you’ve come to terms with the ideas we’ve discussed in class. I’m looking for a deep engagement with your own writing here.

You may, of course, use the “I” voice in your paper—in fact, you must! Please provide an introduction that contains your main idea(s)—you should be able to make an argument about where you are now and how you got there, with reference to particular terms that you see yourself working with throughout the course of the semester. You may feel free to use a chronological approach (ex., “when I first started this class, I thought digital culture was ____. My first blog post contains this comment: “______.” Here, you can see the ways that I was dedicated to x idea. All I could associate with that x idea was___. In a blog post three weeks later, however, there is a marked shift in my language and tone. “______.”). You may also choose a different kind of structure if it makes sense to you (you could arrange it by theme: “these three quotes show the ways that my thinking changed about digital culture. These two show the ways that I am a writer that needs a number of drafts to shape a complicated argument”.)"

Jeremy Hiebert's model of an e-portfolio though over two years old will serve an a helpful visual model of what students will be working on:

Why create an e-portfolio? Well it helps students:

1. document the journeys of preservice teachers

2. promote or market preservice teachers for employment

3. guide them toward meeting the requirements of certification programs.

(see New Literacies)

[3d tv interaction]

Interaction with tv looks set to change. Now, instead of the usual remote, tv watchers can interact with their shows (though who will support this and how hasn't yet been explained) with a wii-like object:

The Hillcrest Labs Home Interactive Media System combines a graphical, zoomable interface for television with a patented motion control technology called Freespace which senses movement in three dimensions and translates it into on-screen interaction.



Hillcrest has developed a prototype ring-shaped Loop remote control that is held like a handle. It takes some getting used to, but allows multidimensional on screen navigation by waving it in the air, rather like a Wii game controller.

“Hillcrest Labs has created an entirely new and potentially game-changing platform for television and other forms of home entertainment,” said Jamie Kiggen of AllianceBernstein, the firm leading the funding round, in which existing investors also participated. “By combining pointing with a graphical, ‘zoomable’ interface, their technology holds the promise to alter fundamentally how consumers interact with their TV and digital media.”

For more info see the original article on informitv and Hillcrest Labs here.

[new book: video: the reflexive medium]

NEW from The Leonardo Book Series and MIT Press


VIDEO: THE REFLEXIVE MEDIUM by Yvonne Spielmann

Video is an electronic medium, dependent on the transfer of electronic signals. Video signals are in constant movement, circulating between camera and monitor. This process of simultaneous production and reproduction makes video the most reflexive of media, distinct from both photography and film (in which the image or a sequence of images is central). Because it is processual and not bound to recording and the appearance of a "frame," video shares properties with the computer. In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, and current critical debates on new media still need to recognize this.

Spielmann considers video as "transformation imagery," acknowledging the centrality in video of the transitions between images--and the fact that these transitions are explicitly reflected in new processes. After situating video in a genealogical model that demonstrates both its continuities and discontinuities with other media, Spielmann considers three strands of video praxis--documentary, experimental art, and experimental image-making (which is concerned primarily with signal processing). She then discusses selected works by such artists as Vito Acconci, Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Dara Birnbaum, Nan Hoover, Lynn Hershman, Gary Hill, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Seaman, and others. These works serve to demonstrate the spectrum of possibilities in video as medium and point to connections with other forms of media. Finally, Spielmann discusses the potential of interactivity, complexity, and hybridization in the future of video as a medium.

Professor Yvonne Spielmann is Chair of New Media in the School of Media, Languages and Music, University of Paisley, Glasgow. She lives in Glasgow and Berlin.

Video: The Reflexive Medium
MIT Press/Leonardo Book Series
ISBN:0-262-19566-6
452 pp., 136 illus.

To order this book and to learn more about other titles in the Leonardo Book Series visit the Leonardo Book Series website at: http://www.leonardo.info/isast/leobooks.html

[if ET had the iphone he wouldn't have made it home]

Two weeks (or there about) after people were seen running to the nearest store only to stand in a queue for hours in order to pay over a week's rent (400 pounds for 4 gig) for a 'phone (albeit a super pretty one), they're seen running right back to return them.

As Cade Metz explains

"Let's be honest here: The iPhone's all-finger, no-stylus interface is a beautiful thing. With the exception of the on-screen keyboard - which isn't
quite up-to-snuff if your hands are any larger than a twelve-year-old's - this
is pretty close to the ultimate UI, an interface you can use without a second
thought. From the get-go. But $541.42 is too much to pay for an interface. UI
aside, the only real reason to buy an iPhone is peer pressure."

He ends his musings with this one-liner:

"More importantly, if you carry an iPhone, what happens to your self-worth? I can assure you: It plummets. Carry an iPhone, and you're just one of the lemmings."

As for technical issues, well, here are 28!


I think I'll stick to my Blackberry. So it doesn't have a 5mp camera but it has a fast web connection (Edge is soooo 2005...), security, loooong battery life, and loads of other businessey-type apps (the iphone doesn't let you edit Word of Excel files?!) that Apple doesn't seem to want to provide (yet).

Plus there's a major security flaw with iphone technology:

"Hackers could take control of an iPhone if its owner visits a doctored Web site or Internet hotspot, security researchers reported Monday.

The vulnerability of the vaunted device, Apple Inc.'s first cell phone, is only theoretical for now. There are no reports of criminals actually taking advantage of the security glitch to remotely access an iPhone. But if it were exploited, hijacked iPhones could be very useful to the same gangs that take over personal computers and use them to disseminate spam, said Charlie Miller, principal security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, which discovered the flaw. "You could have a million iPhones dialing the company's main line and overwhelm it that way," Miller said."

For more ranting check out anti-ipod.

[oh god - literally]

So the bible might be written by some good non-English speaking *male* authors but it remains a story. A story that some take much too seriously and a story in which others find peace. Whatever your interpretation of the bible I'm sure most people today would agree that it a story that acts as a filter (for some) for current life. How bizarre then that in PETERSBURG, Kentucky the Creation Museum has just opened. It cost 27 million American dollars to build an omage to the first story in the bible, genesis. This is a place where "Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel." How odd! Apparently for a growing number of Americans, the bible is the bedrock of his-tory, as the museum site proclaims: "Prepare to Believe." Now, that must be some immersive story-telling. "A fully engaging, sensory experience for guests. Murals and realistic scenery, computer-generated visual effects, over fifty exotic animals, life-sized people and dinosaur animatronics, and a special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats. These are just some of the impressive exhibits that everyone in your family will enjoy." I wonder if this will be like Disney-land for Christians: I can hear the kids begging for a ride on Noah's arc...well, they do charge you for it.

Read an article on the Creation Museum in the New York Times

For those interested in the teaching of science and not creationism a petition has been started by The Campaign to Defend the Constitution and has aimed it at educators. (the Answer in Genesis group behind the building of the Creation Museum aren't too happy with the petition)

[no privacy online - online fingerprints are ba-ack]

New Software Can Identify You From Your Online Habits

IF YOU thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are.

That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places.

Previous studies show there are strong correlations between the sites that people visit and their personal characteristics, says software engineer Jian Hu from Microsoft's research lab in Beijing, China. For example, 74 per cent of women seek health and medical information online, while only 58 per cent of men do. And 34 per cent of women surf the internet for information about religion, whereas 25 per cent of men do the same.

While each offers only a fairly crude insight, analytical software could use a vast range of such profiles to perform a probabilistic analysis of a person's browsing history. From that it could make a good guess about their identity, Hu and his colleagues last week told the World Wide Web 2007 conference in Banff, Canada.

"It could make a good guess about your identity from your browsing history"

Hu's colleague Hua-Jun Zeng says the software could get its raw information from a number of sources, including a new type of "cookie" program that records the pages visited. Alternatively, it could use your PC's own cache of web pages, or proxy servers could maintain records of sites visited. So far it can only guess gender and age with any accuracy, but the team say they expect to be able to "refine the profiles which contain bogus demographic information", and one day predict your occupation, level of qualifications, and perhaps your location. "Because of its hierarchical structure - language, country, region, city - we may need to design algorithms to better discriminate between user locations," Zeng says.

However, Ross Anderson, a computer security engineer at the University of Cambridge, thinks the idea could land Microsoft in legal trouble. "I'd consider it somewhat pernicious if Microsoft were to deploy such software widely," he told New Scientist. "They are arguably committing offences in a number of countries under a number of different laws if they make available software that defeats the security procedures internet users deploy to protect their privacy - from export control laws to anti-hacking laws."

From issue 2604 of New Scientist magazine, 16 May 2007, page 32

[gootube]

Thanks to Angela, I'm aware of yet another development of digital storytelling (Have a look Creative Writing and New Media Masters' students).

YouTube Users Spoof Google’s Acquisition of YouTube With Fake Kidnapping Story
Online video creators are collaborating on the first viral video series that exposes a fictional “GooTube” Conspiracy. The series was initiated by one person, and has evolved into a collaborative storyline. YouTube video creators — who have never met — are participating in the plotline by posting new videos and advancing the plotline.