Communicating in a networked world
Tom Foremski was just named by LinkedIn to their “top 10 media writers of the year” list. He wrote about the awkwardness of self-promotion in LinkedIn Pulse a few days ago.
Tom’s journey from writer at Financial Times to blogger, to publisher is an interesting one. There are some parallels I’d like to call out.
[Tom’s photo here is by JD Lasica taken during Traveling Geeks 2009] [short interview]
Well I don’t have a photo, but my first computer was an IBM 709. My next computer, for a very short time, was a CDC 3400, which was soon after replaced by the CDC 6400 that served for roughly 7 years as “my” mainframe. Me and many other researchers, of course. [Read more…]
For years I’ve kept snippets of code in a file that I refer to when I need a cookbook of sorts to perform some magic incantation I only need to invoke once or twice a year. I just don’t need to keep this kind of stuff in my head. I call the file Gems of Wisdom.
You know, in programming (which I do a lot of), there are often little gotchas that require hours or days to figure out. And once you’ve figured them out, it’s easy to forget them if you immediately move on to the next challenge. Working at the level I do, which often requires typing command-line stuff, I’d never remember this stuff character by character unless I used it every day. [Read more…]
DesignWare’s best-seller Spellicopter was released in 1983 and went gold and platinum, selling zillions of copies. It was on the SKU best-sellers list month after month. (Below the fold—a video of Spellicopter being played!)
I just completed a new page at Red7.com that describes the major mixed-reality games I’ve run since 2004 — take a look.
Since I speculated (a few years ago) that we could create really great mixed-reality[1] games (or learning experiences, for that matter) that would utilize all sorts of real-world media including SMS[2], video, telephones[3], FAX, email and web, I’ve been working to develop more of these games and get them played. I started by developing a scenario-operating-system that could run on a server, “listen” to incoming SMS and email messages, and react appropriately to move “players” through the game. This system is in place today, and listening for certain key words in incoming messages the set players off on a chase through the game of their choosing.
While experimenting with the scenario system, the team and I learned a lot. We learned that people have trouble with SMS messaging. We learned that email works (now that smartphones support email) better. We learned they’ll call a phone number, but they’ll hesitate because they don’t know for sure that the number is in-game. We learned that they like certainty more than experimentation. And we learned they ultimately will be creative if given the right opportunity.
Oh, and there’s a new game being planned right now.
[2] SMS (also called TEXT or TXT in the US) messaging is the first method we used to get messages to and from the players. To avoid certain technical difficulties with SMS, including charges, we used email gateways, which are provided by mobile system operators. These did not work well because many people were unfamiliar with the ways they could send and receive email from their phones.
[3] We used call-in phone messages in almost all of the games. These are answer-only phone numbers where a simple message is played for each caller. Each message describes the next step in the game. I thought it would be fun to customize those messages for the players, but we haven’t gotten around to doing it… it’s a technology challenge that involves call-director, voice-response, XML-controlled systems.