Here be Monsters!
Ryan Conway 16 Apr 2008

Starting today, Moshi Monsters is open to all and sundry to adopt their own Monstery pet, and become a part of the fun and games in Monstro City!

We have a new widget for Facebook and Bebo which lets your monster greet friends as they visit your profile, using information from your networks to personalise things.

There is also the new ratings system where visitors to your room can give it a rating between 1 and 5 stars, boosting your Monstar Rating within the community, and hopefully nudging you one step closer to that elusive A-rating! (while we're on the subject, my room is over here :D).

Although we're now open to the public, we're a long way from being completely finished, there are lots of new features on the horizon, and we'd love to hear any feedback you have!

As always, all the latest Moshi news can be found on the Daily Growl at http://www.moshimonsters.com/community/blog/, so check it out!

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Byron Review talk at BAFTA
Chris Thorpe 4 Apr 2008

So, if you're in Britain at the moment you can't help but notice that Dr Tanya Byron's review "Safer Children in a Digital World" was published late last week. For the past few days everyone from Ofcom, to the Home Office (who've clearly not heard of Hotmail et al), to the Daily Mail (only read if you're interested in finding out what "TV Personality Anne Diamond" thinks about violent games), and many other members of the mainstream media (thank you The Telegraph for the mention of Moshi) have been having their say about the review.

Last night Dr Byron's whistlestop tour of TV studios and select committee hearings was suspended for a night at BAFTA, at an event run by BAFTA and Showcomotion. She was in conversation with Marc Goodchild of the BBC and went through chapters of the review in a Q&A with the audience. I have to confess that before I'd read the report I only knew of Tanya Byron through her TV work, and didn't know of her scientific or high-flying medical background, and like a fellow audience member had been concerned about the integrity of the report's methods and findings. Mea culpa. What came out of last night and from looking at the report for the last few days, and looking at the research commissioned to go with it was a feeling of a very well structured, intellectual, research exercise and consultation. I'd have loved to have been involved in the consultation exercise but at the early stages of that process we were getting Moshi Monsters into private beta and also working on getting our COPPA approval/CARU safe harbor and there just wouldn't have been time for both.

The review was the result of 100 stake holder meetings and many other activities, it "put children at the heart of the thinking" and sought to be balanced in what is a "polarized and emotional debate". Fascinatingly there were more responses from children than there were from adults (including all industry consultation). For it's thinking, the report delves into the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and child development. The talk last night showed Dr Byron's passion for her role and what a great job they've done, for once at these events I could have listened for a lot longer.

The review concentrates on harm as not just "content" but also contact and conduct. These are all things we've been thinking about as we've been building Moshi and have placed report buttons everywhere and put the children in charge of moderating their own messages and reporting issues.

The review places a lot of onus on the industry to educate parents about what their children are doing and places an equal if not greater responsibility on parents to discuss with their children what they are doing and to close the "digital divide". A lot of emphasis is also placed on the fact that we are now "living in a risk averse culture and children are deprived of experiences which will help their development due to this obsession with risk". One great analogy which is in the review and mentioned in the talk is that of swimming pools. Children need to learn to swim in a controlled environment to prepare them for the risk of drowning in later life in the real world.

"A useful analogy here would be to think about how we manage risks related to public swimming pools. Here we have an area open to the public because it affords many benefits. But swimming pools have a number of safety measures in place to in order to manage the risks (e.g. of injury, drowning):

There are clear safety information signs around the pool area that advise on appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

There are swimming aids available for younger or the less confident swimmers (e.g. water wings, rubber rings, floats).

There are different pool areas – shallow for those that need to stand and are less confident at swimming all the way to deeper waters for confident swimmers and divers.

There are lifeguards who can assist swimmers (of all levels of competency) in trouble, signal to those who
are behaving in a risky manner, respond to complaints about swimmers’ behaviour, and even ask them to leave the pool if warnings are not heeded.

There are fences, doors, locks and alarms to prevent access to the pool area when it would be unsafe to go in."

I feel it's been a really positive report for the industry and overall a positive week in the arena kid's online safety in the UK. I'm looking forward to seeing the next steps and how the proposed "UK Council on Child Internet Safety" works with the industry. It's unheard of that the government accepts all the recommendations of a review such as this and it's a big testament to Dr Byron and her team and process.

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Mashing up the widgiverse
Chris Thorpe 4 Apr 2008

We've been a bit slow writing up our trip to the recent Mashup* event on Widgets. Possibly because we've been very busy working on what we were demoing - your monster, sitting on your Facebook/Bebo/MySpace page greeting your friends in a monstery way.

The event was really fascinating in many ways. The widgiverse as I now know it's called seems to be like the web in it's earliest form. Everyone wants to be there, lots of people have no idea why they want to be there - but are just doing stuff in a flag planting exercise - and a whole load of people are asking about the money.There are definitely some very smart ideas though, and this time round there are better and richer statistics about useage and true demographics.

There was a great talk from Ankur Shah from Techlightenment about the current state of play and the importance of the social graph in understanding the use of your widget and on making the widget more compelling and integrated for users. It was also great to see Ivan Pope expounding on his vision for where widgets are going and about the decentralisation of data. As someone who has to constantly think about storing vast amounts of data and scalability, I personally love the idea that your data is held in little connected pools in different locations and is then mashed up as you want it through the tools and widgets you choose. The experience of the mashup event, when taken in conjunction with the recent O'Reilly report on Facebook apps, gives you a lot of insights into how, what and why users want from widgets. 

Our main reason for being at Mashup and being there mob handed (Jack, Jey, Mike, Divinia and I) was to show off the prototype of our little monster widget. The widget's now on our community page and is also available for you to add on Facebook and Bebo, with MySpace not far behind. It's in its infancy and we're working on much more integration with the social networking sites and soon we'll hopefully be doing some fun bidirectional stuff soon. Let us know as always what you think of the widget, we've got some ideas but it'd be great to hear yours.

For anyone interested in the widgiverse, it looks like Ivan's WidgetWebExpo will be a pretty cool gathering out in New York in June.

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Future Karaoke
Ryan Conway 3 Apr 2008

The Mind Candies were out in force on the 1st April, with a group of us attending "Future Karaoke", an evening of short talks on art, music, philosophy and technology.

Amongst the various presenters, three Mind Candies took the stage to present their own short talks on a variety of topics.

James led us down the tech avenue with his talk on the infamous Halting Problem, resulting in a mini debate between members of the audience regarding quantum computing and the P=NP Problem.

Next up was Alastair with his talk entitled "Sonarboria: A Walk Through the Forest of Generative Music", which delved into the realm of algorithmic composition of music, and included an impressive live demonstration of the techniques.

Dr. Mike continued the generative music theme with his talk entitled "The Generation Game" which also touched on the philosophical side of automatic composition, sparking a discussion on whether computers will ever truly be capable of injecting "feeling" into music.

With a variety of other talks including poetry, glitch aesthetics, synthesisers, APIs, and game design the evening proved to be a real success, ending with the first UK gig of The Tenorions, the first Tenori-On band in the world.