Tuesday, May 22, 2007

When Worlds Collide

I am very pleased to link to a very nice write-up by Ikona from the N-Gage Arena online gaming community. We had a nice lunch the other week, chatted about the latest in mobile gaming as well as digital storytelling. After a bit of brainstorming, we thought it would be great to tell the community what I'd been up to.

http://blog.n-gage.com/archive/projectview/


It got me thinking about how social change and corporations come together, something I've been following avidly during this project, and I realized how much I'd already learned from the N-Gage Arena members about themselves and their communities. It's also really cool to see how much connecting to other people globally has meant to N-Gage Arena members and how that fit very well with the late Sega Chairman Isao Okawa's desire for 'world peace through online gaming.'

Monday, May 07, 2007

Tootin' my own horn








I'm speaking at Stanford Humanities Lab on Wednesday afternoon. If you're interested, let me know. The blurb is here.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Something like a phenomena

I won't post the actual number, but I have been fascinated by what's been happening in the last day on Digg. Someone found one of the decryption keys for the new High Definition DVD format (HD-DVD), allowing users to copy HD-DVD content (ie movies) without any copy protection, in some limited series of circumstances.

Anyway, the bottom line is there is a relatively short number that "the man" is trying to supress, whether "the man" is the RIAA or the lawsuit-wary staff at digg. So some of the stories from users trying to spread the key were taken down. My view is the posting motivations have a wide range; either as mischief, civil disobedience, making a statement against DRM, or simply because it was topical.

As you can see from the screenshot, not only is this generating a huge controversy, it's generating a huge amount of traffic. Typically, digg stories on the front page have anywhere from 50-200 diggs with occasional stories getting a thousand or so.

Something around this issue has touched a nerve. I'm interested to see what happens next.

But the result is a huge amount of traffic and activity.

EDIT: Digg has decided not to actively takedown these posts, which seems to have calmed down the users a bit. More coverage and overview from the official digg blog and from BoingBoing