I’ve busily been getting some visualisations of Chatsum activity ready for the RCA Show and have completely redesigned them so they no longer look like a 1980s videogame. Above is a picture of the huge videowall monitors I’ll be showing them on.

For those that are interested, the visualisations are all made in XHTML and JavaScript. I’ve been using the Canvas tag a lot recently and I’m really in awe of how powerful the open standards of the web are becoming. It seems like JavaScript is being totally reborn and I just can’t get enough of positional CSS. It really is true:

Chatsum has gone public beta! Anyone can now sign-up and give it a go. Just click this banner to join:

Yesterday we had a massive influx of Brazilians and boy can they chat! They generated over 15,000 posts in under 12 hours and for the first time there was more chat going on away from www.chatsum.com than on it.

Unfortunately though, with all of the activity came a single spammer who posted the letter A into the chat repeatedly, several hundred times, forcing us to ban them. We started by only banning them for half an hour but they came back later so we’ve had to ban them indefinitely. I hate the fact that we had to do it as we’re working on some really nice user blocking code that puts the power in the users’ hands but until that’s live I had to come over all moderatory and I don’t really like that. Chatsum is meant to be a totally public space with us only really wanting to moderate the chat that happens on our own websites (chatsum.com, imgeorge.org and pixelhospital.com) in the hope that others will moderate their own.

If anyone would like to come and see Chatsum in the RCA Summer Show (as mentioned below), it’ll be in The Show: Part Two 23rd June - 3rd July. It’s always a really good show with lots of beautiful things to look at from lots of very different departments. Last year the Silversmithing and Photography blew my mind.

Let me know when you’ll be coming and if you need a place to stay and if you’re really desperate to come to the private view, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

There are now only 17 days left until I have to have everything ready for the Graduation Show of my MA in Interaction Design. I’m going to be showing Chatsum itself alongside different ways of looking at the social data its use produces.

We’ve just entered the second phase of beta testing Chatsum which involved inviting in another 1,500 users to test our new Member Profile pages, you can check out my profile here. We’re letting users bring in feeds from lots of other web services so when you’re looking at someone’s profile you can also see their photos, blog posts, bookmarks, videos and upcoming events. There’s something beautiful about these pages that will hopefully get us a lot of press. I think it’s a different approach to a lot of other sites - we pull in content from the internet’s Web of Data rather than trying to replicate Flickr, YouTube, etc.

If all goes well and I don’t have to look through the MySQL slow queries log again then we’ll be taking Chatsum into public beta in about week or so. The prospect of doing this so close to the show, when my part in it relies on Chatsum working, is terrifying but as the MBA students that Lucy has put me in touch with keep saying, “it’s also very exciting”.

I’ve spent the last few days wrestling with various requests for text that describes my current master’s work and thought it would be a good idea to post some of it here to let people know what’s currently at the forefront of my mind. First of all, here’s my text for the show catalogue which had to be less than 100 words:

As we digitise more and more of our lives, from photography to letter writing, banking to ID cards, we invite the Internet closer and closer. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists that believed in sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge, an ideology that now seeps up through all we entrust to it. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, protection and revenue.

Then we move onto my dreaded ‘Statement of Intent’ which, thankfully, only had to be a draft. You’ll see the obvious similarities but this one is much more challenging of the reader:

Copyright is dead. At least it is in my field and it’s most definitely dying in yours. Everyday we take more steps towards the digitisation of everything possible. We’ve done music, TV is underway, film’s really just started and photography happened quicker than anyone could have imagined. E-mail and mobile phones silently replaced letter writing and slowly everything is moving towards using the Internet as its carrier. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists in the 1960s, scientists that believed in peer-review and sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge. It is this ideology that now seeps up through all that we entrust to the Internet. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, new means of protection and new sources of revenue.

So imagine my surprise as, just as I finished writing my Statement of Intent, this e-mail appeared from the Arts Council:

Dear colleague,
As you may be aware, the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts is currently supporting a UK survey into the development of new business models for creative artists, based on the use of ‘open content’ copyright licensing. The research is being conducted by Open Business, who are based at the Young Foundation in London.

For further information about Open Business and the artist’s survey, please go to http://www.openbusiness.cc/ or see the attachment.

Please forward this email as appropriate. Apologies for cross-postings.
Best wishes,
Nxxxxxxxx Nxx

All I could really say was “Wow!”. This is one serious move in the right direction and I’m really impressed. The site is obviously still quite young and can be a little confusing to navigate but it’s great to see spaces for the discussion of business models for the post-copyright era start to emerge. Once we’ve had a bit more time to analyse and dissect our current Chatsum model it’ll be great to compare it with other people doing similar things.

Here’s hoping to be equally as impressed after the Arts Council supported Westminster eForum on IPR & Digital Rights Management next week. More on that after the event!

Sitting in the horribly branded Yahoo internet cafe at Tokyo Narita airport, only 15 hours until I touch British soil again, and the past three weeks are already starting to wear off. thoughts of house hunting, dissertation writing and actually packing and moving house are pushing away the memories of floating motionless over hundreds of fish swimming around the Great Barrier Reef.

I have plenty of images to Flickr when I get back and five rolls of film to develop. I’m also bringing back japanese delights for those that asked and cheap cigarettes for those that didn’t. Will probably be online later tonight (I land at 4pm, back home by 6pm) in order to catch up with the latest house hunting news, if anyone out there has a lovely 4 bedroom house to rent in London - chat me up!

The Royal College of Art is seeking to appoint a number of tutors to form a core team and work closely with the new Head of Department in Interaction Design defining the creative and intellectual direction of the department as it moves into a new and exciting phase of its development.

Electronics and computing will continue to be the technological focus of the department, but we are also interested in people with design skills and knowledge related to other emerging technologies such as biotech and nanotechnology.

Senior Tutor (2 or 3 days per week)
Salary £37,558 – 42,573 pro rata p.a.

This post will involve supporting the Head of Department in the strategic planning, academic development and day-to-day running of the department.

Candidates should be practising designers or teachers with excellent management skills.

Please quote reference: ST/ID/06

Tutors (1 day per week)
Salary £27,989 - £35,883 pro rata p. a.

These posts will involve setting briefs and tutoring projects on a regular basis, participating in curriculum development through attendance at course review meetings.

Please quote reference: T/ID/06

Candidates for both posts should have experience of teaching at different levels, an active professional practice / research profile and knowledge, and understanding of the historical and other broader contextual issues relevant to design and technology.

Further information and an application form (no CVs) is available from the Personnel Assistant, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU. Tel: 020 7590 4138. E-mail: personnel@rca.ac.uk or see www.rca.ac.uk.

Closing date: Thursday 4 August 2005

The Royal College of Art is committed to equal opportunities for all.

Just a few quick links that’ll let you know what I’ve been up to:

http://flickr.com/photos/imgeorge/
Penance to Kris Cohen who gave me a free Pro account only to be dismayed at how long it was taking me to use it.

http://www.rcainteractiondesign.org
Congratulations to all the second years that have just passed their final exams, an invitation to come see The Show for everyone else.

http://www.imgeorge.org/wiki/index.php?n=Topics.J2MEDevelopment
A wiki page I’ve started to document writing J2ME applications for mobile phones.

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/CuratingImmaterialitySystems/
The webcast of the Curating, Immateriality, Systems conference I attended at the beginning of the month, some really good presentations I will be working into my dissertation. I recommend the final questions panel if you want a quick overview of the day.

http://www.submerge.org.uk/industryawards/
Lucy and I have entered Pindices and Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth. Here’s hoping.

http://www.imgeorge.org/rca/leavingparty.jpg
For all those following the R.C.A. Interaction Design shake-up - it’s official. For all the staff that have seen us through the past year - a very big thank you! For Lucy and Nina - there’ll always be a blog category here for you.

June’s going to be an exciting month:

June 4th: Kurator: Curating, Immateriality, Systems
A conference exploring the curation of immaterial production and digital media. Organised by my old tutor, colleague and friend Joasia Krysa and ending with the DATA browser 02 book launch.

June 24th - 30th: The Show: Two
The final year show for the second years on my M.A.

June 29th - July 1st: Submerge 2005
The graduate show for digital media courses across the Southwest. Featuring the Exploiting Potential symposium on intellectual property and digital production where I will be presenting this paper: Comparing Creativity in the Creative and Software Industries.