Mixed Reality Art Show and Dueling Tag Clouds

I've recently accepted an invitation to participate in a mixed reality art exhibition. I'll be leading one of five teams creating 1/2 sim installations in Second Life that will be captured via machinima and still imagery for presentation in a number of RL galleries. My topic is "The Ambiguity of Identity." I'll provide more details here soon.

Here's the latest snippit from some of the research I've been doing on the expression of my own identities across social networks. These images were created in Wordle and reflect Delicious tags. The first is Botgirl's ; the second is Human's. It seems Human is a bit more well-rounded!

All Of Me Beta Invites - New lifestream timeline

All Of Me, a new lifestream visualizer is out in closed beta. Although they don't offer an RSS feed importer, they link to flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Picassaweb and will soon add Facebook and Google Calendar. You can also upload local images, videos and web pages from your computer. One nice unique feature out soon is a playable, embeddable widget that comes in a number of styles.

I have 100 beta invites to share, so feel free to give it a try.

Lifestream visualization

Most people use lifestream applications such as Friendfeed and MyBlogLog primarily to log and view current happenings. Another interesting way to use the collected information is to visualize it over time. Here are a few examples and resources:

Dipity (Image below is interactive. Try setting zoom level to "week.")



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Swurl

Word Cloud

Here's a "word cloud" displaying the 100 most frequently used words in this blog.

Created by Wordle, a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

Avatars gone wild

It just dawned on me that the vast majority of beings I've met through their avatar identities were initially introduced to me outside of Second Life. Yes, I know I've been writing and sketching relentlessly here about the subject of identity movement. But up until last night, it was more of an academic exercise than a visceral experience. Here are a couple of the last puzzle pieces that fell into place for me:

• I finally scrutinized an image I had captured from tweetwheel visualizing the connections between my friends on twitter. It reveals a great mix of humans, second life avatars and anonymous twitter-folk. The original here is more legible.

• Although my top-ten Twitter directs are Second Life avatars, I had made none of their acquaintances in-world and still haven't met most of them in the digital flesh. (I did have the pleasure of meeting two of my twitter pals last night at an impromptu get-together at my place in Extropia. (Image from tweetstats.)
  

On a related note, New World Notes covered the virtual world/web 2.0 connection yesterday. It was gratifying to see a Gartner analyst and a blogging avatar (yours truly) given equivalent pundit weight. I can't say for sure whether that speaks well of avatars or poorly of analysts.

Identity surfing within and between worlds

Dandellion's Going Schizo post helped motivate me to finalize the latest in a series of images visualizing the movement of identity between virtual and physical worlds. Thanks to Harper for the comment that spawned the cloud.