When content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and Blogger hit the Web several years ago, the Internet entered a new age where it became quick and easy for anyone with a computer to contribute content. This week, augmented reality (AR) took a significant step toward becoming more like the read/write Web with the launch of an online mobile AR CMS for creating content on the Layar platform.

“Augmentation” – a Web-based tool for generating mobile AR content – was created by Layar Partner Network member Hoppala. With a Layar developer account, users of Augmentation can easily and instantaneously place their content in Layar with zero code and a few clicks on a map. Custom icons, images, audio, video and 3D content can all be added by way of a full screen map interface, and Hoppala will even host all of the data.

ReadWriteWeb: Augmented Reality Becoming More Like the Read/Write Web

Previously: Create your own augmented reality maps – Layar tutorial – but this looks even easier.

Joseph Matheny is the co-founder and CTO of Hukilau, host of the GSpot podcast, publisher of Alterati, co-creator of Incunabula (one of the first Alternate Reality Games), and about a million other things. He recently published in conjunction with Original Falcon Robert Anton Wilson: The Lost Studio Session. Having been interviewed by Joe three times now, I thought it was time to turn the tables on him and find out what he’s up to at Hukilau. Read on to find out how you can get an early look at Hukilau.(Update: The private betas are all gone now)

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Multi-instrumentalist Joshua Ellis, who records under the name Red State Soundsystem, has just self-released his debut album Ghosts a Burning City. Ellis – whose music sounds like a cross between Paul Simon and Nine Inch Nails – recorded, mixed, and mastered the album himself. I caught up with him via instant messenger to talk about his music and DIY music production.

Klint Finley: Can you explain the name “Red State Soundsystem”?

Joshua Ellis: It started from a lame joke. When the band Cansei de Ser Sexy came out, I noticed everybody abbreviated their name to CSS. Being a Web nerd, I giggled.

I used to release stuff under my own name, but I dug the idea of having a sort of secret identity. Plus I wanted to maybe collaborate with various other people. So I wanted a band name. I started thinking about Web acronyms — HTML, PHP…RSS. What would be a cool name that could be abbreviated as RSS?

And it came to me. It just sounded cool and vaguely political and funny. Then I came up with my logo — the old red pickup truck in a field with bigass soundsystem speakers in the bed. And it just seemed perfect.
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“Dangerousmeme is a subversive art project with a coterie of followers on the fringe.”

We are naturally drawn to hyperbole. I take furtive pleasure assuming the role of Cassandra or a ‘ Henny Penny‘. I ask people to question the source of their beliefs. We live in a soundbite-sized world where complex ideas are distilled as reductio ad absurdum. While my overarching themes tend to be dramatic, I also see humor in the outrageous, ominous ideas in our midst. I hope my followers they can muster a smile in the face of this dire information, have a better understanding of when it matters, and formulate their own informed opinions about the true nature of things.

I find irony in the number of people who follow me because they quickly read my tweets and accept them as truth, at face value. This is the tiny conceit in my concept. The net is wide, much greater than it would naturally be if I simply tweeted my own personal beliefs. However, by catching these ideological sleepers and gradually exposing them to a breadth of ideas, I hope I am ultimately not only preaching to the converted.

Globatron: Interview with @dangerousmeme

This sounds a lot like my philosophical approach to Technoccult for a long period of its existence. For various reasons, this has become more and more untenable and I’ve started to editorialized more and more.

Mustard interviews Alan Moore about his new magazine Dodgem Logic and he reveals that he is doing the libretto for their next opera and they will hopefully be contributing a few pages to the magazine:

Then the issue after that we’ve hopefully got Gorillaz onboard. They came down to Northampton last week because we’re planning for me to do the libretto on their next opera project. Being an opportunist, I of course asked them if they’d be prepared to contribute some pages to Dodgem Logic. Rather than just doing an interview with them, I thought it would be interesting to hand over a few pages for them to curate.

Mustard: Alan Moore talks Dodgem Logic

(via 24 Bit via Joe Matheny)

Update: Moore now says this has been overblown.

I caught some of David Simon’s testimony to the Senate on the radio the other day. It was like nails on a chalk board for me – listening to the same dead wrong arguments over and over again.

Ryan Tate says some of the things I wanted to shout through the radio:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

Gawker: David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur

Memo to newspaper journalists: “online news” doesn’t begin and end with Matt Drudge, and newspaper subscription never paid your salary.

The Arizona Guardian and Heat City are two examples of web-only news sites started by recently unemployed journalists.

The Arizona Guardian is run by four Phoenix-based journalists who were recently laid off from the East Valley Tribune. The Guardian covers legislative issues and other aspects of the state capitol.

Heat City is run by Nick Martin, another journalist laid off by the Tribune. The website covers criminal justice and media issues, but the centerpiece of its coverage is the trial of accused serial killer Dale Hausner.

Full Story: Media Shift

(via Ethan Z)

Wikipedia is offering a new service allowing users to select articles from Wikipedia and have them printed as a book:

Step 1 – Creating the book from a collection of articles

The book collection menu, entitled “Create a book”, can be seen on the left hand side of the browser screen towards the bottom. It contains two links by default: “Add wiki page” and “Books help”. (See Fig 1).

By clicking on the “Add wiki page” link, the page currently being viewed is added to the collection. To add more pages you must navigate to the next desired page and click the “Add wiki page” link again. You can also add all pages in a category with one click. The number of pages in the book is shown in the menu on the left and is updated automatically.

If required, specific revisions (versions) of pages from their histories, can be specified in your book. See the experts page for details.

Step 2 – The book title

Once all the desired pages have been added, click the “Show book” button to review your book. Furthermore it is possible to add a book title and change the ordering of the wiki pages of the book (see details of how to do this in the Advanced functionality section).

Step 3 – Download or order a printed copy of your book

The finished book can be downloaded or ordered as a bound book. You can download the book, in PDF and OpenDocument format (viewable using OpenOffice.org software), by clicking the “Download” button (see Fig 3). To order the book as a bound book click the “Order book from PediaPress” button. Further information about printed books can be found in the FAQ.

More Info: Wikipedia

Wikipedia Books FAQ

(via Robot Wisdom)

This is one of the business models I suggested for newspapers.

Presenting Intermittens. Intermittens is a periodical journal of Discordian diarrhea – an incontinent splattering of juicy ideas and corny jokes. Originally produced by the irreverant spags of the Peedy cabal, Intermittens is an expanding attempt to document some of the antics going on today in the Discordian Society. Every issue has a different editor. All content (unless otherwise marked) is from / for the public domain.

This project is an attempt to create an open-source Discordian magazine. We encourage anyone, even you, to haphazardly throw together an issue of what you think is cool. The project itself is a Golden Apple Seed Mission, or GASM, meaning we want your help! We need people who have writing, graphic, and layout skillz. We also need people with the balls to edit their own issue of Intermittens and join the elite Editor Cabal. Do you have what it takes? No, you don’t; none of us do. That’s why we’re making DIY magazines and not professional ones. And that’s why we need more cooks to foul the broth.

Intermittens is being published on a (roughly) monthly schedule. If you’re interested in helping out, check in at principiadiscordia.com/forum and martyr yourself for the cause. In any case, we hope you dig it. And by all means, share. Send the PDFs on to people you know, people you love, people you hate, hamsters, and other creatures.

My friend Telarus, KSC designed the first issue. Seems like a fun project.

Intermittens: a Journal of Discordian Bullshit

‘Project Bluebird: Fucking with Reality’, is a quarterly-release periodical commencing production in 2009. Project Bluebird concentrates primarily on the topics of Reality Hacking, Bio-Psionics, Neo-tantra and Modern Mysticism. Each issue of Project Bluebird features a full-color cover, with internal black and white artwork and text.

Submissions of Writing and Art are now being accepted for the first issue of Project Bluebird. Please submit all content using the Submissions Form. For more information about Project Bluebird, please contact us. Writing should be articles, narrative, poetic, or blends thereof. Other content may be accepted depending on the quality and type of submission.

Editorial Staff: Kara Rae Garland, Lillian Grace, Samm Hain, and Edward E. Wilson.

Availability: Coming 2009.
Pricing: TBA.

Project Bluebird

“At one time or another Sue Lange has been one of the following (pretty much in this order): child, student, potato picker, first chair flautist, librarian, last chair flautist, babysitter, newspaper deliverer, apple picker, form cutter, drama club treasurer, track and field timer, Ponderosa Steak House salad server (before the salad bar days, of course), disco dance instructor, waitress, wire harness assembler, usher, Baskin-Robbins ice cream dipper, volleyball team captain, biology club treasurer, circuit board checker, form reader, day camp counselor, tutor, stock room attendant, nurse aide, chemistry technician, senior chemistry technician, right fielder, Plant Laboratory Supervisor–non-radiological, house sitter, first base, receptionist, stage manager, data input technician, actor, bookkeeper, vocalist, typesetter, songwriter, recording artist, home builder, viticulturist, Digital Production Manager, orchardist, and Applescripter. Lately she’s been writing.”

TiamatsVision- For those unfamiliar with your work, tell us a bit about yourself.

Sue Lange- Well I started out as a child, and then I grew up. After that terrifying experience I moved to New York City and discovered who I really was. Turns out I was musician so I started a band. Crabby Lady was the last incarnation. I stripped the music from my lyrics and published my story as science fiction (“Tritcheon Hash”). That went over like a lead balloon so I tried again (“We, Robots”). Blowing my modicum of success with the second book all of out of proportion gave me the nerve to try it once more, hence my third book, “The Textile Planet”.

TiamatsVision- How did the idea for Book View Café come about and what was involved in putting the site together?

Sue Lange- A number of people on the SF-FFW Yahoo group (women writers of speculative fiction) started yakking about offering fiction for free online to create some buzz for our work. We read stuff like Cory Doctorow’s manifesto on the subject and got inspired. Never one for talk without action, Sarah Zettel grew tired of our ranting and said, “Let’s do it.” A bunch of us got eager and jumped on the band wagon, and voila, BVC is born.

TiamatsVision- What do you see happening with Book View Café in the future?

Sue Lange- I think we’re going to become a publisher. We’re going to have a model in place for publishing Internet fiction and making money at it. We’ll know how to make it, serve it, promote it, and sell it. We’ll have a handful of formidable partners that will be able to distribute our product in the myriad formats out there. We’ll have content in Internet formats, ebooks, print books, and podcasts. Wherever there is content, we will be there.

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“Over the weekend I attended The Future of Entertainment 3, a conference organized by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department. The two day event featured back to back roundtables focusing on issues related to social media, audience participation, and “spreadable media,” a term CMS director Henry Jenkins coined as a more appropriate way to describe content than “viral.” (Viral connotes an inexplicable element the “infected” have no control over. It suggests you can “design the perfect virus and give it to the right first carriers.”)

From a post on Jenkins’ blog last year:

Our core argument is that we are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values. In a world of spreadable media, we are going to see more and more media producers openly embrace fan practices, encouraging us to take media in our own hands, and do our part to insure the long term viability of media we like.

Indeed, our new mantra is that if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”

(via The Tomorrow Museum)

I just did a guest post over at Justin Boland’s Pizza SEO:

I’ve been blogging since the dark ages of 1999. My oldest and most popular blog is Technoccult, which I’ve been doing since 2001. My most important tips are non-technical and platform independent, and I’m presenting them first. The second part of this article covers WordPress tweaks and plugins, which is what Justin actually asked me to write about.

If you don’t read any of the hints, just keep this in mind: Do everything you can to make reading your blog easy, and avoid annoying your readers. Write a good blog, retain your readership, and it will grow. Your readers will e-mail and IM your URL. They will link to you on their blogs. They will link to you on social media services. That’s how you build traffic. Search engines are always making changes in how they rank stuff, so question SEO wizardry and focus on reader experience.

Full Story: Pizza SEO

Update: I’ve started a Portland SEO consulting practice.

There was one seriously humiliating moment that made me decide to start a magazine. The story goes like this: when I was 21, I landed the covers of both Gothic Beauty and the 50th-anniversary issue of Skin Two, which made me think that I was a hot shit photographer (I was not). High on the feeling of appearing in print, I set my sights on what I considered the next level: the fashion glossies. I called up their Manhattan offices leaving hopeful voicemails, never to hear back from a single one. But by some strange twist of fate, when I called up Flaunt, one of their founders, Long Nguyen, picked up the phone. He introduced himself and told me that he was stuck in the office working late on a deadline, and very agitated as a result. Naively, I began to tell him my story of being a young photographer dreaming of a shot to submit my work to their amazing magazine. Well, he totally shot me down. “Listen,”  he said, “do you know how many people call us every day and try to get published? Dozens. Hundreds. You think you’re something special? You’re not. Do you know how much crap we’re forced to look at every day? You can’t even imagine.”  We stayed on the phone for awhile, and he belittled every attempt I made to get them to even look at my work. Anxious to get off the phone with me, he cut off my pleas with a request for my phone number. “OK,”  I said, “it’s 2-1-5…” Before I could finish, he cut me off again, crying out exasperatedly: “OH my GOD, you’re not even in New York?!”  He pretended to take down the rest of my number and hung up, leaving me deflated and humiliated. My dreams of being a part of a really cool magazine were crushed. That’s when I realized how much I loved magazines. I’d show him. I’d show all of them! In hindsight, the whole thing’s really funny. I still love Flaunt.

Full Story: iCiNG

This article was original written for Key 64‘s Guns, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets PDF zine. I have no idea when the zine will see the light of day, so I’m running this here now.

If you have a fixed idea of what a “typical gun owner” looks like, the coffee table book Armed America may surprise you. If your main exposure to “gun culture” is the mainstream media, or magazines like the American Rifleman or Guns and Ammo, you could be forgiven for thinking all gun owners are rural, middle aged white men who dress in cammo and are desperately worried about protecting the families from gun toting “urban youth.” Armed America, a collection of photographs of gun owners by Kyle Cassidy, includes Montana survivalists and young urban black men, but also tattooed punk rockers, single moms, and American families who couldn’t look any more normal without being creepy.

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Kevin Kelly follows up his comments in the Plenty Magazine oral history of the Whole Earth Catalog:

As I read the dense, long reviews and letters explaining the merits of this or that tool, it all seemed comfortably familiar. Then I realized why. These missives in the Catalog were blog postings. Except rather than being published individually on home pages, they were handwritten and mailed into the merry band of Whole Earth editors who would typeset them with almost no editing (just the binary editing of print or not-print) and quickly “post” them on cheap newsprint to the millions of readers who tuned in to the Catalog’s publishing stream. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. The opportunity of the catalog’s 400 pages of how-to-do it information attracted not only millions of readers but thousands of Makers of the world, the proto-alpha geeks, the true fans, the nerds, the DIYers, the avid know-it-alls, and the tens of thousands wannabe bloggers who had no where else to inform the world of their passions and knowledge. So they wrote Whole Earth in that intense conversational style, looking the reader right in the eye and holding nothing back: “Here’s the straight dope, kid.” New York was not publishing this stuff. The Catalog editors (like myself) would sort through this surplus of enthusiasm, try to index it, and make it useful without the benefit of hyperlinks or tags. Using analog personal publishing technology as close to the instant power of InDesign and html as one could get in the 1970s and 80s (IBM Selectric, Polaroids, Lettraset) we slapped the postings down on the wide screens of newsprint, and hit the publish button.

Full Story: Kevin Kelly

While on that flight, Brand came up with a solution: to publish a magazine in the vein of the LL Bean catalog-which he’d always admired for its immense practicality-that would blend liberal social values with emerging ideas about ‘appropriate technology’ and ‘whole-systems thinking.’ He decided to run NASA’s photograph of the planet on the cover and to call the publication the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC). The first WEC, published in July 1968, was a six-page mimeograph that began with Brand’s now-legendary statement of purpose: ‘We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.’

The WEC lasted four years (along with some special editions since). During that time, the magazine published a flood of articles about species preservation, organic farming, and alternative energy-but it was also a resource for ‘tools’ as wide ranging as Buddhist economics, nanotechnology, and a manure-powered generator. Comprehensive in this way, the WEC was a catalyst, helping transform a set of disparate individualists into a potent community. As Lloyd Kahn, the catalog’s shelter editor, says, ‘The beatniks had a negative, existential vibe. They weren’t into sharing. But the hippies came along and wanted to share everything. Whatever they discovered, they just wanted to broadcast. The WEC was the very best example of this.’

It is now 40 years later and the WEC’s avalanche of influence continues to flow. Cyberculture, the blogosphere, companies like Apple and Patagonia, websites like Craigslist and worldchanging.org, sustainable building, ethical business practices, and the gamut of alternative-energy industries were all shaped by its pages. Its ecological legacy spans everything from new cattle-grazing techniques to major environ?mental legislation. What follows is an oral history, compiled from 30 hours of interviews, that takes a look at the Whole Earth Effect-the long-lasting impact of this short-lived journal, as told by the people directly in its path.

Full Story: Plenty

The Whole Earth Catalog was well before my time, but obviously Technoccult owes a big debt to it.

See also: Wired’s history of the Whole Earth ‘lectrnic Link.

The new issue of Trevor Blake’s OVO Magazine has many names familiar to Technoccult readers and/or Esozone attendees (and some not so familiar): Anonymous, Dmitry Babenko, Johnny Brainwash, Klint Finley, Witta Kelssling-Jensen, Vincent Al Ken, Ruggero Maggi, Mail Art Paul, Willi Melnikov, Thom Metzger, Emilio Morandi, No Institute, Wes Unruh, Carlos Valdez and Edward Wilson.

Download OVO 18: Money for no money.

In my article I explore the politics of alternative currencies, which is sadly more relevant now than I realized when I wrote it in October.

For those not in the know, OVO has been published by Trevor Blake since 1987. Trevor says of his work:

When I started publishing OVO I was just a self-important hayseed living in a small town making a dumb little zine among thousands of others. But OVO did accomplish a few things in the first fourteen issues. OVO was the first to publish several essays by Hakim Bey that later appeared in his book T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. OVO published work by Mike Diana long before his work drew the attention of State and Federal employees. Photographs of body piercing appeared in OVO two years before the Modern Primitives issue of Re/Search. The phrase ‘phone tag’ appears in print for the first time in the first issue of OVO. ‘Liberating Wednesday’ by PM, author of bolo’bolo, appears in OVO for the first (and only) time; this is nearly a decade before and fifty-two times more radical a suggestion than ‘Buy Nothing Day.’ Crop circles and the Men in Black are referenced at a time when they were still obscure. The first appearance of Ride Theory in print occurs in Ignatz Topolino’s contribution to OVO. And OVO was aware enough of the outer edges of scientific ethics to mention gene patents in the same year they first were granted.

I am honored to be a contributor to such a worthy publication.

The tone of this article is annoying (tin foil hat jokes? how original), but I liked reading what the editors had to say:

Hidell and D’Arc represent different wings of the conspiracy theories movement. “She’s more into the speculative paranormal end of things,” he said. “I’m more of a meat-and-potatoes politics, international relations and secret societies kind of guy.”

Together, they attempt to publish a “provocative, unpredictable mix” of conspiracy theories. “We try not to have a house conspiracy style,” he said.

Hidell admitted that he doesn’t believe all the conspiracy theories advanced in the pages of Paranoia. For instance, he’s a little skeptical of Icke’s theory that the queen of England and the Rockefellers are really shape-shifting Satanic reptiles from outer space. But then he adds this about Icke: “For all we know, he’s putting all that in purposely so people think he’s just a nut and he can keep publishing.”

Full Story: Paranoia Magazine.

(via Adam Gorightly).

Jorn Barger, coiner of the term “weblog” and one of my favorite bloggers has a few tips for new bloggers over at Wired News.

Full Story: Wired News.