This afternoon at the Walled Garden conference, the Digital Methods Initiative and I made a funky little website.

The concept WALLED GARDEN addresses issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the (in)accessibility of information and knowledge?

Basically the question we (DMI) asked is “given web2.0 sites as walled gardens, how many of it’s content is accessible from outside that specific walled garden (platform)”. We found this service usernamecheck.com, which checks if a given username is taken on a whole set of sites.

We extended this service, in the light of the Walled Garden conference, by querying usernames for their existence in all these services. For each service where the username is taken or active, we’ll query google for the name in the service and give back a ranked list of web2.0 services ‘leaking’ information about you.

You can try it yourself at leakygarden.net.

It would be really nice to do a followup by getting a representative sample of usernames from each of these services and querying them all in a search engine for ‘leaky content’. This touches questions of which sites feed whom, which sites allow only content to come in but not to get out, etc.

In this respect others of the DMI team started tracing and visualizing data flows of information between these walled garderns – which information goes in, and which information goes out. You will be able to find their results here soon.

Except form being a coach at the Picnic08 Mediamatic social RFID hackerscamp, I and a couple of others made the vBird.

vBird is a social bird which likes to fly, but cannot; it needs people to help it fly. The vBird project wished to build upon the successful by poly-xelor. The vBird’s heart has two parts: a camera with a wireless transmitter and a bluetooth Arduino with a serial RFID reader, a Lilypad accelerometer, and some leds. The former streams the flight to the vBird’s nest, the latter is used to identify the thrower and receiver of the vBird (by the RFID reader and the tags of the throwers). The accelerometer detects if the vBird is being thrown, flying, or being catched; an appropriate sound is then send out through the speakers in the nest (‘nice to meet you’, ‘wheeeeee’). The leds are used as the eyes.

Because we knew who threw the bird (because of the embedded RFID reader), we could upload the video fragments captured by the vBird to the appropirate profiles in the picnic network. The idea was powerful and the technique worked as a prototype. However, throwing hardware needs solid casing and a lot of stuff broke during the proces. It would have been better also to use a hi-speed camera as our current camera did not have a high enough sample rate to provide really cool videos. A couple of shots were quite nice though, of which you can find some here: with the flash interface or as a playlist of movies.

All in all it was a fun project, and we had a good team. As a prototype it worked quite well, to be fool proof it would need some tweaks. If you want to know more about the vBird, check out our page at Mediamatic. All the code for the vBird can be found here. And of course, the other teams made really nice projects too, like a physical mario cart, a google elevator contest, the ik-Run, breeders, a mobile massage couch, and more

Last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp we made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag – which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network – and the table will start to display information about you – like an oracle.

In response, and as an addition, to Wilbert Baans’ storytelling with public databases, I made a little twitter scraper. It indexed all twits for the query http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+voted%22+%2B+McCain+OR+Obama+-twitvote, up till a month ago. From November the 4th till November the 5th the script scrapes new twits for this query every minute.

A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression /vote.*mccain/i succeeds, else it is undecided / unrecognized.

The result can be found at Twitter Poll. So far Obama is winning.

Update: Wilbert Baan has made theses stats into a beautiful visualization:

There is an other twitter poll on Mashable.

Update 2: I tried making a similar exit poll based on MySpace, but that query does not yield results sorted on time. Also, just like Google, MySpace only returns a maximum of 1000 results per query. Unfortunately I’m thus stuck with the same numbers, no matter how many times I will scrape it.