This year we join the Eyebeam fellows in offering a hands-on ShiftSpace workshop as a part of the program.
What Can you expect to learn if I participate?

• What is ShiftSpace? What is the Metaweb? Why bother? [a short presentation]
• How to develop your own User Generated Interface in 50 minutes? [the hands on workshop part]
• What are people doing with ShiftSpace? [a show&tell with artist Joe Moore, author of the Cutups space, winner of the ShiftSpace commission program]
• Where is it going? [an open QA and discussion going through the whole thing]

Bring.Your.Own.Laptop
Basic web skills are good to have (and a basic curiosity and willingness to get your hands dirty in code). If you have a preferred text editor installed along with a local development system, that can’t be bad. We encourage you to preinstall the ShiftSpace development environment, you can do that here.
The workshop will take place on Tuesday July 8th, 2008, from 6pm (arrive earlier) at Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St., NYC.

Please pre-register at: bookstore AT eyebeam DOT org. Participation is limited.

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.

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!

We hope to see you there.

we have decided to give you guys (and ourselves) two extra weeks until the commissions program deadline.

The New Deadline: March 10th

We hope this gets the last submitters to conclude their application to their (and hopefully also the jury’s) satisfaction.
Anyway, if you’re ready with your application, do not hesitate to send it.

looking forward to your submissions,

the § team

We are working hard to get §0.11 ready, it takes a long time to finish but in the meanwhile some updates about the commissions program:

Trails

We hear you. Trails is still slightly buggy and hard to work with at the moment, and hence have not attracted tons of uses yet. We were hoping to stabilize it earlier but unfortunately we are overwhelmed with work on §0.11.

We have decided to allow you some more time to work on your trails so for the upcoming deadline you will not be required to present your final trail but only a draft showing where you want to take it and a description of your trail proposal. You will then be able to further develop your trail and have us here to help you. We prefer your final trails to use the §0.11 architecture as it would be much more stable and would probably make for better works. If you are comfortable with trails as it is, you are welcomed to post your complete trail with your application, but what we’re saying is that you don’t have to.

Spaces

The space commission program has been going well and we are pretty happy with the developer API we have going. Yet it is not yet as developed as we would like it to be (it is in fact the work we’re focusing on for 0.11). The latest release of Greasemonkey has thrown us back a bit too as the way we were debugging spaces has been deprecated as it introduced a security hole. We are working on creating a Javascript based sandbox now, so we are in sync with the latest GM release (for now if you develop using the GM Version 0.7.20070607.0 as long as you test your code on your own sites, you have nothing to worry about).

The main issue is: we are two weeks away from getting a developer release of 0.11 out, and we want you guys to try it before the deadline. Are there §ers out there who could use an extension of the commissions program deadline? Do you guys need another two weeks maybe so you can get more sense for the API and try the developers release?

Sign up to our discussion list and let us know if you guys need some more time!

§ is presented in the Transmediale festival in Berlin, but we could not make it there in person. We hope our friends there are enjoying their time and we’re happy to invite the Transmediale audience to try ShiftSpace in the festival and and stay with us as users. More news soon…

* In the picture: Ela from the Public Art Lab with the ShiftSpace display at Transmediale

We will continue on porting the rest of the spaces and features over onto the new 0.11 architecture and then launch a new official release, keeping the active release up to date with where the platform is going in general.

Much respect to David and Dan who have been practically committing code to the repository non-stop every two hours for the past three weeks.
enjoy,

The ShiftSpace Team.

or watch the video: