Snipisode - Facebook Status Storytelling Application
Snipisode lets you schedule status posts as episodes of a story or feature – Snipisodes!
There are status schedulers out there but they are quite tedious to use. Snipisode lets you type or paste in a whole story and then with a click of a button snip up the story either by line or by periods (? and ! too). Then you choose a time either daily or every two days and that’s it!
The story will unfold on your status line. People can click the Full Story link by the status to see all your status posts for the story including comments on one page.
Snips and schedules!
Here is a YouTube video showing the process in action. So come on in and try it out! Please let us know what you think.
Google has just announced Google Buzz which lets you post and share status lines from your g-mail. Buzz is a good word – Dan Zen sure did not invent buzz – it being around at least from the early 70s and more likely a 60s maybe even 50s term. But in celebrating the hip word for what’s happening, Dan Zen did use Buzz in Hipcats the social media site from 2000 pictured above.
The Buzz section let you post on the following topics which is a little different than a plain status post:
Media Reviews (Books, Video, Music)
Cool Websites
A Happening
A Protest
A Zen Koan
A Radical Idea
A First Time
A Translation (themes to translate words in Hip Cats)
Never really did catch on – but the rest of the site had its moments
Dan Zen has a new front menu in the form of a tree with animated blossoms and leaves. A new signature totem logo is at left and the tree grows from the Node Zero logo from Nodism.
This menu was planned about 3 years ago. The previous Deck of Creations from 2005 has been moved to Creations under the Fun branch of the tree. The deck was designed to accommodate any number of features. This can sometimes be a bad design as there is less intensive to update.
The new design reveals a shift in focus for Dan Zen over the last 5 years from game and gadget features to a wide range of areas. The occasional game has been made but the main focus has been on the following topics:
A humorous look at current texting on mobile devices.
Possible variations:
We grow skinny thumbs
People fork long thumbnails
We wear pronged thimbles (thumbles)
Alternative Interfaces:
Mind Control – here now in early stages
Projected keyboards with IR or laser sensors
Keyers (three keys ala Steve Mann)
Scroll OLED touch screens (ScrOLED)
Guttural commands (mouth words)
An excerpt from Nodism.org – the Philosophy of Connection.
Hierarchies or branches of the single hierarchy show up when things are organized or categorized. Our folders and files on the computer and indeed Web servers and Web pages are all stored in hierarchies. Any nesting is hierarchy for example: Universe > Galaxy Cluster > Galaxy > Solar System > Planet > Continent > etc. right down to house > room > dresser > drawer > pant > pocket > material > molecule > atom > electron > quark > string. In life we have trees and most if not all things that grow. Time causes us to choose options that branch before us.
Taxonomy in teaching, invention claims in patents, table of contents in books, classification of animals, etc. All these and more are hierarchical. Hierarchies are at the root of every domain – each called something different and represented in different ways. So if you recognize a hierarchy in your field, please leave a comment.
In programming, the latest paradigm is Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and this is all hierarchy based and levels are accessed via dot syntax: parent.child. This is how all the latest games that model life are created. In XML, the current standard way in the information age to share data between companies and software is hierarchy based with nodes.
OOP and XML is the cumulation of thought from the most logical people in the world en mass modeling life. This is a mass philosophy born out of trial and error and few people if any think of it this way! Nodism is the synthesis and analysis of this phenomena.
This is great news for a number of Dan Zen features and tools such as the advanced interface tools called Flash Feathers at http://flashfeathers.wordpress.com. Where open source Flash classes are provided to handle multitouch and tilt technologies:
Dan Zen comes out of hypernation with a collection of advanced interface Birds – Birds? – for Flash.
FLASH FEATHERS
ROBIN – multiuser chats and realtime games with Flash and PHP FALCON – easy data transfer between Flash and server scripts HUMMINGBIRD – parallax effect with mouse for 3D menus GOOSE – multitouch emulator with just Flash and Browsers PENGUIN – tilt emulator and processor for tilt and translation apps WOODPECKER – sound frequency and wave animation for MP3 OSTRICH – motion capture cursor follows your Web cam motion DODO – blob detection of motion in a Web cam
Thousands of lines of code has gone into the Flash Feathers series so that designers and developers can create the functionality of each in a half dozen lines of code. So… let anyone you know who works in Adobe Flash about the Flash Feathers site at:
If you are interested in advanced interfaces but do not code then you may still want to watch the video section of each bird site as we go through the examples. All the working examples are in the zips.
Dan Zen will be performing Hula songs in Hawaii for the next while and may have some time for a feature later in the summer.
WordPress is the most popular Web content admin system famous for its bloggers and open source community. This blog is a WordPress blog
Sounds like a great event to get our students and friends out to and you can’t beat the price. As a matter of fact… if we can we should try and sponsor the event. I have put in a request to marketing and we will see what happens.
Hope to see you there – leave a comment if you and a group are coming. Oh… I am giving a talk there from a content creator standpoint at least.
Plots?!? Who needs a plot! Mood Mystery games let players feel like they are involved in mystery without that annoying plot! Make up characters and clues and act all mysterious and maybe some plotters will plot a plot as the hilarious game play plays.
Visit http://www.moodmystery.com to find out more!
Makes a perfect immediate gift for your hard to get friends or family!
Imagine we have a mobile device with hardware and software that can capture tilt (pitch, roll, yaw) and translation (x, y, z) motion. An accelerometer can more readily find tilt but a camera can find tilt and translation.
If hardware and software can leave this information in the format of a TiltML (Tilt Mark-up Language – XML based) then front-end software such as Flash can make use of the information as interface.
A simple example would be to look down on the mobile device and tilt the device to roll a ball through a maze.
A device can be looked at in either horizontal or vertical orientations. But there are a number of different ways these two orientations can be viewed. We will call these ways, modes. Here are six modes of interface:
MODE 1: Top View Tilt
Looking down or up at the device and tilting in pitch and roll. Rolling a ball through a maze.
MODE 2: Front View Tilt
Holding the device in front of you vertically and steering with yaw. A racing game where the device is like a steering wheel.
MODE 3: Top View Translation one Axis
Looking down and using one translation (y axis) as motion and tilt to steer. Walking or running creates motion in the game, pitch and roll or yaw to steer.
MODE 4: Front View Translation one Axis
Looking forward and moving forward causes forward motion in game (z axis). Walking, running or driving creates motion in game and then steering with yaw.
MODE 5: Top View Translation all Axes
Looking down and mapping out two or three dimensional space with translation and yaw. Finding virtual items in real space looking down (or up)
MODE 6: Front View Translation all Axes
Looking forward and mapping translation z plus pitch or roll to map real space. Avoiding obstacles or capturing items as you walk
Combining these modes leads to Full Space where the device acts as window to alternate virtual space in full 3D. Putting these devices in front of your eyes is a form of mediated reality where you can diminish or augment reality.
Thee Gnostics were a psychedelic space rock garage band from Hamilton, Canada in the 90s. Archives of video, sound, pictures along with descriptions can be found in The Tarken Files.
The Tarken Files shows any Web video, sound, pictures and text. Thumbnails for the files are presented with rollover scrolling text beneath. Click on any thumbnail or use the arrows to browse more files. A viewer will appear with either video, audio, picture or text navigation.
The video navigation has a full screen button at the right. Hit escape or the reduce screen button to exit. The sound navigation has a reduce button at right that closes the pannel but keeps the sound playing in the background while you browse pictures or text. If sound is playing in the background, you will see a sound icon on the right side of the video, picture and text viewers so that you can adjust the volume or go back to the sound.
There are tabs at the right of the viewer that open the ratings, comments and information panels. To rate, roll over the rating at the bottom and submit. The comments and information panels (and the text viewer) have a scroller if necessary that lets you scroll through the text. You can also single click through the pages or double click to go to the top or bottom page. The information panel shows you the views as well.
The Tarken Files have been excavated from a Galaxy Long Long Ago yet seem to also span the future.
Agency Zen has launched its second facebook application. Stick Aliens lets you use the Oracle to determine your alien tendencies. To use the Oracle just drag the eye or any of its icons around and then the Oracle will provide a Stick Alien vision on your profile page.
The plan is also to launch Stick Aliens through Open Social and one day enhance the feature to solve mystical puzzles based on which aliens your friends have. Enjoy!
Dan Zen wears his San Francisco Groovy Guru robe. The one he wore for the International Groovy Day poster. Should we choose a day for that? Or should it just be any day? Oh… also check out the Love Mash – the robe shows up there too and it would be cool if some more people made Zen Mixes and maybe someone will make us a love mash!
Dan Zen also “starred” in a movie called the Guru Monster Movie. Some of that can be seen pictorially on Thee Gnostics mySpace page – more to come as TheeGnostics.com site happens.
In 1996, Dan Zen traveled to San Francisco and wore a guru robe – quite a beautiful traditional green robe with yellow embroidery. He was at the Macromedia Conference where Shockwave was unveiled. A flower lei held his festival pass. An Indian guard, after much deliberation, came up smiling and said, “You know… in my country… the women wear those robes”.
Get dancing people! Loosen up – no steps to follow – you can’t go wrong and it feels great – puts you in touch with your body and nobody has to know! Unless… you start vlogging it with Zen Mix!
