Topic: Media
Author Margaret Atwood, creator of fictional dystopias, speaks on the plight of the author in the face of changes to the publishing industry today. She takes it down to first principles, in a partly historic, partly autobiographical way, how the "publishing pie" is divided. She warns the publishing industry against eliminating the author's piece of the pie in their mad rush to an electronic publishing future.
The Know Your Meme team gives this fast-tempo and seamless presentation of Know Your Meme as an important node of internet culture and folklore. Comparing themselves to American musicologist and folklorist John Lomax, they delineate the issues of internet meme-recording: even where you might think there's too much information, you still don't have any guarantee that it will be there forever.
Ray Kurzweil has spent most of his life imagining what the future might be like, and then inventing it. In this keynote from 2010, Kurzweil shares his vision of the future with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. The interview begins with a discussion about the Blio, the future of digital publishing, and finally the Singularity. This interview precedes the September 2010 release of the Blio, a TTS-enabled, full-color, web-enabled eReader.
What is a Transmedia Producer? Although this new role was recently recognized by the Producer's Guild of America, many people are unaware of it. Jeff Gomez explains how a Transmedia Production works, weaving in examples from Avatar and other projects, he introduces the audience to a new creative phenomenon in our culture. Transmedia story telling is the process of conveying storylines to a mass audience through the artful, well-planned use of multiple media platforms.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks about the emergence and power behind opinion space with craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg.
Do we know how to design successful social environments? Is "social experience design" understood as well as "visual design" or "interaction design"? Not yet, says Xianhang Zhang. He believes social design is still in its pre-scientific era: inefficient, error-prone, and unpredictable. Hang calls for a formal theory of social experience design and describes his own theoretical framework. As a first exercise of his principles, he is creating a Design Guild as a way to foster better designers.
Dr. Moira Gunn talks with Steve Rosenbaum about how the data aggregator's new role on the Internet from the pages of his new book, Curation Nation: Why the Future of Content is Context.
Consumer mapping on the web and traditional back-office geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming less distinct. Both are more accessible, standards-based, and flexible. Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, speaks about the creation of a publicly accessible GIS mapping system, ArcGIS.com, a web platform that works with maps from various authoritative sources and provides the public with useful tools to add and use their own crowdsourced, volunteered geographic information (VGI).
From rebuilding communities in Detroit around technological and artistic innovation to improving legal services, each of these speakers share their experiences and insights as to why groups succeed - and sometimes fail - in their attempts to adopt the latest information technology developments and apply them to the greater public good.
Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia hopes to generate interest in the Arab publishing industry, an emerging market. He believes it is incipient and thus ripe for new entrants. While he believes it will mature, it needs improvements in the areas of distribution, censorship and preservation. He discusses how e-publishing can be one of the most valuable tools in its development.
