NMC New Media Blogs

This is some beautiful computer generated art by Glenn Marshall, created with the programming language Processing. He also did the equally impressive Music is Math which is also linked below. Might we see museums of the future filled with this type of art?

Keene (UT-Austin, DIIA)

Windows Cloud to launch in 4 weeks

"Ballmer reveals cloud computing OS incoming" says Pocket-Lint.

Should we be scared??? Should we care??? The first cloud bomb virus to hit the servers this cloud lives on might make some front page news. I'm just sayin'...

Keene Haywood (The University of Texas at Austin - DIIA)

Apple has announced their iPhone Student Developer program which gives accredited higher education institutions the ability to have access to the same development tools and technologies that regular Developers have...for FREE! Instructors and professors can have development teams of up to 200 students. You can apply for the program here. So next time you are wondering what to do for your class, apply for the program and go forth making some great iphone web apps.

Keene Haywood (University of Texas at Austin - DIIA)

This is not my first blog.  Like a smoker going back to the patch over and over to no avail, albeit al reverso, I have put my hand to keyboard now many times to start a blog.  But -- as any accomplished blogger will tell you -- it is not an easy task to stick to.  This time, I have a strategy, if not a plan.  My blog is here, nestled in the warm cuddles of the NMC website, the public face of the community that is as much my home as the one I share with my family.

Much has been made of Pure Digital's Flip line of pocket video cameras. Inexpensive, convenient, easy to use and decent audio and video quality (for the price). Its made video as easy as point and shoot. Well the ante has been upped some from the vernable imaging gurus at Kodak. They have introduced the Vi6 pocket video camera that shoots in 720p, 60fps, 16:9 aspect ratio using H.264 encoding. This is compressed HD in a form factor about the size of a Flip Mino. Also, the Vi6 can take memory cards (SD/SDHC formats) up to 32 GB giving one lots of room to shoot all those lectures one is attending this semester.

There are not many pieces of software that have raced through the version numbering system like Apple's iTunes. And now we have some rumors of iTunes 8 rearing its head at Apple's Sept. 9th. "event." There will likely be new ipod models in the mix along with this iTunes update, which is more than an update, it’s an entirely new version. Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) blogged today that the new iTunes may sport these features...Thanks Kevin for keeping the world abreast of immiment technology enhancements. Here are the details from Kevin's sources...

What's new in iTunes 8

iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together. Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don't already have.

Ars Technica just posted some news that Amazon is considering a jump into the textbook market via their e-reader device, Kindle, which has been out for almost a year now. It appears Amazon is prepping an upgrade to the device and may introduce additional models, including one targeted for students. Obviously, this is a huge market and one that is poised to undergo some rapid changes. As the article points out, students are tired of the high prices of textbooks and some are scanning books and putting them on BitTorrent sites for downloading, which is illegal.

Web 2.0... the social web, collaborate, share, create, mashup... Hey its YOUR web so go crazy. Its hard to have a day or two without hearing something related to the social web and how the Internet is changing everything in both anticipated and unanticipated ways. Heck, its maturing faster than your dog. And speaking of dog aging, supposedly one cannot teach an older dog new tricks. But how about the new dogs? They can supposedly learn anything. This is a good time to make a large conceptual leap over to learning New Media in our schools. In classrooms and lecture halls, university labs and IT groups, the social web is well being its social self... everyone is talking about it and it’s the life of the preverbial party. While the informal dialogs are everywhere, its probably time to start thinking about some formal dialogs about the need for teaching new media in our institutes of higher education.

There is a gold rush underway and thankfully it does not involve any long slogs out West with pans and pickaxes. This rush is for data which is increasingly becoming the bedrock of much of what the Web 2.0 and future developments will rely upon for dishing out increasingly complex and hyper specific information for just about everything. One of the hotspots in this data mining is information not only about one's online self, but about one's self in the real world, particularly one's habits and movements. Some may say this is getting too close to information on a personal level, akin to the digital equivalent of the close talker from the Seinfeld era. MIT researcher, Sandy Petland in an MIT Technology Review article offers that this is not the case.