Winners Announced

In a Dorkbot event tonight (actually it’s past midnight, so… to be precise, yesterday evening) we have announced the winners of the Turbulence supported ShiftSpace commission program, here they are:

In The Space category the winners are:

1Place - Yeas & Nays: A ShiftSpace widget for calling representatives by Christian Croft ($2000)

A ShiftSpace that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier.This space combines ShiftSpace’s power to layer commentary above existing contexts with advances in VoIP telephony to build a tool for informed civic action. It layers the citizen’s act of calling an official on top of online information substantiating her argument.The proposed space enables a phone call with a representative from a webpage that politically concerns you. Type shift + space, enter a location, and Yeas & Nays fetches your matching representatives. Next, enter your phone number, and the system initiates a call that bridges your phone to that of the representative’s office. After the call, the widget updates to include a recording of your call whose URL you can send as proof of your civic action to all your friends.

The § team granting Christian Croft the geeky first place trophy - A Matrix Babushka

2 Place - Fisheye by Geoff Matters ($500)

Fisheye is a narrowly targeted application, using the ShiftSpace platform to implement a Web Annotation project specifically designed for criticism of online media. The primary feature is embedding categorized links to various existing media criticisms directly into the work being criticized. This yields a much more efficient model of media criticism, because rather than media consumers having to seek out criticism of each article they read, the criticism comes to them in the context of the original articles on, eg, nytimes.com. Metadata, including tags, ratings, categories, and channels, allow each user to customize what they see to match their interests and keep the signal/noise ratio optimal.Rather than extending ShiftSpace’s general abilities by enabling a new type of media or page hack, Fisheye is employing the ShiftSpace platform for a specific, narrow, but very important purpose: democratizing and improving quality of online media.

3 Place - LilySpace by Bill Orcutt ($500)

I propose to implement Lily, my Firefox based visual programming environment, as a space for the ShiftSpace platform. Currently, Lily allows users to save applications as Firefox addons or as XulRunner apps. This project would enable a third option: “Save as LilySpace.” LilySpace would enable users to graphically create meta web applications that add a layer of commentary, interaction, data visualization, graphics & sound over a web page - all without writing a line of code. The application would then be shared with other users via LilySpace and the Shiftspace platform.

4 Place - Cutups by Joseph Moore ($500)

Cutups is a space that allows users to explore the recombination of existent text on a webpage so that new meanings and uses may be discovered and articulated.

Simple Scenario:

A user navigates to a given web page and invokes the Shifspace console and the Cutups space. The Cutups space allows the user to select from a variety of manipulations. Currently, those are to perform a random sort, to alphabetize, or to reverse alphabetize. The user checks what manipulation it is they want to perform using radio buttons and then turns the space on using a checkbox. The user may then select a block of text with the cursor and when the mouse button is released the given manipulation will be performed on the text string.A longer description on the application page is available.

5 Place - TheirView by Paul Chilton ($500)

TheirView is about how other users see a website.

ShiftSpace has a lot of social networking features as well as deep integration into the users browsing experience.

There is an opportunity for a two-way integration between the two applications, so that TheirView can show ShiftSpace data, and ShiftSpace have TheirView functionality integrated into the experience.

For any URL ShiftSpace would have additional information available to it, and TheirView may have additional social networking data supplied.

See application page for a Wink capture of using shiftspace.org through theirview.org, and possible integration points between the two systems.

In the Trails Category the winners are:

1 Place - Greenwashing Trail of Tears by Transnational Temps (Deck) ($600) View trail

This trail pulls together a variety of websites that address or exemplify ‘greenwashing’: the use of misleading PR and advertising to cleanse a corporation’s image with respect to its environmental impact. In recent years, and especially after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the public perception of global warming has changed. But the tremendous increase of feel-good PR on the part of some of the most environmentally abusive corporations on earth leads us to wonder who will hold greenwashers accountable for their deceptions. Shift Space’s annotation system is a good way to introduce the kind of reading between the lines that is needed in today’s environmental marketing environment.

2 Place - CIAO/CU by An Mertens ($100) View trail

The trail belongs with a novel in print which will have the same title, and is written in Dutch. I wanted to give this story back to as many people as helped create it. That is why I have decided to tell the story in ENG on the web.I chose for ShSp because I believe it can suit netnative collaborative writing. I really hope ShSp will somehow develop in that direction. Some hints:

*have the possibility to make corrections within a shift
*have the possibility to interact: post comments on shifted pages and/or create derived trails that allow different developments of the story
*view the trail permanently while browsing

3rd Place - ©opy/w®ite by Piper Wynn Severance ($100) View trail

©opy/w®ite is an interdisciplinary exhibition in the form of scales. The base of these scales is Visual Literacy, an integral component in what defines us as human.

The column is the Speed of Information, from the oral tradition through the digital revolution, and the profound impact information (and access to it) has had. The two weights are ©opy (copyright) and w®ite (graffiti). The bar they act upon is Fair(use) and Balanced?

On this bar ideas about visual information are played upon: Fair Use, Iconoclasm, Propaganda, Censorship, Political Identity, Monopoly, Enlightenment. ShiftSpace can create this thought map.

ThoughtAndMemory.org by Clay Ward ($100)

ThoughtAndMemory.org is an open-source non-profit service that helps people research, rate, and access convenient point-of-sale information about the socially responsible practices of products that they are considering buying. We are currently researching the chocolate industry’s performance on various interests (like energy efficiency, humans rights, and transparency.)

We propose to use Shift Space to leave clues on the websites of the companies and research resources that we’re looking at.This treasure hunt will be a fun introduction to Shift Space. The reviews that people write on ThoughtAndMemory.org should be sourced from outside websites. Shift notes could help our users leave tips for each other on particular websites to aid in easier research. In this way, user collaboration would extend outside the normal boundary of our web community, enabling a more distributed and perhaps effective research paradigm.This grant will allow us to do this. Thanks!

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