When Trebor Scholz asked on his Twitter stream if someone can recommend a good video on the history of B92, I realised not only that there’s no such representative video, but also that Youtube B92 account was suspended and the video was moved to Blip.tv. Anyway, I’ve exchanged some links and ideas with Trebor, browsing through the web history, the online pages and found some archive of B92 correspondences and BBS trays from the 90′s that could be useful for his class.

Then he asked me if I could be a guest speaker in the form of iChat lecture/conversation and record online video for the students, and I thought: well, why not? In general, I don’t like to go back to history events, especially back to the 90′s but then in the context of web activism I had professional urge to act and give the feedback. The outcome is the video I’ve recorded on the Seesmic for the students, where I was dwelling through the Internet history of b92 Opennet and BBS’s, forums, and how the citizens used online media to undermine the current regime, and all social, political, economic turbulences that have marked the 90′s. Initially planned 10 minutes of the video talk extended into 18 min of my scattered thoughts (was recording at 2 am European time, after the tweet-up, so I could deliver it before Wednesday’s class) and I realised there are lot of things to say not only about the online history of B92 but the birth of the citizen journalism in Serbia as the major point in social media in the 90′s.  In Trebor’s presentation – slides you can find out more about above said, the Social Media and War in Serbia, as a part of his Global Internet Activism series.

If you’re not familiar with Twine – it is web 2.5 (towards web 3.0) tool that keeps track of your interests by collecting online content, brings it all together by the topic of your interest, so you can have it all in one place and share it with anyone you want. Even more, beside personalized or collaborative  way of collecting content, sharing interests in communities, learning about new things, getting personalized recommendations.

Before I invite you to join and share with you an interesting Twine I found out recently, I’d like you to know that Twine is powered by semantic Web [one of my fav. anticipated topics since 2002]. This means the system automatically learns about your interests, groups, then makes connections and recommendations tailored to you by using RDF standards (Resource Description Framework language), URI (universal resource identifier) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). For more information how these three main components work in Twine check this page.

You can join Twine anytime and find interesting content – depending from your interests. I use Twine since May 2008, when it was ‘invite-only’ – this is me on Twine , and recently I found out great new resources on Full text. And it is free! Full text is the name of this Twine and it’s enriched with free databases and scholarly search tools, open access journals, which is opposite of locked academic online full text databases, archives or libraries that you have to pay for (or your University/ institution at least). As a preacher of the open access – if you are researcher, student, involved in academia or maybe professional interested in specific area,  this is place with great resources. Please give me a feedback on Twine or meet me there.

Twine Official on Vimeo.

Radiohead just released a new video for its song “House of Cards” from the album “In Rainbows”.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

For more information on data visualization (and how you can download it),  you can click on Google code page. It is interesting that this video is published under the mixture of copyrights/lefts: the code is open source licenced to Aaron Koblin, and the data (not the music)  used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I hope that this wonderful Radiohead song and the video will inspire and gather other visual artists and IT people to use various technologies in making something innovative in the future.

Interesting video I really liked, presenting life ‘according to’ but also a world beyond Google.  It’s our collective memory, memory of the world placed in the virtual space that is not the information well anymore, but much more. You only need a computer and Internet connection to reach the Akkadian Babilu (Tower of Babylon).  Music used in this short film is Leonard Cohen’s – The Partisan.

This weeks’ event in Torino, Italy -  Frontiers of Interaction IV brought, beside interesting speakers, video talk with digital guru Howard Rheingold, interviewed by Robin Good on vision about the future of mobility and pervasive techs. Fantastic video link covers major topics on online collaboration, digital divide, net neutrality, interaction and future of mobile techs, e-learning and other major issues in the future of social media and web.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1049057&dest=-1]

I got email this morning from my old friend and colleague commenting, among other things, on my Flickr photo blog and 365days project.  One of the photos drew his attention to write these words that astonished me, because…:

I was very amazed about a picture from eating Serbian women. I’m not a psychologist, but sometimes when I often see this behavior, it comes up in my mind, that they are not happy, lack of love, attention and so, and as compensation starting to eat. And soon growing up their bums. And particularly what they consume: “ugly Mac-food”.”

…because these women are no fat, the context of this stolen click – photo (as the title says) they love to eat, they are not starving, they are healthy, normal women with [if so] a bit wider hips [but hey, why many men love those hip-hop and soul singers with hips, ‘bums’, and drool over photos of Monica Bellucci? And if you see below this photo, several people from different geo-spots made a comment and none of them (both female and male) mentioned that these girls are overweight or fat. I thought that curves make women feminine, and still think so. But this is not the end. When new information hits you in the morning, the other comes along with it, from the daily news. And it is a story of Czech supermodel who was attacked by Brazilian ‘fashion police’ that on recent runaway show she appeared to be fat, with the critiques on “back fat, love handles and cellulite”. Hello! Is this fat?

Maybe, these are the reasons why society and media push up young girls and women-to-be into sick state of mind and health: skinny, starving and sick go together. Recent article shows also that in the past two years there were two cases of girls who died from anorexia (eating for weeks only lettuce and Coke). After this story I got a bit intimidated by the photos of the food I posted on Flickr here and there, which makes me ‘fat’ and i guess ‘rich’ person according to the media.

I couldn’t help but wonder shall we live the healthy lives the best we can according to our set of standards or shall we follow the world ‘trends’, starve, die and be remembered as ‘beautiful and thin’ sticks without cellulite?  I guess many of us should re-examine our own values and listen to ourselves, our body and biorhythm trying to make a balance in life.

I’m suggesting you to watch this inspiring TED video staring key speaker Mark Bittman, and contemplate our eating habits, for the start.  As for me, I’m going now to have an apple for a snack, fish and veggies for lunch, followed by rich ice-cream for desert.

we need those love handles