Mushon - Outfoxed

ShiftSpace Commissions 10 grants of up to $2000, deadline: Feb 25th

[ — Please circulate widely between your friends, peers, students, blogs and lists — ]

November 5, 2007
Turbulence Commission: “The ShiftSpace Commissions Program” by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv
http://turbulence.org/works/shiftspace

Turbulence has commissioned ShiftSpace and now ShiftSpace commissions you.

Ten development grants of up to $2,000 will be awarded to individuals and collectives using ShiftSpace as a platform to create new Spaces (interfaces above websites) and Trails (cross-web information maps).

About ShiftSpace (http://ShiftSpace.org):
While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment — but who controls the terms of this new read/write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional
interpretations, contextualizations and interventions — which are called “Shifts”. Users can choose between several authoring tools — called Spaces — that allow web users to annotate, modify and shift the content of a page and through ShiftSpace, share that shift with the rest of the web. Trails are maps of shifts (shiftspace content) that create meta-layer navigation across websites. These trails might be used as a platform for collaborative research, for curating net art exhibitions, or as a way to
facilitate a context-based public debate.

Go to the commissions site (http://turbulence.org/works/shiftspace), watch the introductory video, apply for a grant and help us spread the word.

“The ShiftSpace Commissions Program” is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.”

If you are students of mine in my Parsons class, please refer to our new class blog

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Part III:

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Just finished the design for the new Highlights space which I will develop with two of our Open-Source community members, Avital Oliver and Dudu Buchbut.

User Scenario:

• The user launches the space through the shift-menu
• The Highlights tool-bar opens allowing the user to:
  • highlight by drag+drop on text (the cursor changes to this icon)
  • repeat the highlight action (save more than one sequence as one shift)
  • change the color of the highlight between 6 options
  • change the name of the shift (the default would be generated from the first highlighted text)
• Save + Cancel + Close functions
• The bar also provides two browsing buttons that would allow the user to scroll the page to the next or previous highlight.

Comments and feedbacks would be more than welcomed.

Trails is the upcoming main addition to ShiftSpace it is an an interface for mapping information in the world of ShiftSpace. the idea is that shift (ShiftSpace annotations/interventions/user-generated-content) left on different pages will be trailed together into information maps.

We have been drafting tons of mockups, trying to figure out how should it work, what would be compelling to use? What would be a way to sculpt Trails in a way that would facilitate the potential we see in it? What would be feasible to execute? What would be flexible enough to iterate on as we develop? and so on…