Link herbarium

I shouldn’t really be doing this, currently being on vacation and all, but I simply have to put down some links and decompose the Hemavan conference a bit. I'll keep it light though. There was a debate regarding the exact phrasing of the Finnish sentence, that once won a European contest for being the most pleasant sounding sentence. After a bit of googling, I'm naturally a lot wiser. It appears to be Aja hiljaa sillalla (which means "drive carefully/slowly on the bridge" and is taken from a road sign), an option that wasn’t even mentioned by us Finns :) I really like the sound of it, but this one is a lot better:

-Kokko, kokoo kokoon koko kokko!
(Kokko (surname) build up the bonfire!)
-Koko kokko?
(The whole bonfire?)
-Koko kokko!
(Yes the whole bonfire!)

There's no denying, Finnish is a great language!

Monique de Haas has a blog on cross media communication and she recently blogged an interesting project that awakes the gamer in me. Anyone can sign up for co-creating a game from scratch and once it’s a huge success, you can look forward to loads of royalty revenue. I’m kinda curious on the work methods though, as there’s a risk that the game will be a mosaic of the contributors’ compromises. Karin Danielsson told me about a BBC TV format that is now to air on SVT, called Slutet på historien (end of story). Established writers and authors provide the beginning of short stories, the ending is up to the viewers to write. Evidently, it’s a massive success in the UK. Mattias Arvola pointed me to Comikit, a creative software for children to train language among other things. I need to tip my colleagues working on the Space Trainees format on that.

Phew, now, the vacation may start!

Accepted papers and conference site launch

Lots of academia in the pipeline now. I got my papers accepted for two conferences, the CMID07 in Hemavan, Sweden, concerning crossmedia interaction design and EuroITV in Amsterdam in May. Hurray! I'm so looking forward to indulging myself in passionate, scientific discourse and chilly, snowy slopes!

At the same time, the preparations for our own conference Eyes on iTV has taken off big time now, as it's due to take place in late May here in Vasa. I started drawing on the logo for it last week and finally, today, the new, improved site launched. During the conference, we're putting together an academic ensemble, where researchers can present and discuss iTV related issues. There'll be no publications, pre-submissions of paper propositions or the like. Instead, the outcome will be a meeting between media scholars and media practitioners. I'm fond of this form of encounters, where experts share their insights and case studies with an audience for say 20-30 minutes followed by an open discussion with the audience. The ones I've attended have provided with loads of knowledge and few yawns, I hope ours will do the same. The submission tool for abstracts for proposed presentations will be up in a few days.

exEnteractivity's got a new look

My other blog, or perhaps rather a resource site for my PhD thesis, has been pimped up. I added the recent findings on how the viewing experience of iTV differs depending on the interactivity tool, i.e. the mobile phone or the set-top box. My near future agenda with conferences to attend and papers to have camera-ready soon is updated as well.

tv quiz solution

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the buzz word quiz I did on hot words at the conference on iTV in London I attended. Well, here's the solution (as a pdf-file).