<html> <head> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)"> <style>  </style> </head> <body lang=EN-GB link=blue vlink="#606420"> <div class=Section1> thequality-update 01/2004   Update on thequality.com's current projects and insights into converging media issues. http://thequality.com   NEWS   - What's the Story? - Wednesday, February 18, 3pm, BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly London UK   Kicking off the year is What's The Story?, an event I am producing for the BAFTA Interactive Festival, a three-day series of events kicking off on February 17 with the aim of finding out why the idea of interactive story has refused to die. We've invited game-makers to sit around a table with film-makers and let rip on how they see new developments impacting their craft now and in the future. There will be exclusive demos of upcoming interactive titles including Peter Molyneux's “The Movies”, some specially commissioned machinima (if you don't know what machinima is, this will be a great opportunity to see it in action), a VJ set and a host of other goodies.   BAFTA Members Free Non Members £10   FOOD FOR THOUGHT   It has been over two years since our last update (this was always meant to be semi-regular!) and no news has been good news. It's been eleven years since this little dotcom started and with the benefit of a little bit more hindsight, it doesn't seem like many things have changed online.   There is still a shortage of good plumbers. There are still plenty of opportunities to lose money. There are still lots of virtually clueless consultants. There are still plenty of opportunities to do something and achieve widescale recognition. Content still has a ridiculously short life-span. Links still break and services still slip regularly into obsolescence. Business plans and storage mechanisms still fail, domains still expire, and backwards and forwards compatibility is still viewed by many as a luxury. The digital age could still easily end up as an embarrassing black hole in recorded human history. "It doesn't work now of course but it was pretty cool."   Depressing? Not at all! The good news is that the experience of the builders, the plumbers, and their respective tools are all steadily improving without much hype, for the benefit of those who are generating it. Online distribution has never been as efficient as it is today, to the horror and delight of industry. Sustainable systems design is no longer simply a nice-to-have but more of a cost imperative. The Internet has never been a more effective medium in which to publish substance and the likelihood of substantial content being accessible is improving. If you're into rubbish, there's plenty more of that as well. Which is not a bad thing. It is hard to set culture against culture when either can poke through the other's trash. Empathise with your enemy, they say. File-share and share alike.   The explosion of interconnected weblogs has been fun to watch, an illustration of how quickly the Internet evolves. Content management starts to get complicated and suddenly, for many people, it is suddenly becomes irrelevant. The Web throws another googly. A new paradigm takes hold. Regardless of what content is actually being produced, the sheer scale and vigour of all this personal publishing is doing wonders for the overall usability of the Web - the glorified global filing cabinet. Semantic information is soaking in at a rate that will be increasingly hard to remove quickly - handy stuff if anyone wants to hide the drawers marked "Dissent".   I still find it ironic how much the whole system relies on text. Simple labels. Simple protocols. No degree in rocket science required. Despite the debut of photo-realistic CG humans, despite the unparalleled sonic realism of convolution reverb, literacy is still what counts. Readability is what counts. You don't have to go to great expense to make online stuff readable but if you are serious you do need to share something. Which is not to say that you can't protect assets, guard crown jewels, but if your public content isn't machine-readable, it may be time to question why.   ABOUT   thequality.com is Michela Ledwidge's interactive production company specialising in story-telling and story systems. The company was founded in Sydney in 1993 and moved to London in 1998.   </div> </body> </html>