Hangy at http://hangy.mobi is the mobile app for wearable devices that will make you:
the PIZAZZ at the party!
the CROWN on the conference!
the COOL in the club!
the SHOW of the fashion!
Easily express your moods, give greets, show pics or promotions and even wear styling lights! Watch the Hangy YouTube Playlist to see how it works and how to make a Mobidallion wearable device in two minutes!
The Hangy site offers a fun view of famous characters wearing Hangy and imagines how they would express themselves. Click any character to VOTE for your favourite.
Inventor Dan Zen recounts,“For years, I have been watching the Web for mobile devices used as wearable expression – and have found nothing. The closest is the digitalDudz fellow – I was telling my students about putting a device on the front and back so you could see through your body since the dawn of mobile video – so we seem to have similar interests.
Why are we waiting around for digital fabric that can show the same old thing over and over – why not make use of our current devices with all the apps in the world! A whole series is planned – with similar interface, so try out Hangy and let others know!”
There are a couple existing fasteners to hang Apple devices as a necklace iHangy (not related) and Necklit. These require extra production and cost and only work with Apple devices. You can create a Mobidallion wearable device in less than 5 minutes with tape and string or use a gel case and thread string through two pencil poked holes. These free and easy techniques are more than strong enough to hold the device even with the most rambunctious of dancing! Please watch the videos to see what we mean (see the second and third in the playlist).
All the best and send us your pictures wearing Hangy!
Inventor Dan Zen is an award winning digital media creator with over 80 games, gadgets, communities, and tools at http://danzen.com. Hangy was made with Adobe Flash and easily published to all platforms through Adobe AIR. Dan Zen has launched a half dozen mobile apps in FLASH/AIR such as Touchy, Wavy and Swoodle.
Tapoll at http://tapoll.com has received over 100,000 views. In honor, we have made it bigger! We took the 980 pixel width of Facebook, Google+. flickr, etc. to make Tapoll easier to see and operate!
TWIST
Tapoll polls have a unique twist:
Tapoll lets you predict and vote on a poll at the same time.
The results then show the predictions which often vary quite a bit from the actual votes. Using the graph feature, you can see over and under predictions as well as the percent of user who voted for their own prediction. This is often in the 50% range.
SHARING
Just recently, we added share buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
VIDEO DEMO
The top left corner is redesigned and now includes a link to a video demo on YouTube.
INTERACTIVE VIDEO AD
On the right hand side you will see a video ad for the Touchy game at http://touchy.mobi. It shows up every once in a while and relates the ad to the keywords of the poll you are viewing.
INSPIRATION!
Tapoll also shows related news and social links in the inspiration column at right. If you press the TAPOLL button next to any of these, it will start you off creating a poll with this link, picture, video, etc. cited as a reference. You can also make a poll based on another Tapoll poll as well using the TAPOLL button under any poll.
Please come on by and share a few polls on your social sites!
TouchyTV has launched at http://touchy.tv with three episodes. Kayla and Alex commentate on games of Touchy.
Host Blip.tv shows the episodes one after the other with a slight delay or you can roll over the bottom of the video for a navigation.
Touchy is the mobile mediated game where you try and touch other players’ screen but do not let them touch yours. It is an iPhone/iPod Touch game available on the Apple App Store for $0.99 – look for Touchy by Dan Zen.
The Touchy site is at http://touchy.mobi. There is also a facebook application to challenge friends to a Touchy Duel – see the facebook page at http://facebook.com/touchymobi and go to the Touchy Duel application tab.
Have fun and please help spread the word. From our testing, Touchy is a transformative game with old friends laughing a new – teens finally finding that social icebreaker – parents getting an update on the old wrestle. We thank you for being a Touchy Ambassador!
Here is a look at inventing for the Internet written in 2005 looking back over the ten year period from 1995 up to 2005. In general, the focus was on making new use of the medium:
People can interact to make content not just view content
People can communicate with each other
A computer mediates to enforce rules of a game or environment
Production and distribution of virtual objects are free
Other inventive focus was the relation between story and game play. Sometimes a story would suggest game play but usually a relevant story was created for a given game play.
Here are the comments about inventing features for the Internet in the early years. Many of these ideas would have relevance being redone in today’s social media aware world – because we were socially aware in the past but perhaps did not quite have the platforms and sharing systems worked out.
Inventions for 2005 – 2010 will be the focus of the next posting.
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 😉
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!
Group Games is a new concept that in a sense hacks the facebook groups to create games where the leaders are those with the most group members or pictures or wall posts of a certain type, etc. Here is a link to the Group Game group on facebook. Note, that anybody can make a group game and it does not require coding. If you are interested, please consider adding it to the group game page and be part of the collective.
Nano Race! Is the first group game where you join one of the groups that are working towards being shrunk to nano size to gain great speed, strength and riches. How exactly that works is up to the players to role play. The group with the most explorers is winning the race!
The groups are pictured below but do not link through to the game. It is best if you join the overall game group for nano race by clicking the Join Group link at right. Then pick one of the groups by clicking the link to the group and then JOINING the colony group. Then invite friends and write on walls to role play the game.
Here is the Dan Zen board interface from 1998 (Read about it on this Blog). All this talk of Social Networks reminded me of my Social link up to left. This was really my blog announcing the latest things on Dan Zen through one of my “barnacles” Eg Orna. The barnacles were all anagrams of their colors.
More to the point is that just this corner of the site shows five social networks and games – they are still active and some started in 1996. To date there are a couple dozen social games on Dan Zen averaging about two per year over twelve years. They can be seen thought the Social Category at the right of the blog – please note there are two pages with the second page being accessible from the top.
The five social games shown in the corner are (Moustache Mysteries is a game for individuals):
Spirogram where you send and receive encoded messages.
Salamander where you go into a park with a bunch of others and try and find a spy called the Salamander based on clues.
Opartica where you can share portfolios or individual op art creations.
Hip Cats, an all out social network with accounts; ratings of other hip cats; dating; friending; indication of favorite movies, books, and music; top ten hip cats newsletter; a buzz section with user created music, book, movie and Website reviews, happenings, protests, koans, radical ideas, first times and translations that turned your words into certain hip moods like psychedelic, beatnik, goth, urban and surf; messages; ratings on products; tie-ins to affiliate Amazon purchasing; templated scenes for organizations to host a Hip Cats site complete with stats, word filtering, self modifying drop outs; all programmed in DHTML within months from its launch.
Password Paradox is another self modifying social game where the passwords you guess right are actually the passwords that others have already guessed.
Another thing I noticed recently was the Loves You tag on the top of the flickr logo (replacing the alpha or beta that once was there helping bring in the age of Web 2.0 gizmos). Dan Zen used to put We Love You at the bottom of a number of pages often after introduction and help pages. Examples are below. You can still find them on Hip Cats and other pages. Of course we are all welcome to love! It was really nice of flickr 😉
Tapoll is the site where you get to predict a poll as you vote. Now, you can decide on which polls go on the front page. That is, until someone else decides on a different poll.
To view polls you can choose a poll topic at left, choose the latest 20 polls, or see all topics. Once you choose a poll, you can predict and vote on the poll. Just above the poll is a link that says front. Click this link and confirm that you want the poll on the front and it will be placed on the front page of Tapoll.
Pccchooooooo! What speed! What Serenity! The two do not usually go together but then again it is not every day that you get to fly a jet pack through peaceful puffy clouds.
There are a million clouds on which you can sit and look up or down, drink tea, read a book and of course think deep thoughts.
But like anything, there are environmental concerns. Will the clouds last forever? How do we fill our jet pack? A bit of a twisted take on non-renewable resources. We will let you discover the answer if you have not already.
Thanks go to Steve Mazza whose jet men on clouds was overwhelmingly inspirational! As soon as I got home from his exhibit (see the picture below), I had to seek therapy in constructing this feature in time for the upcoming Iron Man boom and of course building on our fascination from early James Bond, Rocket Robin Hood, etc.
Steve Mazza work from Future Tense show at Transit Gallery, Hamilton Canada
Finally made the top Google page for Hip Cat and Hip Cats. I spent years fuming over being ousted by the likes of Cat Hip Displasia Injuries ;-). Try out the link and please click on Hip Cats!
Hip Cats was and is a social networking site that was started in 2000. It allowed you to create a persona, make a friends list of people you wanted to hang out with, rate other hip cats, date them, see their favorite music, movies, and books – all connected to Amazon affiliate. You could message other hip cats and view them in different Hip Cat genres like beatnik psychedelia, goth, urban, surf and their words would get translated – good would become groovy, etc. There is a buzz section where users can post reviews, events and creative writing as well as custom moods to view Hip Cats through.
It was a very early dynamic html (DHTML) site that featured updates to certain parts of the page without loading the hole page – which is what AJAX is used for and all this Web 2.0. It was cross platform and still works today which is pretty amazing considering it is a thousand lines of JavaScript, and another five thousand lines of Perl.
The site is self modifying where hip cats that are rated poorly drop off the scene – their data is mailed to the creator.
In the first few months, thousands of Hip Cats were created, top ten Hip Cats messages were sent out to people, and friendships were made. I tried to get other companies or groups to take Hip Cat scenes. There is a SHIFT magazine scene but it went out of business. There is a Beatnik Museum scene but I do not think they added the link. I almost got Austin Powers to take it but it turned out that they thought I wanted to pay for advertising. So it was all very frustrating not to be able to get people to take a free scene and populate it with their fans. It had so much potential.
In striving for programming simplicity, it has a few quirks. Please read the Flat Chess Tips found behind the link on the bottom. It will help you sign up and invite friends. And it will help you with operation. It only takes five minutes to read and you will find everything will work smoothly thereafter.
You can play at the same time or you can play whenever you want. That is usually how it is with me. Where I make a move and close the application and come back later to make another move. But you are welcome to schedule a time with a friend and play without closing the browser. You will be notified in the application as soon as a move is made.
If you feel compelled, please let me know what you think!
For many content creators, like Bloggers, money means nothing – all it takes is a few nice comments and they get all charged up to make another post or feature, etc. I know that when I wonder if it is all worth it, I take a look at the thousands of comments on the Dan Zen garden and they tell me, I’ve made a difference. On the blogs however, I seldom get a comment – and if I do, it is spam. This has prompted the making of a tool that will let visitors know that their comments are greatly appreciated. So please, if you have a blog, consider using CommentRight.
CommentRight lets you select from a series of image prompts that you would like to tell your visitors with respect to leaving comments. Once you have selected, you can get the image code to paste into your blog post. Because it is just an image tag, it can be used anywhere such as in WordPress, Blogger or MySpace. The image tag will show a different one of your selected images each time.
CommentRight is free and easy – please let others know and please click on any CommentRight banner in this post to leave a comment as to what you think about CommentRight. It would be a helpful indication that CommentRight works. The C in a box to the right of the banner links through to the CommentRight site.
You use Chatnap to create a URL that you paste into a friend’s instant messenger window. If the friend clicks the URL within five minutes they win a point and you lose a point. If they do not click within five minutes then they have been caught chat napping and they lose a point and you win a point.
Sign in under START then under CHALLENGE you can create a friends list and challenge your friends. Under SCORE you can see your score and your friends’ scores. Even sign up for an RSS feed to keep track of whenever they score or lose a point.
Predict-A-Poll is a poll portal and tool where you can predict polls as you vote in them. You can create your own polls that will show on the portal. If you want, you can post the polls on your Blog or Website. You can also make private polls.
The results show the predictions and the actuals so you can see if you are predictable and if you are good at predicting! Results are also graphed and analyzed.
Polls are organized by keywords and display context sensitive merchandise using a cool little mini mall from Chitika. Click the link under the mall if you are interested in putting a mini-mall on your site. Send the link to a friend if you think they would be interested.
WannaGet is the collecting game for a collection of collectors ;-). And it is designed specifically for content creators – like site owners and Bloggers – to offer their viewers something fun.
You can collect items in a number of topics (like Harry Potter, Narnia, James Bond) and as more providers create sites, there will be more items to collect. You get points for collecting – click to read the rules and play!
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Group Games is a new concept that in a sense hacks the facebook groups to create games where the leaders are those with the most group members or pictures or wall posts of a certain type, etc. Here is a link to the 
Dan Zen 