Ceci est une pipe.

Monday, February 12th, 2007 | web, web2.0 | 1 Comment

Don’t you love meta-systems? I just learned that the new Yahoo Pipes service lets you mash up almost any kind of internet data to produce an RSS feed. Sounds complicated, but is actually very useful. Using Yahoo Pipes, you can aggregate various information sources, bundle them, filter them, run searches based on search results, and publish them. For example, you could take the first page of the New York Times and generate a collection of Flickr pictures from it: The pictures will represent the top stories. Or you could mash up del.icio.us, digg, reddit and slashdot as one news source. Or you could build a search engine for both Google Video and YouTube. And since all of these options generate an RSS feed, you can always subscribe to it, route it onto a website, or further process it.

With Yahoo Pipes, we’re seeing the first tangible steps towards Web 3.0.

Rethink

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 | web2.0 | 1 Comment

Interactive Fiction

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 | games, home story, web2.0 | 1 Comment

Most of you will be familiar with the concept of “Choose your own adventure” books. In a nutshell, these books were works of interactive fiction, where the reader read a portion of a story, and at the end of the text snippet (usually not longer than a paragraph), was faced with the decision of how the story should continue. For example, he might read: 

#1: You have entered the castle of the evil wizard and are standing in the entrance hall. On the wall, strange paintings seem to stare at you. There is a door and a staircase. What do you want to do?

• Examine the paintings [go to #103]
• Open the door [go to #54]
• Go up the stairs [go to #192]

The numbers at the end of the options depicted the portion of the book where the reader would be prompted to continue the story, similar to page numbers. If you read #103, the painting might stare you into a hypnotic sleep, and you would wake up in a dungeon; #54 would tell you that the door was locked, unless you had the rusty key; going up the stairs to #192 would be a bad idea, since a vampire would catch you there. Typically, such a book contained 250 numbers, which would keep you entertained for two or three hours – more, if they contained tricky puzzles.

Notebooks Full of Numbers

In our teenage years, my good friend and occasional guest blogger Jones and I wrote a plethora of of those games, which took us some hours (for a simple 100-number game) to some months (for epic sagas with 3000 numbers) – usually revolving around a zombie army infesting our home town, or secret agents trying to rid the world of madmen who tried to cover the world with a giant fried egg.

All this happened before the heyday of the internet, so all the stories were written in notebooks. But ever since we had written our first hyperlink tag, we knew that, had we had HTML back then, our stories would have been published online. But that’s not the point.

My point is: I’ve always played with the idea of creating a system that lets the players of these adventures be authors as well. In other words: You play the game until you come to a portion of the story which hasn’t been written – and are then prompted to write the next part of the story yourself. The result would be a collectively written adventure by people who enjoyed the story.

Adventures go Web 2.0

Today, I discovered that this system actually exists: Choose Your Own Adventure is a wiki which lets you continue other people’s stories, or start your own. From what I’ve seen, there are not too many stories online yet (and the longest one bears the unfortunate title “Smutty Sex Romp”), but the system looks very promising.

Driven by a strong nostalgic wave, I’m seriously considering starting my own adventure there. If you’re quicker than me, please leave a comment!

[check out the site]