Born On The Web

• We are the monkeys
  Cool short movie that summarizes our existence here on earth.
  (tags: world monkeys mankind men movie short)

Last week thursday and friday my classmates, including Jesse, presented their final master thesis and final thesis projects. It was a very big day for all of them, marking the end of their four year academic journey at C-MD. During those years everyone has developed their own personal area’s of interest in the wide environment of Communication & Multimedia Design and this reflects in the choice of subjects. They can broadly be placed in four research categories: social media, experience design, interactive story telling & media access.

Yesterday we received the news that all of them have passed. Way to go guys! Enjoy your holliday.

Here’s an overview of all the thesises:

Experience design

Online Decoreren
Ricardo Gonzalez Gallego
Pdf

Artist Branding
Jelle Vanderlee
Pdf
Site: www.ebrandedartist.be

Interactive Music
David Lenaerts
Pdf

Ik ben, ik draag en ik beleef – Mobiele communicatie als Brand Experience tool
Hoi-Yan Leung
thesis download

Social media

Aggregating the web
Jesse Wynants
Pdf

Dialoog stimuleren binnen de meningsvorming (gesitueerd in een context van politieke duidingsprogramma’s)
Lev Detrez
Pdf: download
Url: http://www.dialogeren.be

Interactieve televisie & veranderend kijkgedrag
Johan Van Hove
Pdf
Site: http://www.idtv-platform.be/

Interactive Story Telling

Generative story-telling
David Roose
Word file
Project

The Exquisite Comic!
Jeroen Cornelissen
Pdf
Url: www.exquisitecomic.be
Blog: blog.exquisitecomic.be

Media access

eID Wat is het? Hoe werkt het? Wat zijn de mogelijkheden?
Alexander Goossens
Pdf

Ritmeonderwijs door middel van een lespakket aangevuld met educatieve computertoepassing.
Kan een lespakket en ondersteunende toepassing een meerwaarde bieden aan het muziekonderwijs in de lagere school?
Michaël Liekens & Veerle Paulissen
Thesis pdf
Bijlagen

Electronic Program Guide Usability
Steven Van Tendeloo
thesis download

• d.Construct 2006: Web Application and Web 2.0 Conference
  I would love to go … not sure I can make it.
  (tags: conference web2.0)

• Adobe Labs -NoteTag Demo
  This is a simple flex application, that allow you to share and assign task. Kind of simple productivity tool. The cool thing about is that they are using blogger and del.icio.us service to store the information. Del.icio.us wasn’t made for such tasks but
  (tags: blogger adobe share productivity tagging tools)
• Alex Barnett blog : Feedback on Live Messenger
  Alex Barnett linked me on my post on windows live messenger. He linkes to some other interesting articles to. Check it out.
  (tags: microsoft messenger live)
• I4U News – Sony Patents Car Communication Invention
  Man I wished for this feature in a car many times. But I’m not sure it is a good idea. The roads will be a jungle of disco lights :)
  (tags: feature sony cars communicate car)

This week was a great week. It was extremely busy, I had my thesis presentation on Thursday. I was very happy with the experts that were in the jury. They were a good representation of the web and marketing landscape in Belgium. I don’t think I was nervous, but there was a little pressure to explain everything really clear in my presentation. You can find the presentation online. Like usual I make very minimal slides, just one or two keywords on a slide. So without me chattering, you probably won’t understand what the slides mean.
Friday I got the news I passed for my thesis + project, so this was good news. Tomorrow, Monday, I’ll know my exact grades.

Friday I was in the newspaper “Het Belang van Limburg” because I was nominated for a prize called Wanatoe (article, in Dutch). Wanatoe is a prize organized by the same newspaper and is for graduate students, for their final thesis project. All last year students from the “KHLIM” and “PHL” school could participate. I was a bit surprised I was nominated and very glad the jury saw some potential in my project.

Reading your own interview is kinda strange. I’m not sure the interview was a good representation of the person that I am. I don’t like to be called a web designer, but I understand that this is term everyone knows, so it is logical that a mainstream medium like a newspaper likes to use this term.

Yesterday evening I went to the official awards ceremony of Wanatoe. And completely unexpected I got a prize !? I was already pretty surprised to be nominated and now I have the chance to work further on my project in a very good environment. I’ll get coached for over one year by the people of “Z33″ and “platform vormgeving limburg”. The first prize, so the actual Wanatoe prize, went to Heidi Ector. She made a kind of dance choreography, so something very different from my project. I hope I get the chance to check out what she made. It seems pretty cool. Just like the other nominations.

This all came very unexpected but I’m very glad the jury saw the potential of the new media in my project and acknowledged it. I’m getting pretty excited what the rest of the year will bring.

I saw back a friend I met in Africa Friday. All of a sudden he turn up on our traditional after school year BBQ, very unexpected but extremely nice to see him again. Welcome to Belgium Patson.

Next week will be very different. Wednesday night I leave for Rock Werchter, it will feel good to have a no-computer-week. I’ll prove to you all, I don’t have problems going trough the days without a computer or the internet. At least as long if there is beer, women and rock’n roll. :)

Hello audience,

I’m Frederik, aka frits, a new media pipo from Meise / Hasselt.

Jesse just invited me to be a guest blogger here and off course I take him up for the challenge. We’ve been doing small and bigger projects together for the last four years, in school and just as friends / young entrepreneurs, and it’s always been a a very satisfying experience. We’re both graduating now, moving to different places, doing different things and a blog is a great way to keep up with what we’re both doing. Since I’m also kind of ‘born on the web’ this place is a good haven for me to talk about web related things that have taken my attention and that I want to share. My main interests are closely related to Jesse’s. Yes, I’m also a sucker for web 2.0 apps and the growing social aspect of the web, but what really makes my eyes moist and gives me a big smile are downright beautiful, shiny websites rich of explorative experience.

One of my daily stops is the FWA, the Favourite Website Awards. Everyday the site showcases the best new website on the whole world wide interweb. And every month the FWA jury, formed by the crème de la crème of international web designers, chooses a site of the month. There you can truly find the very best of rich media webdesign.

The archive of The FWA goes back until 2000 and this allows you to see the incredible change cutting edge websites have gone through. One of the most notable changes is the use of full video environments, made possible by the ubiquity of broadband, the Flash plug-in and the rising budgets for online advertising.
Take a minute to remember the text based web of a few years back and then point your browser towards one of the new FWA winners: In-Sync Challenge. They offer a full video 3d interactive experience where you can test your knowledge of safety issues around the house. Complete and utter madness I think. A few years back the company behind this site maybe would have put this info in textual form on a few html pages with some images. Now, people can play around for a very long time and do the tests as if they’re playing a video game, or even as if they’re experiencing it in real life.

It’s wonderful to see how the language of hypermedia is evolving in a much richer language, taking influences from game design, film and environmental design. Admittingly, a site like the In-Sinc Challenge will only be possible to be made for very big players with huge advertising budgets, but since the budgets for online advertising keep on rising, the use of online by consumers is ever growing, ànd the expectations of users keep on getting higher, I’ll believe we’ll see more and more of these kinds of immersive experiences.

That’s it for now about rich media experiences. It’s a bit hard to stop once you’re on a roll :)

Thanks for having me around here Jesse, cu soon!

Well, I’m not a regular blogger. I have periods I post a lot, other weeks almost nothing. During the month July it will probably even less. I’ll be away from 21 to 31 July. So I asked my friend and co-student Frederik, to blog here once in a while. We have roughly the same interests on the web. He’ll probably focus a bit more on design and user interfacing. Correct ?

But the most important part is, Frederik or Frits is ,just like me, “Born on the Web”. A whizkid that worked at Planet Internet in the early days of the world wide web.

I’m very happy he wants to post here until he has his own feed running.

Yahoo! messenger (60 million users worldwide) adds plugins, it gives external developers the chance to create tools that can work with the yahoo messenger. This gives the developers huge opportunities to work with a very large audience.

In Belgium, the most popular messenger is msn messenger (240 million users world wide) or I should say Windows Live Messenger. It would give great opportunities to support marketing campaigns or extend communication functionalities between friends. It can add a nice viral touch to a campaign.

I quickly browsed to the developer documentation of Yahoo messenger and it’s nice to see that you can create plugins using javascript and flash. Yahoo! focusses on the web developers and I think they see a messenger plugin as an extension to a web platform.

So let’s hope microsoft has the same plans for windows live messenger.

Yahoo plugin gallery.

• USATODAY.com – A life without left turns
  Beautiful article about the things we all can learn from our parents.
  (tags: interesting Life philosophy family driving article)

Well I’m a bit embarrassed I didn’t really got a decent “thank you” in my paper. I should have noted my friends explicitly. But the only thing I could think about was getting the damn paper printed.

When browsing to the papers of my friends Johan and Lev I found following lines in the acknowledgments:

• Alle bewoners van Berebroek studentenhome met in het bijzonder de heer Van Hove en
  de heer Wynants.
• Lev en Jesse voor hun vriendschap, optimisme, humor, werklust, spontaniteit en de zotte
  stoten,…

Well they should be thanked properly, so here is the official thank you specially for my friends at C-MD:

Bedankt beste bazekes,

Bedankt!!