Today is May Day, we celebrate the social and economic achievements of the labor movement. In this important day, we wanted to announce our project User Labor.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML), is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

Please see the examples on the User Labor website. Your feedback and contribution is very important to improve this project.

http://userlabor.org/

User Labor was first implemented in Meta-Markets.com, the online stock market for social web labor (learn more about Meta-Markets). Below image is a screenshot of my profile page on Meta-Markets. By clicking on the “View User Labor” link any Meta-Markets user can see how much work I’ve done at Meta-Markets in the ULML xml format (will be displayed as a chart soon).

Also see Engin Erdogan’s “Happy User Labor Day”blog post.

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This saturday (April 26th), I will perform pieces from Meta-Control at the SINK event at Reboot, East Village (map). This is a good summer night of electronic music and visuals. See you if you can make it.

More info here.

Update: Unfortunately the party was shut down by the police. Devrim Kadirbeyoglu shot and edited a 4 min video (police at the end):

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Call for Art

Urban Jealousy
The 1st International Roaming Biennial of Tehran
30th May - 6th July 2008
Curated by Serhat Koksal and Amirali Ghasemi

http://www.biennialtehran.com

Download the Application in WORD documents here (Choose Your Language)
Farsi, French, English and Turkish

Deadline: April 21st, 2008

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Will participate in a contemporary arts talk series at the Mimar Sinan University Department of Sociology on Thursday, April 17.

Will be presenting MYPOCKET and Meta-Markets in the context of the new generation of media and networked arts.

Keywords include immaterial labor, distributed power, open web services, networked conceptual art, complex systems.

This post acts as my Twitter, each paragraph is limited to 140 character.

Read more at Dugumkume.org (in Turkish only).

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New generation of finance entrepreneurs will be gathering tomorrow (April 12) at the BarCampMoneyNYC 2008 event. It will be an ad-hoc gathering for the people who work in, cover or seek to change the finance industry to share and learn in an open environment. There is sure something about Paul Kedrosky’s signal as New York City being a financial tech startup hub.

I will talk about my recent project MYPOCKET, the personal spending prediction software, and Meta-Markets, an experimental stock market for trading socially networked creative products.

BarCampMoneyNYC Event Details:
Date: April 12, 2008
Time: 9am - 5pm
Venue: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, 1301 Avenue of the Americas (between 52nd & 53rd street), 40th Floor.

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Today I am doing a 1 day RSS Ramadan. No feed reading until the sun goes down. I don’t know what it means, but I feel like I need it for the health of my mind and soul. Although some other interfaces may interrupt my information diet, this is no problem since the deal is between me and my “internet god”.

Ironically I first announced on Twitter.

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This weak leads to two Creative Networking Workshops, tomorrow (March 19) at the MIT Visual Arts Program (VAP) and Thursday (March 20) at RISD. With Amber Frid-Jimenez we will run the workshops during her course Participatory Networks.

Creative Networking Workshops focus on the the design of network protocols as a creative activity and expanding the individual’s thinking about the network medium. Emphasis on network elements, network topology, protocols, and information design. Participants learn the most through observing and creating many examples of networks, sketching diagrams, and authoring protocols. Networked systems in this workshop are not limited to the web or the Internet, but participants are required to design diagrams for running systems; running with animal power, social capital, radio waves or any other model depending on the participants’ concepts.

This workshop is designed based on the experimental work we’ve started to do in the Physical Language Workshop at MIT. We’ve been creating and running experimental infrastructures for the past three years. We extract best practices and best concepts, turn them into recipes and teach them in the workshops and courses. Our goal is to support the development of creative infrastructures, to flourish artist run systems, and to develop critical view on contemporary complex networks.

The first Creative Networking Workshop was done in Istanbul, November 2007.
http://teaching.burak-arikan.com/creative-networking/workshop-itu

* Top image is “G8″ by Bora Akaydin. Created at the first Creative Networking Workshop in Istanbul.

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What are you coding? Let us know, copy paste a snippet to Pastie. Pastie is a service for anyone to communicate through the exchange of quick short code snippets. It is a type of Twitter for code. In fact Pastie is more loosely connected to the “rest of the world” than Twitter. There is no user system but a simple API. Besides manual pasting you can also paste from your console, from your text editor, or from an IRC channel, Pastie is close to where you work.

Screenshot from a code snippet on Pastie.

Pastie displays the snippets color coded and well indented, must haves for reading any type of code. It currently supports 14 programming languages including Shell Script, Ruby, Java, C++, SQL, and CSS.

Every snippet has a unique URL, so you can reference them elsewhere. It is generally used in the developer forums. Rather than pasting the code in the forum people just give a link to the beautifully displayed snippet on Pastie.

The simple Pastie API enables developing interesting new applications. There are already remote interfaces that enable using Pastie from TextMate, Vim, Shell console, and Ruby console. Using the API is quite easy, all you do is connect via HTTP and send the code snippet and the language type. I think Pastie could play nicely with any other web application. I can think of using Pastie as part of a social networking application for example. That would enable sharing “my code snippets” with friends and see their snippet stream in my large-scale conversations. Just like video or photo stream, code snippets from friends can be fed in to our fat RSS readers. That would make programming more fun, and social?

Pastie is created by Josh Goebel, one of the contributors to the Ruby on Rails project and co-author of the popular Ruby on Rails forum application Beast.

I’d like to mention another fantastic pasting system Paste (currently offline), an artwork from Martin Wattenberg and his collaborator Marek Walczak. You paste whatever is in your clipboard, something that’s on your mind or just a distraction. Paste combines these pastes into a single text stream, you appreciate the minutia of collective consciousness.

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Today the YouTube Platform launched in Silicon Valley. The new YouTube API allows people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other websites. That is you can create a web service that has a video sharing feature but the videos are hosted on the YouTube servers. Great! We all want one! Apparently YouTube Partners are already on the bandwagon creating “cool YouTube applications“. The Partner program is US, CA, UK only.

You provide the video, YouTube hosts it, and in turn gets all the ad revenue. As I read from the TechCrunch YouTube Platform post YouTube product manager Jim Patterson confirms that there is no revenue-sharing built into the API. He says:

It is a YouTube-branded experience. It is free. The price you pay for using it is you must participate in the YouTube community.

We heard these before. Lets look at the contract, the immaterial contract between a regular user and YouTube, the immaterial contract written and signed only by YouTube. There are 3 monetization ways for YouTube:

1. In-video ads displayed in my own video at my own site
2. In-video ads displayed in my own video at youtube.com
3. In-video ads displayed in my own video that is embedded elsewhere on the web

whereas only 1 monetization way for a regular user:

1. Ads in video pages displayed at my own site

So the new deal is clear: 1 + 1 + n is not equal to 1 + some visibility.

With the new API YouTube massively extends its advertising real-estate, that is every person or web service who hosts videos on YouTube. It must be a clever move in the business literature, but it just increases the value imbalance between the user’s labor and the service’s offer.

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Lots happening these days in NYC.

Casey Reas is in town, leading to two exhibitions today at Bitforms and the Pratt Gallery. His new work from the Process series are really nice. Both shows are open through the first week in April.

ABSOLUT QUARTET, an interactive robotic musical installation by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska is currently on display until April 25th at 186 Orchard Street, Lower East Side (map). You can enter a melody through the absolutmachines website, initiating an original and unique piece of music to be played live by the machine in its lower Manhattan home. A short lo-res movie of the piece in action can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e9AJVtuCKc

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