Andy Carvin · January, 2005

Latest posts by Andy Carvin from January, 2005

Blog: The Gates @ Central Park

  29 January 2005

Hi everyone.... I've set up a community blog for "The Gates," the upcoming art event in New York's Central Park by the artist Christo. For two weeks in February, Christo will decorate Central Park with thousands of saffron-colored flags on gates throughout the park. http://nycgates.blogspot.com/ The website is set up to accept blog postings from anyone who visits The Gates and wants to comment on the event. The site will accept new posts via email and voicemail. Think of it as a public experiment in collective art criticism. :-) There are two emails you can use to post comments to the site - one email for people with positive comments about The Gates and one for people with negative comments. You can even attach a photo to the email and have it placed on the blog, if you go to Central Park and take pictures. Soon, I'll have the blog set up so that visitors can post audio blogs/podcasts about the event from their phone, using a call-in number and PIN code. I used this technique at the Berkman blogging conference for the blog http://mobcasting.blogspot.com. So for those of you who are in NYC or are planning to visit the city during the February event, I'd like to invite you to post your thoughts about The Gates. Feel free to post before, during or immediately after the event; I'll probably close the site's posting features a couple of weeks after the exhibit ends. How to Post Your Comments and Photos to the Site If you would like to post your thoughts about the Christo Central Park exhibit to the website, please send an email with your comments to either of these addresses:

For positive comments: yes-christo.gates /at/ blogger.com For critical comments: no-christo.gates /at/ blogger.com
(You'll have to remove the "/at/" and replace it with an @ symbol. This is to discourage spam.) Please put the title of your comments in the "subject" field of the email, and then your comments in the body of the email. Feel free to sign your email or post anonymously, whichever is more comfortable for you. Spam and off-topic posts will be removed immediately from the site. You can also use these email addresses to post a photo to the website; simply attach a photo to your email, then put the title in the subject line and a description and photo credit in the message body. Please only send your own photos; do not send copyrighted material or other people's photos without their express permission. If you would like others to be able to use your photo, please feel free to make a note of it in the body of your email message. If you're interested in discussing the site, including the development of lesson plans and other tools related to it, I've set up a yahoo group as well. To subscribe, please send an email to the-gates-subscribe /at/ yahoogroups.com and you'll be added to the list. thanks, Andy Carvin

An Inaugural Mobcasting Experiment

  18 January 2005

Hi everyone.... As an inaugural experiment in mobcasting, I've created a mobcasting tool for presidential inauguration protestors. I posted a note to a couple of protest group sites, and have set up the blog so that the instructions for participating are right on the homepage. At this point I just plan to sit back and see if anything happens. -andy

Update on Mobcasting Idea

  17 January 2005

Hi everyone... I've managed to set up a blogspot site -- mobcasting.blogspot.com -- that can be used by anyone with a Blogger account to post podcasts from their mobile phone. While Blogger doesn't have a podcast-friendly RSS feed, FeedBurner does, so I'm using it to generate the necessary enclosure tags that make podcasting work. So if anyone wants to test it out, let me know -- I can then set you up with posting privileges for the blog so you can also post podcasts to it from your phone.... -andy

When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting

  16 January 2005

I've just posted a blog entry on my website that might be of interest. It's about mobcasting-- the idea of combining mobile phone-enable podcasting with smart mob-like group action. The blog was inspired by a tutorial I wrote yesterday on how to podcast with only a smartphone.Here's a snippet from the blog:

What do I mean by mobcasting? Well, it's really a double entrendre, if you will: a play on both mobile podcasting and Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold's notion of viral-like social coordination enabled by information and communications technologies. Smart mobs got a lot of hype last year in the mainstream media, usually in the form of surrealistic group performance art initiated over the Internet. But smart mobs are much more powerful than just a group of college kids showing up in an art gallery at 12:15pm, standing on one foot and yelling "Tevye, get off the roof!" before dispersing without further comment. Like the case of SMS use during the anti-Estrada demonstrations in the Philippines, smart mobs can be any form of group social action enabled by ICTs. A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.
Here's the permalink: http://www.andycarvin.com/000712.html Would love to hear your thoughts on the concept.... -andy

Introducing Tsunami-Info.org

  2 January 2005

Hi everyone.... My tsunami info website now has its own domain name: Tsunami-Info.org. The site aggregates news feeds and blogs from a variety of sources around the world, and offers machine-generated translations in more than half a dozen languages. Some of the feeds captured in the digest include Yahoo!/Reuters tsunami coverage, the BBC, South-East Asia and Tsunami Blog (SEA EAT), Crossroads Dispatches and Emergency Action Blog. The most poignant feed comes from SEA EAT's Flickr feed: a stream of photos and descriptions of people still missing from the tsunami. It sends chills up my spine every time I see them.If you'd like to see any more feeds added, please let me know.... -andy