Rafelsberger's blog

On June 13th and 14th, the 6th Barcamp Vienna took place at MODUL University Vienna, blessed with perfect weather and an impressive view over the Austrian capital. The program was created interactively by the participants, covering a broad range of topics related to new media technology.

In addition to our recently relaunched Facebook version, Sentiment Quiz is now available as a widget for iGoogle and Netvibes. Through these platforms, the game can be embedded within any Web document.

In mid-July we launched Sentiment Quiz, an application for Facebook Platform in the tradition of games with a purpose. In the meantime, more than 1400 users installed the game and about 300 users are active each month. Sentiment Quiz aims to motivate people to evaluate the sentiment of terms and sentences in an entertaining way, incorporating a number of game design principles into the application.

The Department of New Media Technology has recently presented its latest research results at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Geographical Information Processing and Visual Analytics for Environmental Security in Trento (Italy), the Annual Conference of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC-2008) in Philadelphia (US), as well as the Experience IT conference organized by Siemens IT Solutions and Services in Vienna (Austria).

On September 30th, Steve Clemons visited MODUL University Vienna to give a captivating presentation on "Electing the American President: Do New Media, Blogs and the Net Make a Difference?".

The Fifth Barcamp Vienna will be held from 4 to 5 October 2008 at HP Vienna. BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences born from the desire to share and learn in open environments. It is an intense event with live demonstrations and active discussions.

The Twitter Weather Map is just a simple example to illustrate the hidden power and possible emergence that lies within social media, presence services and livestreams. It is a mashup using data from Twitter, a microblogging service which lets users post little text snippets about what they are doing or thinking.

One aspect of the IDIOM project is to develop and evaluate various visual interface approaches to access large data sets. You can find the more mature and tested ones on our portal Media Watch on Climate Change.

While the knowledge planet component using NASA World Wind is already online, we are working on similar interfaces to access and interact with other geospatial data. The following screenshots are made from prototypes using Processing, a Java based IDE and prototyping tool.