“My time is being squandered online because I’m not getting experience points,” Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. He was speaking at the November 16 seminar on DIY Media.

I could see from long acquaintance with his proclivities that Hall had decided to find a way to combine his long-time personal obsessions with gaming, chatting online, radical self-surveillance, self-publishing, and self disclosure: the New York Times magazine called Hall “the founding father of personal blogging” until he retired in 2005, after more than a decade, at the age of thirty.

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day’s surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix — making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We’re already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? (”I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there,” Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)

Hall calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”

Here is a mockup of how a PMOG might look on a mobile phone screen, via Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku app:

In Helsinki in the summer of 2006, Hall described PMOG’s: Quicktime video.

Questions or suggestions, critiques, plaudits, brickbats for Justin? Want to push the design or question its premises? Post here and I’ll prod Justin to respond.

Robin Good, whose Masternewmedia is an excellent resource, has posted the text, audio, and a few screen captures from the presentation I made in Second Life for the New Media Consortium on Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Participation:

Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling.

Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn’t looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves.

This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

Derek Powazek, creator of Fray, and one of my employees at Electric Minds (which launched ten years ago), has created a DIY photography magazine: JPG Magazine is as much community as publication; like flickr, members can upload their digital photographs, categorize them, and share them with others — but JPG community members rate the photos, and the top-rated are published in a paper magazine. Powazek’s DIY magazine manifesto, A Tale of Three Communities, puts it this way:

One of the many gifts of our increasingly networked world is the diminishing boundaries between communities. And the magazine business is about to get hit by a boundary-blurring tidal wave.

It’s already started. What’s the difference between NBC and Joe Everynerd on MySpace or YouTube? They’re all just usernames - each with an equal chance of getting seen. The traditional roles of content creator and consumer have been irrevocably blurred.

Magazines, on the other hand, still have very high walls between their writers and readers. The writers and editors enjoy the illusion that they do something no one else can. The readers, then, have only one job: to consume the product.

But if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that the world is full of people who know a lot more than you do about something. Think up any niche and you’ll find a site out there, powered by some lone geek, with everything you ever wanted to know. Whether it’s knowing what’s cute or how to build a monorail, it’s all out there.

The internet has also taught us that when all those people with all those diverse interests come together, they can pool their knowledge together to make amazing things. Think Wikipedia or Digg. Given the right tools, crowds can truly be wise.

The magazine business was built on scarcity and inequality. The editors guarded the gates of the printing press to make sure that only the best ideas got in. They had to - there was only so much paper.

But online, there’s a scarcity of scarcity. Web pages, unlike paper, scroll to be as long as they need to be. The gatekeepers have no mandate here. And, as a result, we’ve seen a flowering of authentic media the likes of which the world has never seen.

The online world has created a culture of creation among ordinary people. Meanwhile, magazines are still partying like it’s 1899. Writers write, readers read, and never the twain shall meet.

Simply put, this can’t last.

The LinkTV people, who really know what they are doing, have succeeded in merging DIY video, online community, the electoral process, and the public sphere. Check out Thepeoplechoose.org, where citizens contribute their own video to document, advocate, critique, argue and persuade other citizens — rather than passively sucking down the huge amounts of broadcast propaganda, they are actively making their own:

The mission of The People Choose 2006 is to “democratize” the 2006 midterm Congressional and Senate elections—to let American citizens help shape the nation’s election coverage and give them access to factual information about elections that includes the priorities of voters. The People Choose 2006 will enable anyone anywhere to upload videos and information about the campaigns in their Congressional district or state to a dynamic, map-based index open to the public. The videos may be included in programs broadcast nationwide on Link TV. The result is election information from the point of view of the citizens—not corporations, campaigns or political parties. We hope to change the way the media cover elections in the U.S. by giving citizens a role in that coverage. By building a national online community whose members can see one another’s needs and priorities, we seek to move Americans away from the politics of attack and narrow issues.

Almost exactly a year ago, Jeff Jarvis asked “Who owns the wisdom of the crowd?” in regard to the “user generated content” sites like del.icio.us and flickr (both of which had been purchased by Yahoo). If volunteers create value for DIY Media sites, and the owners of the sites reap significant profits, do the volunteers deserve a cut of the action? I was reminded of this issue when I read this long post from Henry Jenkins and his colleagues about the Youtube acquisition, raising similar questions:

This is an issue I raised here a few weeks ago. At the heart of the Web 2.0 movement is this idea that there is real value created by tapping the shared wisdom of grassroots communities, composed mostly of fans, hobbyists, and other amateur media makers. I have often celebrated these efforts as helping to pave the way for a more participatory culture — one that will be more diverse and innovative because it expands the range of content we can access. Yet, as I suggested here a few weeks ago, there is a nagging question — if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?

We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people’s intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?

What do YOU think?