The people from glass magazine invited me to write about space and distance in relation to my project80Days (oehm) project. Read it here

Yes, 2nd October is a week back and the launched site is in full go.
The lauch event ws a blast and thanks again for all attending and supporting.(see photos below)

Still quite a few tweaks ahead, mainly to the unsuspected pull of google-maps’ support of AS2 just a week before launch (really , what?)
Features are constantly added, the travel tool got a complete revamp and for now, we are using Bing-maps. Possibly will swap back to google or maybe even try to head for the development of a complete self-made tile set, who knows…

So without much further ado, please enjoy the new project80Days.com, test and comment and enjoy like hell….

project80days.com

Friday beta launch at the fleapit in columbia road , London from 6:30 pm

See you there!

Since a few hours ago, the beta is live!

project80Days.com

is fully functional and ready to receive travellers who can take a challenge.

Just to let you guys out there know, the gamma is developing nicely, including a complete revamp of the diary (code – wise) and new featires have been added (like referential messaging, etc.) So stay tuned, I am pretty sure july will see the beta coming out.

yes there are still bugs left right and front, but thankfully most of them are on a visual level. So for everyone, who is following this, yes i am talking about you Tyrone, the beta should easily be coming for july, how cool is that?

My fellow readers, (you still there?) yesterday at about 20:00 May 13, 2009 I finally had my first finished trip around the world in-game. It was a moment of joy. It felt very strange after such a long time (and essentially about 70+ developers days only though), to have it all work. Now the only thing thats left is all details to make it more user-friendly, add heaps of design and work heavily on the community presence of the site and then it’s “hello beta!”. I hope to still get the ‘gamma’ version out this month.

plan trips with strangers… groople.com

80DAYS is a social network website with a geographic twist. It is a real world social travel game, in which the participant has to virtually travel around the globe(in 80 days). In order to achieve this, starting whereever the travel profile is created, the user has to collect travel credits(km) by having people visiting his/her travel page. The geographic aspect lies in the fact that the only people able to help our digital Mr.Fogg are the people geographically close to the virtual traveller’s location on the world map of the travel account. E.g. if the traveller’s current location is in Paris, only people visiting from an internet access around real world Paris will add to the traveller’s travel credits. The travel credits can then be used by the traveller to move eastwards around the globe till he/she reaches the starting point of the journey.
During the travel, both traveller and helper will be able to leave messages and images in a blog-like diary.

The obstacles and differences to the usual way of building a friends or aquaintance list online are immediately clear. The geographical limitation restricts the people who can help you travelling through a certain area. There might not be internet in that part of the world, you might not know anyone in this part of the world, you might not speak the language to find people there, etc. The internet’s infrastructure might span the planet, but the inherent groups and sub-networks are not as connected and accessible as media might want to make you believe. As artists, we cross those cultural and/or geographical barriers as a default position and try to build bridges, but we are not the majority. 80DAYS tries to help everyone build bridges and challenge themselves a bit, even if it is only from the secure place of the local internet access.

How travellers find their way around is partly supported by 80DAYS’ interface, but to a big part, it is left to the individual user to find people from the locations where they want to travel through. Geographical proximity might support this, as I living in London I might only know someone in Germany, but they might know someone in Italy, who knows someone in Greece, who knows someone in Turkey and suddenly I have a person in Turkey.

Getting to know people who still live in their countries rather than meeting the people who left their country is very often a very different experience. Many times, the people who you meet somewhere else didn’t feel to fit in our don’t even like their own country for some reason. Another issue is to get to know the world a bit better. Where is that country I am just travelling through?

The project builds on the part of Verne’s book during travelling through india, where a train line part has not been build yet and Phileas Fogg has to improvise despite his thorough mathematical planning.

It also questions theone-click shopping and click-and-friend culture of popular social websites like facebook, where you can ask a thousand people to be your ‘friend’ without ever contemplating what ‘friend’ means in this context. The basic meaning of what a friend is is hardly negotiable nor meaningful if the communication interface is as black and white as a mouse click.

The essential adventure is that, geographical and cultural distance still means something and has to be accounted for in order to understand the world and the nature of the communication. 80DAYS acknowledges this by mission and message.

Imagine my joy, a open invite for proposals in the theme of 80DAYS. Imagine my dissappointment that the main focus is on ‘live-technology’, meaning the use of technology for real-time communication in order to reflect on today’s version of Jules Verne’s hasty traveller, who used technology to bridge distance regardless of the culture and people he might have the opportunity to see and explore on the way. Well, not really, he had time to stop(and stare), which in the end made him find his indian-princess-wife-to-be. So, I guess we can expect quite a few projects involving networked dating services;)
I am sitting here now lamenting, if I should still apply, as my 80DAYS is about slow travelling and the relevance of distance and location, rather than negating aforementioned by technology, if that is at all possible. Probably the biggest question in this case is the importance of context.

Context:

as in:
Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation and discourse

Context (dictionary.com) 2.the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

Why? Quite a few examples spring to mind. Look at the misunderstandings and shortcomings of email communication. Ask yourself why it is important to ask ‘where are you’ on most mobile phone calls. Consider the impact of fashion, smell, general surrounding have on a conversation or even on the initial approach of a situation’s participant towards others present. I remember working at the MIT in Dublin, having the full screen live 24/7 video wall in one of the studios. The technical aspect pretty much overshadowed the experience, but maybe that was because it was 6 years ago.

More interestingly, it reminded me of my first few months moving to Hamburg, Germany and London, UK respectively, as both have underground systems. The experience is as follows. You travel in between major points of interests(like a tourist or short term visitor), like a mole digging down underground, travel a certain few minutes, just to pop-up on the destination without ever getting a feel for the distance, the gradual change in e.g. university or shopping center to residential area. Or think about politics. Having a politician declare something without explanation of prior decisions can be seemingly outrageous and out-of-a-sudden(think any given day on any given free-undergound newspaper), context can make things slightly more understandable.
For me, taking the location or time element out of the equation is loosing context. In other words, think about why shopping, where everything is available right away, does not saturate our consumer needs much. Or think about the slow-food movement, which tried to point out what we loose to fast-food (apart from quality of food).

Sticky networks, or play more with Kevin Bacon

What are social networks all about? Exploring the people of the world? Think again:
a) social network sites have very limited user numbers
b) social network sites are actually fairly limited to some key areas of the planet (north america, europe)
c) language and geographical barriers still exist, e.g. germany uses wer-kennt-wen.de rather than facebook, brazil still uses orkut.com heavily
d) try to have arabic or japanese characters run in your browser
e) honestly, are you using the network in a much wider way than collecting friend-of-friends, who you already know?
f) Do pages like facebook really support community or rather expand self-importance. How many groups have you joined and left without ever actively participating in it?

Remember how the AOL browser used to(or still does) restrict the websites you will find entering words like ‘travel’. Google, does the same thing. There are special Google versions for some countries. Don’t expect to see the same results in any two countries. Yes, we can see the world, but the view is heavily biased, so are the opinions and knowledge offered. ‘But they are biassed everywhere!’. True, but I still wouldn’t mind to hear the other opinion as well, just think about the Live8 fiasco, a ‘global’ awareness concert in multiple locations around the planet to raise awareness about poverty in africa. Problem was not even the scarce appearance of african artists, but that hardly anyone in africa had heard about the ‘global’ event.

Generally, the internet is a great tool and support system, but far away from giving and adequate experience by taking out the physical aspects of life like e.g. location, distance, etc. It is the distance and hardship to stay in contact, that makes a connection worthwhile. Isn’t the most amazing thing about a friendship, that you can meet only once a year and still get on well? But hey, maybe I am an old-fart, post twitter generation, yes I am only 35.

So, in the end, what does my 80DAYS bring to the table?