Friday, February 20, 2009

Naked Gardeners: Hippie Trail, Multimedia Wiki-projects, Wildness and Freedom


I just communicated with Rory MacLean, author of "Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India" (2009), who wants to create an online map so that lots of folks who went along the hippie trail can post multimedia and connect it to this map.

So he started a hippie trail Facebook page, where people can post multimedia:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/52146563316/ (but I'm not sure how much Rory is involved with this page anymore).

And here's his book:
amazon.com/Magic-Bus-Hippie-Trail-Istanbul/dp/0978843193


The hippie trail as map to which one can then link photographs, videos, art, and other media, is a fascinating project, and anthropologically as well. But like World University and School, and ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy, Wikis and such projects probably all need head gardeners, or pilots, to tend them into flourishing, or navigate them safely on their journeys, as well as a bunch of folks to 'garden' and 'sail' together, ~ to be gathering at these sites again and again. From this creative production, the hippie trail, for example, will probably carry on, now via cyberspace and information technology.

So it looks like Rory will be a main driver of one hippie trail multimedia bus, and I'll continue to be a head gardener of World University and School.

All of these projects would work well with a Wiki (editable web pages, like Wikipedia), such as MediaWiki - mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page. To add a map, people might use something like Google Earth. Here's a starting point - earth.google.com/userguide/v4/ug_mapfeatures.html. And here's one example - https://web.archive.org/web/20140214194505/http://bmanearth.burningman.com/ (was: bmanearth.burningman.com). Going back and forth between a Wiki {editable web pages} and Google Earth, if possible, seems to get at what we might want to create here. And WikiMedia Commons is one approach to indexing photos and media - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. This makes these materials part of the public domain, under Creative Commons' law.

(Simply to create a map and add photos to it, you can make an image map using html [hyper text markup language], the basic 'language' of web pages, that people's browser can then read. Here's the basic html code for an image map: https://html.com. Can someone mention easier ways on the web, and add them to the comment section on this blog entry?)

For many multimedia projects ahead, you probably need at least one gigabyte of RAM (random access memory - computer (electric) memory), and 2 gigs are better. But the photo web sites Picasa (which is Google) and Flickr, with their respective maps, may also be sensible, easy, and good starting technologies for this kind of project, too.

When we develop exactly what we're looking for ~ a simple map which allows us to easily link multimedia to ~ let's add the steps to https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Ethnography.


* * *

... with an invitation to add resources to Google Street View, eg the Harbin Hot Springs' gate here
~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg ~ https://twitter.com/HarbinBook ~ http://bit.ly/HarbinBook ~







http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05_04/NakedGardenEPA_800x765.jpg




http://en.ce.cn/entertainment/fashion/trend/200706/06/W020070606553451707862.jpg


Into the radical beauty of the Harbin pools ~~~ :)




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