Free Software Advocacy and Politics - Danny Yee

Free Software Advocacy and Politics - Danny Yee
An interesting site with many useful links ro free ware and avocacy web sites. the owner, Danny Yee says "I'm interested in linking the free software movement with the struggle for social justice and developing the synergies between them, and in connecting free software with freedom of information issues in other areas. (For freedom of speech issues, see my fighting Internet censorship in Australia.)"

Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

A Beautiful WWW has posted an updated version of their viz of Wikipedia. This version specializes on science and technology articles. The map is generated by first laying out the graph of Wikipedia (nodes are articles, edges are links between articles) and then decorating that substrate with colours (for topics: maths, science and technology) and images.

See the entire article on Data Mining

Facebook Grows Up

At 19, Mark Zuckerberg came up with a new way for college kids to connect—and started an online revolution. Now 23, he's trying to build out his business without losing its cool.
View the article
Here is another article about Zuckerman

-empyre- August 2007

Second Life : The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Being in Second Life <http://www.secondlife.com >

Neal Stephenson's Metaverse reigns supreme. One of it's current incarnations- the multi-user virtual universe Second Life claims a population of 8.5 million avatars. SL is embraced by many as an innovative and safe fantasy scape - enabling play, creativity, education, companionship, love and lust. It is reviled by some as a cesspit of antisocial isolationist addictive behavior; and SL is dismissed by others as simply an over-inflated hype driven commercial venture expounding the values
of property acquisition and commodity exchange.

Whatever your perspective, SL is serious business with an exchange rate which fluctuates against the $US and an estimated Second Life avatar electricity consumption equivalent to the average citizen of Brazil.<http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php>

In this seemingly infinitely expandable universe aesthetic endeavours, creative constructions and artistic performances are enacted daily by talented artists and researchers - some of whom will join us in discussion this month as guests, and many more as part of the -empyre- community and beyond. We hope to hear from all of you and view your work.

Performance, architecture and artwork images from the guests and -empyre- community will be available on our Filckr site and a synthesis of the discussion will be edited into a richly illustrated chapter of a new Pretsel publication on the Second Life Architecture Competition. No dialogue will be published without individual approval and if you wish to upload images of any SL creativite activity which you are posting about to the Flickr site please email me. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodbadugly>

Guests

--> Annabeth Robinson (UK) is a Second Life Artist focusing on interactive and sound driven projects, Metaverse consultant and Sim builder, Lecturer -Design for Digital Media at Leeds College of Art and Design. aka AngryBeth Shortbread http://www.annamorphic.co.uk/

--> Patrick Lichty (US) is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, co-founder of the Second Life based performanceart group, Second Front, animator for the The Yes Men, & Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine
aka Man Michinaga, http://slfront.blogspot.com

--> Stephan Doesinger (Austria) is a conceptual artist and architect who initiated Bastard Spaces the 1st Annual Architecture and Design Competition in SL to be announced at Ars Electronica aka Doesi Beck http://www.doesinger.com/ http://www.sl-award.com

--> Dr Ricardo Peach (AU) is the Program Manager for the Inter-Arts Office at the Australia Council for the Arts, which is funding a SL residency.aka Ricardo Paravane
http://www.ozco.gov.au/grants/grants_new_media_arts/second_life_artist_resid
ency/

--> Christy Dena (AU) is researching changes to art and entertainment in the age of cross-media production for her PhD at the University of Sydney. Dena works as an industry strategist, mentor, educator and journalist. aka Lythe Witte http://www.christydena.com/ http://www.lythewitte.net/

--> Dr Fabio Zambetta (AU) lectures at School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University Melbourne and researcher in the area of 3D embodied conversational agents, 3D virtual environments, and interactive storytelling.
aka Fabio Forcella http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~fabio/projects/

--> Kathy Cleland (AU) is a writer, curator and lecturer in the Digital Cultures Program at The University of Sydney and is currently completing her PhD investigating avatars, digital portraiture and representations of the self in virtual environments. aka Bella Bouchard http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/digitalcultures/?page=staff&id=katclela
·

--> Adam Nash (AU) is a media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer who works in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His work has been presented at SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. aka Adam Ramona http://yamanakanash.net/

---> Dr Melinda Rackham (AU) is the Executive Director of ANAT - Australia¹s peak cultural organisation for artists working with emerging technologies. Her Ph.D. explored the nature and construction of avatars and multi-user Virtual Reality Spaces. aka Marina Regina http://www.subtle.net

Manifestos - some links

The manifesto is a way of outlining the intention and aspiration of a social, political or artistc group.

Arguably the most famous manifesto is the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848.

Here is a snapshot of some manifestos that have been significant in art history and media culture:

• Futurist Manifesto
  
• Cyborg Manifesto - Donna Haraway
• Cyberfeminist Manifesto - VNS Matrix
• A Hacker Manifesto - Mackenzie Wark
• The GNU Manifesto
  
• The Digital Media Manifesto

More manifestos can be found at http://manifestos.net/titles/

Virtual STA Travel

Well it looks like STA Travel have joined the virtual community of Second Life. I prefer travelling in my 'real' life personally, but I guess the company see it as a way to promote themselves to tertiary students who might be considering travel after their studies or during the breaks.

Not certain I know what the intended meaning of the image below, but I do find is quite unsettling on a number of levels - is Uncle Sam taking over Sydney?

Little Mosque on the Prairie

The other night we found episodes of this Canadian sitcom on YouTube. After watching the pilot, we ended up staying up for hours watching the entire series.

Little Mosque on the Prairie had mixed reviews after its release in January 2007, but for my money it is a smart and witty look at the social, relgious and cultural challenges for Muslims and non Muslims in the post September 11 world.

The Foreign Policy Passport blog hopes that each episode's "dose of laughs" succeeds in demystifying Muslims while Dr Blogstein argues that, if shown in the US, it could do for Islamic Americans what the Cosby Show did for African-Americans in the 80s.

Personally, I can't wait to see series two due to be aired in Canada this fall.