I noticed a few days ago that the special issue of Pelit Magazine is now out; it includes the long brainstorm discussion between me, Tony Manninen and Sonja Kangas on the future, including the next 15 years of development in game technology, design and culture. It was fun and intensive discussion, and runs several pages in the magazine — hope you enjoy it, too. See: Pelit.fi
Category: digital culture
digital cultures, digital lifestyles – you name it
Wii news channel serves the living room
Today, starting up my Wii, I noticed a system update available and voilá: the Wii News Channel has arrived! Mixing news and entertainment is an age-old, and often critiqued trend, but now Wii succeeds in displaying news attached to a virtual globe (which is a step towards contextually aware news systems in home environments), and makes “news as a slide-show” function something that I might actually sometimes keep on the background, to be informed by a nice selection of global, regional and science/tech/entertainment related pickings. But the information sources in this system might be a bit narrow, still? More here: PlayWii – Nintendo News
Geotagging for the future
As sites like Wikipedia inform us, geotagging is the process of adding geographical or location information into media, such as digital images or videos (or basically any entity: it is wide field). While we are currently looking into linking various games related tools and processes with the social media initiatives in our pervasive gaming research (read: within IPerG), I am also interested in the simplest possible way of making location tagging available for large audiences. While there are also developments of building GPS into digital cameras, and software tools for automatic location tagging with GSM cell data (in cameraphones), I still think that the approach of Flickr Maps is probably going to be most popular by short range, at least. It is so easy to drag your photo into certain location in the world map, and also browse photos with the same intuitive map interface. Example: link to few images I have mapped in my Flickr Map. (I think you need to zoom out a bit in order to actually see any of them, though.)
Virve Peteri's PhD defence
Virve Peteri’s PhD defence
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Virve bravely defended her thesis “Mediaksi kotiin” (a study on domestication of media technologies) against a sociologist from Turku (from all places!) today in Linna Building. Her study is one of the few thorough qualitative studies that examines how new media (computers, mobile phones, home theatre equipment etc.) are being taken into the lives and also situated in people’s homes. You can access the entire study online (in Finnish) here: http://acta.uta.fi/teos.phtml?10916
It's here
FAlbum integration issues
I have been trying to tie in all the various areas of digital media, games and online services where I have invested portions of my digital identity. One step to such a direction would be to have a working photography–blog integration, that I have been trying to achieve by installing FAlbum (by RandomByte). As you should currently see from the main page of this blog, the “Random Photos” sidebar element should now work (“Recent Images” function did not really work; it seemed to skip most of my photos). And in the /photos/ sub-page also rest of the Flickr integration is otherwise functional, but the WordPress theme that I have breaks apart — the stylesheet does not work, and the FAlbum installation instructions do not exist for fHeaven template that I have based my design upon. Take a look at:
falbum:installation_instructions [RandomByte]
Flickr Tag Cloud for all my photos
(the Scandinavian characters break down, for some reason…)
hdtv adventure game
Now this is actually rather fun: as a an indication of games becoming the vernacular of Media Era, read/play this Dethroner spoof on adventure gaming books (remember them?) and ongoing HDTV discussions.
http://dethroner.com/index.php/2006/11/28/choose-your-own-adventure-the-cave-of-hdtv/
(Gizmodo, thanks for the link)
social media and context in mobile
This is one of those areas where much interesting is going on: using mobile devices to keep track and share your life with your friends, coworkers and family. Several interesting applications and services are in the works, most of them still in beta, though. I have been particularly looking at these: Merkitys-Meaning, Context Watcher, Jaiku. As more people subscribe into these, the context information becomes more useful and interesting. I tried to install Merkitys-Meaning because of its integration into Flickr, but currently it cannot be signed into my E70 mobile (Symbian 60 3rd edition not yet supported, should be in January). Meanwhile, I continue testing Flickr integration into WordPress (attempted also the del.icio.us integrator plugin, but that did not work).
IST 2006
IST 2006
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This day and tomorrow will be spent in IST 2006 conference, which is the annual get-together of eurocrats and us “information society technologies” people. Full with ambient intelligence, social media, tangible bits and all sorts of other marvels, IST is a curious hotbed of activities, few actually ready for the streets, most staying eternally in prototype, or beta.
window into winter, blogging around the world
window into winter
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
I was invited to participate in this global blog where people around the world write about their daily life:
http://topics192.blogspot.com/
In classic Finnish spirit, I used the opportunity to nag about the weather (only the British compete with Finns in their passion to discuss weather, as far as I know). And with this apparent climate change, there are obvious reasons to pay attention to what is going on in this blue-and-green planet of ours.
frans goes blog 
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