Live from Möbius Lugano Multimedia Award

Right now, at the Möbius Lugano Multimedia Award 2008, held today in Lugano, I am attending the second part of the event, a symposium with the theme “Web Media Collision. The media war and the web”. Roberto Carraro, whose speech has just been completed by a huge round of applauses, has replaced the traditional powerpoint presentation with a Second Life session. Roberto has built in Second Life the visual support for his argumentation around the media war and the competition between different media tools. From television to interactive television, the web and to web 2.0, from video-games to video-games built by the users. Roberto has used a symbolic graphical representation of the tension and evolution of these tools and navigated between them arriving at the web 2.0 panel where the heads and the bodies of the long Giacometti-like shaped black and red human shadows co penetrated each others in a spherical representation where concepts such as blogosphere, wiki, RSS were floating. Andrea Basso, research director AT&T Labs in New Jersey has concentrated on data mining and information retrieval on the internet; Andrea has made a demonstration for Miracle: multimedia information retrieval by content – a search engine which allows searching audio and video contents using speech recognition and segmentation of contents. Prof. Paolo Paolini, from USI Lugano, is now speaking about career possibilities in the new media field. Tangentially, Paolo brings about a discourse that has been set aside in the other speeches: while new media is setting forth towards broad promising horizons, and web 2.0 towards web 3.0, there are numerous cultural institutions and museums in the world that do not have yet a website or if they have one it gives little graphical and contents appeal for users. Paolo is re-directing the attention towards opening possibilities for multimedia production in contexts where human and financial resources are scarce, through open-source easy to use authoring tools. Think small be fast act effectively..