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An interesting project being promoted by Situation Leeds at the moment.  Contemporary Art in the Public Realm.  It also could be a potentially interesting approach for digi_club to get young people out and about with technology.

An interactive, photographic, travel, mapping, research project.

www.DoGoSee.com explores methods of creatively mapping out space. It is interactive with the central idea that visitors to the website can tell us where to go in cities that we visit. When a post is sent to the blogi we receive it on our mobile phones, search out the request, then photograph it and upload it live to the blog. During each project the website refreshes constantly as we upload the results of these requests. Simultaneously, we use Global Positioning Systems to record a physical trace of our journey; this information takes shape on a Google Map, and gives visitors to the site a direct link to the images we have captured on our quests, based on their suggestions.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/13/second_life_airline/

Now, wait for it, you can take a virtuali flight on a virtual airline within a virtual world where the virtual people already have the power of (virtual) flight.

Is this inanity as an art form?

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=220

This hilarious artwork presented here by Furtherfield showcases poignantly what I can only conclude is the outrageously exploitative practice of paying people a pittance for "Human Intelligence Tasks", such as on Amazon's Mechanical Turk "service"
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

In this service, mugs (or alternatively the poor) are asked to, say, write a review on their blogi of a watch repair shop in London. In this example, the workers were instructed precisely what "plugs" to give and precisely the URLS with the precise anchor words. The fee for this specific task was $1.00.

In The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin, the "participants"/workers' average wage was $0.69 an hour.

Interesting as an experiment for art, but as reviewer Rob Myers says "This is a possible nightmare future of affective labour and of art. Be paid a few cents to rhyme two lines or to sketch a cup....  McJobs do not provide long-term-employment, a decent wage, or a stepping stone to a better job."...

It seems now you can have your DNA sampled and turned into a lovely painting to hang above your bed...!
http://www.dna11.com/gallery_portraits.asp

At least it's more plausible than the world's first robotic cat
http://www.baekdal.com/future/intelliau/

The ultimate Virtuali Creature.

Until I found these robotic cats, which seem definitely scarily real...

check this out, not sure what it will be like....

Multiplace 2007 | networki culture festival

presents

__Last Tagi Show__

http://www.lostpostservice.net/lts

On 14th of April watch http://www.lostpostservice.net/lts for a net performance Last Tag Show exploring the facade of Web 2.0. Name it social media hack or Web 2.0 circuit bending, but above all the show is going to refer to global performance of users building and enhancing their own web image setting thus a social mask and yielding a performance of it's kind.

Enquiring Minds report
Since September 2006 two schools in Bristol have been piloting a new approach to curriculum designed to explore how teachers can support children to act as researchers and knowledge-creators. This new report gives an update on what teachers and children have been doing in the classroom during the first two terms of the school year, September–December 2006.
Go to Enquiring Minds websit

WHY SHOULD AN ARTIST RECEIVE PUBLIC MONEY?

The public's current answers to this debate can be found here

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/artsdebate/2007/02/when_should_an_artist_receive.php

taken from Arts Professional

The main point is a (relatively) technical article on the up and coming metadata standard for images, XMP, and projects to support it in FOSS software:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/23/1926259

However, before your eyes glaze over I should point out that most of the article is actually a useful introductory discussion on the problems of managing large collections of images:

'In media management applications, the importance of good metadata handling outweighs good data handling, because the metadata are how we locate and track the data files with which we work. The audio player marketplace learned that lesson years ago, which is why you would be hard-pressed to find an audio player today that doesn't understand ID3 tags and let users interface with files through them. Users decide which track to listen to based on metadata: artist, song, album, genre, and so on. Imagine how painful it would be if the only way to browse through your music collection were by file name alone -- or, worse yet, by listening to a five-second clip from every track, with no access to the meta-information directly. How easily could you find what you wanted?'

and

'For one thing, tags work only when they are used in bulk, and work best when they harness the collective intelligence of large groups, not individuals. Read Tim Spalding's excellent essay at LibraryThing on why taggingi works for LibraryThing but doesn't work for Amazon.com. In order for tagging your photos to prove useful, you have to tagi every single one of them, on every factor of interest.

Another problem: tags have no context. Does a photo tagged with "mom" and "birthday" mean a photo of your mom on her birthday, or the photo of your birthday that your mom emailed to you? Both meanings are semantically valid, as is every other variation. Without a real context, the meanings of tags flatten out to least-common-denominator of metadata: the amorphous "subject." '

An impressive bit of work by the United States Holocaust Memorial Musem teaming up with Google Earth to shine a bright light on events in Darfur.  Some further comment and overview at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6543185.stm and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/crisis_in_darfur/

It's effective in being able to demonstrate both the scale of the problems, whilst also allowing people to interact with the subject at a personal level through photos, testimony etc.

Mobloggingi, instant sharing of content, free video streaming, protection for the anonymous poster, it's all good stuff for empowering the people, unless the people have something somewhat darker in mind.  Of course we've always got to be on the look out for latest media backlash, just as a we need to try and cut through the latest hype, but a couple of related stories from the BBC serve to remind that the technology can be used as a pretty blunt instrument as well:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6539989.stm