When a citizen is curious about something in his or her community, that person can use Spot.us to commission a journalist to investigate and write a story about it. Suspicious that the cops in your precinct are abusing their power? These guys will look into it for you.

The community provides the funding; once a story has been pitched, Spot.Us’ journalists determine how much it will cost to investigate. Microdonations are made by individuals or organizations until the costs are met, then the investigation begins. The story that results is published under the Creative Commons license so anyone can use it

5 Innovative Websites That Could Reshape the News.

http://myitthings.com/
MyItThings.com is a leading online user-generated fashion and trend magazine and community, which invites people to contribute their own articles, pictures and photos; share wish lists and even submit their own designs. It democratizes fashion by putting the power to set trends in people’s hands. The magazine is a dynamic space that is published by editorial staff throughout the day and gives an opportunity to everyone to contribute and be featured on its pages

http://chictini.com/
Chictini is a fashion social network that focuses on fashion discovery. You can submit products and show off your personal style while connecting with people like yourselves.

http://www.2threads.com/

2threads is a social network with style. It is a place where anyone with a penchant for fashion can come to look, love and buy fashion all in one, easy to reach place. No matter who you are or where you are from 2threads is a place where you can engage in all your guilty fashion-fixated vices.

http://www.fashionising.com/
Fashionising.com is a fashion community and social network for people who love fashion. Keep up with cutting edge fashion, become a fashioniser.

http://www.fashion-networks.net/
The Fashion Network is a social networking website designed to be used specifically by those passionate about fashion and style. Here you will be able to connect with like minded individuals from across the globe. The Fashion Network is brought to you by Chatter.

http://www.mykidsfashion.com/
My Kids Fashion is the kids fashion industry’s first social network created for designers, retailers, manufacturers and consumers located across the globe. My Kids Fashion is managed by DashinFashion.com – Online Guide to Kids Fashion Worldwide.

http://www.stylecaster.com/
StyleCaster is a fashion social network where influencers connect with each other, explore the world of style, share content and get recommendations from peers and experts around the world.

http://www.stylehive.com/
Stylehive.com is an online style club for people who live for fashion, design and shopping. It’s where you meet your style muses and follow them as they discover and share their latest finds. Part social-networking club, part pop-culture lab , Stylehive.com is one big ensemble cast of trendsetters creating, discovering and buying the next big thing!

http://www.springleap.com/
Tee shirt company base on people contribution

http://www.threadless.com/
community based tee shirt company

http://www.ustrendy.com/index.php
Our platform helps to democratize fashion, where fans give the yay or nay to which designs get produced and sold. The UsTrendy community helps uncover the gems of top-rated indie designers, who get a shot at making their fashion dreams a reality

http://modepass.com/
Community contributions with a brand-based cataglogue: news, articles, videos, images

http://www.weardrobe.com/
Weardrobe is the easiest way to share photos of what you wear. Weardrobe whos wearing what

http://www.polyvore.com/
Polyvore’s easy-to-use virtual styling tool lets people mix and match products from any online store to create their own fashion collections called “sets”. The Polyvore community consists of trendsetters, shoppers and aspiring stylists, who create more than 30,000 sets daily . With over 6 million unique visitors and 140 million pageviews per month, Polyvore is the largest fashion community site in the world.

http://www.glossom.com/

The Visual Platform For Creative People Promote and distribute your work Curate your own content through the Visual CuratorTM Discover people and build relationships Spot trends and get accessto sources of inspiration

http://www.burdastyle.com/
A site for adventurous fashionistas to try their hand at creating their own clothes with patterns, tips, a forum and more.

http://www.fantastictoe.com/
the web’s premiere shoe community. Here you can organize your shoe collection to perfection, and show it off to your friends and other shoe aficionados. Share shoe pics, shop for shoes, read our Morning Shoe Report, and enjoy our superior collection of shoe quotes, and shoe videos, updated every weekday. Or, join our vibrant community of shoe bloggers:

http://www.stylemob.com/
StyleMob is a new community for street fashion inspiration. Our mission: to create a place for real people to have a say about fashion. When you come to StyleMob, you find out how real people put together their outfits and upgrade your own look with fresh ideas.

http://youlookfab.com/
Blog and “standard” community. Get advice, give advice, share excitement about a new purchase, or just have a good yak.

http://www.notcouture.com/
NOTCOT is a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements. NOTCOT’s two sites have become the daily sources of inspiration for creatives everywhere, fighting the good fight against “creative block” since 2005 with visually stunning imagery, the latest in international trends, and a passion for all things well designed.

http://www.notcot.org/
is a community of creatives, design lovers, and trendsetters – where .org serves as the studio bulletin board gone digital – each image and caption brings you to a place worth visiting. It’s about sharing what inspires you

http://www.cloziz.com/
La première communauté de Fashion Addicts pour diffuser son Style, ses meilleurs Looks, ses bons plans mode, et gagner des fringues !

http://www.styledujour.com/
It is a place for people to organize and execute their own sense of what is fashion. We want you to show us what that look is. Style du Jour is perfect for the person who is looking to express themselves or is too busy to fuss with an unorganized closet. We will help you organize your wardrobe online so you have an easy, manageable, and fun way to put your look together.

http://www.avenue7.com/
Social Shopping, celebrity monitoring, community to share your outfit and the things you love

http://fashionmash.com/
upload your clothes (images are outlined) create and share your outfit, get comment and suggestion from the community

http://www.popsugar.com/community/welcome
PopSugar Community is the place to dish on the latest gossip, share fashion finds, learn beauty secrets, review movie and tv shows, discussmom advice, swap delicious recipes, live happy and healthy, and much more.

http://trendmill.com/
Upload your look and get comments, easy tool to create spot on images

Any suggestion to add new ones?

Leave them in comments, thanks

Live streaming on the official site http://frontiers.idearium.org/2009/

My Mac Book pro fans are still spinning but the effect worths the cpu stress. I have no printer now so I use my Iphone and actually I accessed just the first steps, but it works pretty good

The Star Trek augmented reality experience seems a very good example of the potential of this tecnology, that is more and more applied to interactive advertising. Marketers have the possibility to engage customers in a mixed reality experience that will stick in mind surely more than a TV spot seen ten times.

Let’s monitor how many people will take a loo at this video, that has comments of enthusiast people, other that says is a fake  (try yourself here to test it)

Another funny example is this one, that reproduce in augmented reality the “testimonial” of a TV campaign (a Sasquatch). You can take a look at the video or go directly here

Living Sasquatch – Papervision – Augmented Reality from Boffswana on Vimeo.

The spot is funny too

So, I was particularly intrigued when I read “First Person Plural” by Paul Bloom

An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?

There are several concept in this articles that are interesting, offering many cues that can be useful for a team leader, a martketing responsible or simply a person that want to imprve the relation with himself and the others.

1) What we remember and what we experience can be different. Our working time can be less stressful than a sunday spent thinking about monday morning, and reaseraches evidences that people asked to randomly record their activity and mood each time they hear a beep were on average “happier” in working time than in vacation. Paul Bloom gives more evidence of this inconguence of memories.

Personally I believe that too ofter the working envioronment doesn’t allow to express all the different personalities of us as human being, and this is a huge loss of potential both for the indivual than for the organization.

Self and others acceptance, the incentive to express completely going sometimes outside the borders is a practice that should be encouraged especially a team level.

2) Absoulte coherence is not necessary a value.

The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.

” Walt Whitman gave us a pithier version: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Our different personalities may have different point of views, that can be experienced and understood  while these personalities are expressing themselves. Communication between our different selves, and the persistence of the stimulus in different occasion of our life make this internal dialogue easier allowing to express our inner wealth. On the other hand, a censure on opinion change can create barriers between our different point of views.

3) We can experience outside “real life”

After all, the most common leisure activity is not sex, eating, drinking, drug use, socializing, sports, or being with the ones we love. It is, by a long shot, participating in experiences we know are not real—reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, and so forth. Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

There is a great opportunity offered by Internet and especially by the virtual immersive environment as Second Life, Play Station Home and the constantly increasing virtual worlds: being an active player in a fiction environment.

The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment.

By this perspective, the ideal virtual worlds is the one that allows to express inner-self potential and experiment situation that can be useful in day-by-day life.

Some interesting evidence can come from trends in virtual worlds creations. A useful map by KZero shows how VW for adults are mirror worlds and  the ones focused on socializing and content creation.

There is a debate on the effect of virtual worlds on behaviour and personality development. In a safe environment people can adopt unusual behaviours, personalities and way of interacting in a quasi-real, where experimenting different selves

The process of self-binding happens when one self can predict that it will later be dominated by another self, and it can act to block the crossing—an act that Thomas Schelling and the philosopher Jon Elster have explored in detail.  This is, for example, one of the process that can be overcomed in a virtual environment with (almost) no immediate consequence for real life.

Can it be a good opportunity? That depends by the virtual social environment: on how violence or abuse are judged and on the value schema that is created to drive participantrs to self-improvement. I have experienced by myself how healty relations created in virtual environment cah be traslated into real life. Balancing the 2 aspect is of course foundamental, but there are many evidence that Virtual worlds can enhance and increase our potential as individual and teams.

4) Self-binding can be a good strategy or a risk

Blooms goes deeper in the analysis of the long-term and short term self and in the implications of self-binding, increasingly used by the goverment to regulate peoples behaviour. While this latter is actually worring, self-binding can be a useful strategy when we want to overcome critical aspect of one of the our-selves.

Thinking yourself as a community of peers can help self-improvement, self-consciousness and relation with others, and in this meaning might be more useful to “convince” your different selves instead of binding…

In these sense, Bloom’s closing is a good hint:

The community of selves shouldn’t be a democracy, but it shouldn’t be a dictatorship, either.

At the moment in Maison,the we are studyng how a mixed reality environtment can enrich the user experience in different spheres, from marketing and product presentation to remote collaboration.

Augmented reality can enhance all the 3 key elements to enhance digital interaction:

• Inform: adding digital content to reality can dramatically increase the quality and the quantity of inputs that can be percieved mantaining the fruition habits. The example of the digital books perfectly rapresents how a standard action can benefit of a digital enhancement.
• Entertain: we are competing for attention, and engaging the user in a challenging interaction is the better way to get it. Entertaining is keeping people “pleasantly occupied” to get their attention
• Play: under-estimated and often considered a “distraction”, but actually one of the most important aspect of life (at least for me). Play is an important part of learning in many animals, and is a key component of the cognitive development and socialization for humans.

If your goal is to create a relation with your customer, to sell a product or to strenght your brand, but also if you want your team to cooperate in more creative and unbundeld way, take a look at the videos for inspiration. Let’s bet that the increasing adoption of these technologies will reduce more and more the boundiaries of the companies, and that the relation with customers will include them, sooner or later, more deeply in all the marketing processes.

Introducing augmented reality

A nice test with Second Life by the friend Cristian Contini

Augmented Mixed Reality: Second Life pops out from the Screen from cristiancontini on Vimeo.

Augmented reality applied to art

A working online application (funny) that you can try here

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

An example of use of augmented reality for collaboration (and of bad presentation of a good idea by DaimlerChrysler

And last but not least the post by Luca where all started, with a couple of interesting cases showing Second Life avatar in a room and an application by BMW to assit mechanics.

L’idea di Burger King è simpatica, e ha quel giusto tocco di cattiveria che stuzzica i fan di South Park & affini.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Sono in attesa di capire che cosa è arrivato all’amico che ho sacrificato, la cui foto è stata bruciata in una animazione un po’ stregonesca.
Un amico su Facebook si può sempre riaggiungere, certo è che l’utente inesperto potrebbe spaventarsi. A volte, osare paga