Iaac Blog

Collective intelligence: aggregate knoledge that emerges from the decentralized choice and judgments of groups of indipendent partecipants. It is also called “Wisdom of Crowds” and the ability to pool the knowledge of millions of users in a self-organized way demonstrates how mass collaboration is turning the new web into something not completely unlike a global brain.

Web 2.0: second generation of web-based communities and hosted services, wich aim to facilitate creativity, collabotation and sharing between users. The term gained currency following the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.

 Web 1.0:  the old Web, that it was about Web sites and clicks; different from the new Web, that is about communities, participation, peering, and sharing.

Business 2.0: a new kind of business, emerging from the new mass collaborative, that changes how companies and societies harness knowledge and capability to innovate and create value. This new business opens its doors to the world, co-innovates with everyone (especially customers), shares resources that were previously closely guarded, harness the power of mass collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational, but as something new: a truly global firm.

 Wiki: is a type of computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites, and are increasingly being installed by business to provide affordable and effective Intranets or for use in knowledge management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally describes it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”

 Wikimap: a Google Map, where people can put link for different place, like monuments, restaurants, etc.; that considers interesting to see or to visit.

        see pdf

      see pdf

also see monica szawiola blog

Using GMapCreator or any other Google Mapping application it is possible to create some stunning maps that would look good in either poster or large print format.

This tutorial provides by Digital Urban is a simple method to carry out multiple screen grabs and image stitching to create high resolution output from Google Maps for such purposes.

Hosting and Occupation: update

Hosting and Occupation

Schinus Molle

The Digital Urban blog speaks about the new possibilities, given by hight performance network, that allows people to share a lot of data, improving the research and the links beetween the users. The blog puts its attention around three new fields of research: e-research, cyberinfrastructure and web 2.0. E-Research is an emerging indoctrination with new intellectual fields and techniques of research opening up across the disciplines. Craig Stewart of the University of Indiana defines Cyberinfrastructure as: “Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible”. Tim O’Reilly’s compact definition of Web 2.0 is as follows: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them”.

There are different examples of this new kind of research, one of them is rappresented by Google Earth and virtual Earth.In this years urban data has changed; distributed 3D cities are now a reality not in the platforms that we first thought would hold 3D data such as VRML or ViewPoint but in Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. The last two years has seen a phenomenal change, a tipping point in the visualisation of cities. Microsoft with their fleet of planes scanning cities around the world – 500 are planned in the next year - and Google with their more community orientated 3D Warehouse have changed how we view and communicate urban data.Google Earth and increasingly Virtual Earth are becoming the platform of choice when distributing data and distributing this data is become increasingly easy.

Also second life rappresent a new enviroment for this kind of experimentation: importing data about the weather into Second Life opens up a range of potential applications from multi-user collaborative geographic information systems to simply tracking your parcels location, traffic congestion or even local transport facilities live online.The weather data visualisation is on the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Island, importing METAR data and translating it to 3D weather symbols. Moreover second Life has just enabled voice chat within its virtual world browser, a system called Onlive integrated real-time voice-based communication in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) environmentsTo communicate the user was required to press the ctrl key on the keyboard and talk into a connected microphone. The user’s voice was then encoded and transmitted into the virtual environment using automatic voice synthesis and three-dimensional audio. The result was real-time conversation with lip synchronised avatars.With the emphasis on lip synchronisation the avatars were represented as single floating heads which limited to some extent the level of perceived interaction with the environment. To be honest the three dimensional scenes were merely backdrops and the quality of the audio was often poor resulting in dropouts and confused conversations. Indeed, the most widely used phrase in Online was ‘pardon’, although at least in was in three-dimensional audio.Another features is the ntegrating whiteboards and the powerpoint presentations, especially for its use by business and academic communities. Setting up a powerpoint presentation takes time and requires scripting, Holodesk however had it built in.Holodesk was a VRML 2.0 based shared virtual environment from a Pittsburgh-based company called Telepresence. Voice chat was also built into the system but limited to two users at any one time compared to the multiple voice communication of Onlive. Notable additional features were the ability to communicate via shared whiteboards and views prepared graphic slide-based presentations within the virtual environment.A key limitation of using VRML for multi-user worlds was the inability for any changes to the world to be saved. In essence a VRML world was a scene which although offering some level of interaction did not involve any level of collaboration.

The Doors of Perception is a blog that promote events organized to make aware the communities about the necessity of a more sostenible way of life. One of these events is the Dott 07: it is an initiative of the UK Design Council and One North East, is about how an entire region might accelerate its transition to a less-stuff-more-people world. In Dott 07, communities across the region will explore new ways to carry out familiar, daily-life activities - supported by design. The Dott 07 Festival opens in 13 days time in Gateshead, England. It brings together the results of projects and events that explore what sustainable life in one region could be like – and how design can help us get there. North East England, as one of the birthplaces of the carbon age, is anxious to help design its replacement. The 12 day Festival runs 16-28 October on the banks of the River Tyne.

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