Hi §ers, you have probably noticed § and FF3 are not very good friends yet. This is due to a change in FF3 that changes a certain function in GreaseMonkey that breaks things in §. Bottom line, if neither FF3 or GM changes this (and it doesn’t seem like they intend to very soon) we will have to make some dramatic decisions concerning our architecture and the way we work through the GreaseMonkey extension. Making ShiftSpace it’s own stand alone extension is not out of the question. There are pros and cons for taking this step and we have refrained from doing that up to this stage. Over the next week we will better evaluate the situation and hopefully come up with the best solution very soon. If you want to jump in and help take a look at the relevant ticket in our Trac system and have your say in the comments there or on our developer list.
Anyway, don’t worry everyone, we know you guys are early adopters (you adopted § really early) and are probably excited about the new (awesome!) Firefox. So our we, we will make sure you will have § on it, better than ever. Stay tuned.
As mentioned, we would give a § presentation and announce the winners of our commission program at Dorkbot NYC on Wednesday, April 2nd @ Location One - 26 Greene Street (Soho, between Canal and Grand). There are more details on the Dorkbot site, and there’s also a Facebook event for those of you who are into that. 
We hope to see you there.
The commissions program has reached it’s deadline and our jury members are now busy going through the applications and picking their favorite ones. We will be announcing the winners in a § presentation we will be giving at the Dorkbot NYC event on April 2nd. Come meet us there.
We are glad to announce we will be launching the ShiftSpace API and the ShiftSpace commission program this Saturday, November 3rd at the Offf festival in Tribeca Performing Arts Center. We will be giving a talk at 10:00am and would love to see you there. The commission program in collaboration with Turbulence.org (more details will follow soon) will invite you to develop your own spaces (apps and interfaces above any website) and trails (information maps) and win grants to support your work based on the platform. See you at Offf.
We’re in Montreal, where we’ll be presenting ShiftSpace on Friday Oct 19th, and giving a workshop on Saturday the 20th. (more details) HTMLles is a ‘Media Art and Networked Practices’ festival with a Feminist agenda, and we’re the only boy-band in the program (haha).
We would love to see you at the presentation and even more in the workshop which will be using ShiftSpace release 0.10 - featuring Trails (!) (which is still waiting for its own screencast for us to actually “officially” announce its release, though many of you already noticed and updated by now).
See you soon in Montreal!
cheers,
Dan & Mushon
This is kind of last minute, but I’m going to be speaking tomorrow (Saturday) at OneWebDay New York. OneWebDay is kind of like Earth Day for the Internet. I’ll be giving the first in a series of presentations at ITP (721 Broadway, 4th floor). The talks go from 12pm until 2:30 or so, and then there’s a festival happening at Washginton Square Park. Hope to see you there!
Also, here is my slide deck, in Keynote 2008 and QuickTime formats.
Conflux is a psychogeography festival based in Brooklyn. Last year we presented ShiftSpace in the 2006 festival. This year we’re actually making a case for online psychogeography by offering a § workshop based on our new release candidate for § 0.10 featuring Trails (!). That shift mapping feature we’ve been talking about in presentation for a long time is almost ready for release… Come check us out on Sunday from 11am-12:30pm at:
Luna Lounge
361 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718.384.7112
http://lunalounge.com
The workshop will attempt to lay out how information architecture manipulates our perception of reality and to question that through an online derive - drift through information, challenged through shifts and mapped through trails. we will go from paper-mode to online-mode and just enjoy a new critical approach to browsing the web. And in the spirit of Conflux hopefully have it reflect back on the way we’re browsing the city.
Make sure to check out the fascinating Conflux schedule, it’s going to be an amazing festival and it seems to just get better every year. See you all there.
In July Dan and I visited Israel on some vacation/personal business. But obviously we couldn’t not do some ShiftSpace related business while there, and indeed we gave a presentation as a part of the Upgrade Tel Aviv new media gathering series. We were joined in the presentation by Danah Boyd, who was also visiting friends in Israel. Danah discussed her concepts of the public/private nature of social networking sites and we presented ShiftSpace in that context. The talk spawned two articles in Hebrew, you are welcomed to read the one in The Marker titled: “פיתוח ישראלי-אמריקאי: כך תבנה אתר כבקשתך” and the one in Nana titled: “האינטרנט: עשו זאת בעצמכם“. We want to welcome the new wave of Israeli users that followed these two publications, stay tuned… the coming months are about to be very exciting…
In the beginning on May both of us (Dan & Mushon) presented our thesis (ShiftSpace) as two (different) presentations in NYU’s ITP thesis week. They went pretty well and they each cover the whole project and focus on different aspects of it. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Ok, now back to work… graduation is just a small symbolic step in the ongoing process of our work, and there are a lot of things going on right now (like the long awaited 0.09). In the meantime, interesting discussions are taking place in our discussion list, you might want to check it out and maybe join in…
Live streamed ShiftSpace Presentations - Monday Apr 30th at 7pm & Thursday May 3rd at 3:20pm.
As some of you know, ShiftSpace started as a thesis in NYU’s new-media masters program, ITP. This week this stage in the project’s history is ending. Tonight - Monday Apr 30th at 7pm Mushon will be giving his presentation and on Thursday May 3rd at 2:40pm Dan would go. Follow the streaming on the ITP thesis site (other stuff there will be totally interesting too). We will later publish links to the archived presentations.
Thanks for all your support.
(Next week business as usual… the new release is almost there)
