MYPOCKET included in the After The Net exhibition at Observatori 2008 in Valencia. The show is open at Centre del Carme from 5 to 29 June 2008. It is curated by KURATOR and presenting a selection of online works from an open call by Joasia Krysa (KURATOR), Manuela Moscoso (LaAgencia), Marta Rupérez (TheArtOrganisation), Luís Silva (Rhizome / Lisboa 2.0 Arte Contemporanea).

After The Net is a deliberately ambiguous title: implying that somehow the Net is over in terms of its utopian promises and also making a reference to the documentary film The Net by Lutz Dammbeck (2003). Like the film, the exhibition explores systems of technological control and presents works that draw attention to historical shifts of network power: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and in turn to social networking platforms.

Artists and Contributors: Caen Botto (Universomente), Wayne Clements, Geff Cox (for project.arnolfini), Lutz Dammbeck, Jeff Gompertz, Rui Guerra, Linda Hilfling, Chun Lee, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (GOTO10), José Antonio Orts, and selected artists from openKURATOR: Burak Arikan, Bestiario, Carlos Katastrofsky, Abe Linkoln, Jimpunk and Mrtamale, Joseph Nechvatal, Cyril de Vroom and Jos Wabeke.

Pictures and documentation will be available at the Kurator website by next week.

Today bloggers discuss comment ownership. They are debating whether comments should belong to the blog/service or to the commenter. Ironically the meat of the discussion is in the comment threads. Rob La Gesse deletes his FriendFeed account (all comments disappear), Robert Scoble declares that he owns his comments, Mathew Ingram asks if Scoble owns his comments, Hank Williams calls for a comment copyright mechanism, Fred Wilson points to Disqus, Disqus posts “Commenter Bill of Rights”, Josh Catone asks who owns your comment, does it matter where you leave them?

We all know who owns the comments. Comments belong to the person who writes them. The question for us is how much are our comments worth?

When you write a note in Delicious it propagates to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Twitter, then to other social places on the web. Do you currently own it? No. Does your comment attract visitors and in turn generate ad revenue? Yes. Do you get anything from the ad revenue? No. What do they say? “In return you are getting the service for free”. Are you really getting a worthy service for all your comments, votes, photos, bookmarks, videos, and all your invaluable social connections? Think about it.

What we need is open contribution metrics at any service. To be able to debate on how much we give to a social web service and how much we get in turn, we have to be aware of the amount of our contribution.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML) is created because of this issue. 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.

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a cell packing algorithm in the Meta-Control series.

Today my RSS reader NetNewsWire reseted itself, I lost all the feeds (500+) I’ve been collecting in the past years. I don’t know what happened, but all I get was the default feed list: mac.com, BBC, Wired etc. First of all, I said bye to NetNewsWire and removed it from my computer. Although I like its clean and fast interface, I can’t take this serious error.

Then I started to look for new feed readers.

Google Reader. Well I use it sometimes, but it is very slow for my reading. Also it manages the feed list really badly. For example, it uses RSS icon after RSS icon to represent the feeds, very bad. I can’t scan them easily. I think Google Reader developers are just lazy, why not just use feeds’ own 16×16 icons like many other readers do. Share, share with a note, star, tag are necessary for large-scale conversations (Greg Smiths’s post). But these features overlap with the services I already effectively use: Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.

Attensa. Works quite fast, but it has a poorly designed visual interface that I don’t want to stare at much. Attensa’s AttentionStream technology combines content (e.g, authors, titles, tags) with your attention to provide a relevancy ranking. Sounds exciting but the interface does not surface this “underlying” technology well. Place of the numbers, color saturation, contrasts, and font size are all poorly composed I think. It may get better if I use it more, but current prioritized lists are not relevant to my interests. If you do machine learning, please show it, show the progress, what you learn about me.

NewsGator. Slow and poor information design. It has some filtering through AideRSS, which ranks feed items based on comments, Del.icio.us history, Diggs, Tweets, etc. But this filtering does not make much sense to me, because the popularity based ranking models can not match my diverse interests well. Also I read my favorite feeds just in time, so as a paradox, items are probably being ranked after I read them.

Fav.or.it. Tried a little bit, its interface is just confusing. Too much unnecessary information here and there. Comment reading is good. Integration with existing sharing services (Del.icio.us, Twitter etc.) is good. Reading experience is bad.

FeedEachOther. Many features, poor information design. Comment reading good, friend connection good, feed list (OPML) sharing good, readability bad. I don’t care much about feed recommendations, because I already find interesting and related feeds as I use the web. Again locked in sharing, no integration with existing services.

There are many readers out there, these are the ones that I found interesting enough to give it a try. There are also custom home pages (Netvibes, iGoogle, Live.com etc.) that act as readers, I just can’t touch those at all. Every reader has one or two unique feature that is good, but none of the readers is good enough to help me deal with the complex information flows. If you use something good, please post it in the comments. For now, I think I will stop reading feeds.

Update: Checking some of the console based unix feed readers on this list.
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/i_want_the_mutt_of_feed_readers.html

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a flocking algorithm that I was playing with recently.

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.

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):

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

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).

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.

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.

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.