taunt media

Taunt Media Helps Launch PlayTheWeb Initiative

Nick Bouton — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:11:28 +0000

Over the course of the last two months, Taunt Media founder and principal Nick Bouton has been participating in a new initiative with several other Vancouver-based web professionals and organizations in order to promote the concept of “Web Play” through ethical reuse of content on the web.

The purpose of this initiative is to encourage the reuse of content with respect to the original rights of the copyright holder(s). PlayTheWeb’s eventual goal is to create, document, and support a new attribution microformat to track attribution and historical information about media items that are reused around the web.

PlayTheWeb.org is a blog created to detail the development of and related discussion around this new microformat. Over the weekend, Taunt Media launched the new look and feel for the site, which has been in the works for the last few weeks. The site is intended to encourage discussion of ethical content reuse, discuss related technologies and techniques, business models and applications, as well as foster the community who will help develop the microformat.

To reference the site’s raison d’être:

One of the core initiatives for PlayTheWeb.org is to support the development of a new open content attribution format in order to help content creators and application developers publish where and from whom reused content is being sourced.

As of today, the participating members of the PlayTheWeb initiative are:

David Gratton, Donat Group / Project Opus
Brian Leroux, Nitobi
Nick Bouton, Taunt Media / Protagonize
Rob Linton, Project Opus
Séamus O’Connor, Project Opus
Loren Davidson, Project Opus
Greg Field, Project Opus

Are you interested in the realm of content attribution? We’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re interested in joining the discussion, please follow us over at PlayTheWeb.org.

Nokia Open Lab 2008 in Helsinki

Nick Bouton — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:08:40 +0000

Just a quick event-related update this week: Nick Bouton, founder and principal of Taunt Media, will be one of 35 invitees from around the world attending Nokia Open Lab 2008. The event and its related workshops are held at design hotel Klaus K’s Rake Hall, located in the heart of Helsinki, Finland. It’s being sponsored by both Nokia Europe and WOMWorld, a Nokia-focused mobile technology blog.

The event is centred around the future of mobile technology and the influence of the social web and community building in the development of upcoming mobile devices. Nick was very pleased to be contacted by WOMWorld with respect to attending the workshop back in August, due to his experience with community building and social media-based applications. He’s is looking forward to attending and meeting other mobile technology and social media afficionados from around the globe.

More information about the event is available over at Nick’s personal blog, and Nick will be blogging (and Twittering) about his experiences at the Open Lab and around Helsinki later this week.

Protagonize a winner in KPMG/Backbone’s PICK 20 Awards

Nick Bouton — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:17:00 +0000

We’re proud to announce that our flagship site, Protagonize, has been selected as one of Canada’s leading Web 2.0 companies in the 2008 Backbone Magazine / KPMG PICK 20 Awards. The official winners list will be published in the July issue of Backbone, which will hit the streets in the Globe & Mail and on newsstands on July 15th, 2008.

It’s great to see Protagonize included in some rather elite Canadian company, ranging from the amazingly popular Club Penguin, to Freshbooks (which we’re proud users of), to the widely-read b5media, to our good friends over at ThoughtFarmer.

The Pick 20 awards were devised as a ranking of Canada’s Web 2.0 pioneers, as judged by a hand-picked group of . To quote their site, “Backbone and KPMG assembled a prestigious group of Canadian thought leaders, movers and shakers, practitioners and pundits to judge the PICK 20 nominations and comment on the winners.”

The goal of the awards is to recognize Canadian sites leading the pack in one or more of the following categories:

Problem Solving: customer response, idea generation, solution brainstorming
Innovation: crowdsourcing, market prediction, participatory feedback
Collaboration: jams, customer input, user rankings
Knowledge sharing and management: teamware, wikis, blogs and collaborative content creation

The judges had this to say about Protagonize, which ranked 19th on their list:

19. Protagonize

www.protagonize.com

A collaborative fiction Web site in which “one author writes a story and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.”

“Beautiful thought. I love this and can see myself spending a lot of time on this site,” said O’Connor Clarke, although he and others expressed concerns about the site’s revenue model. “It’s an interesting niche, although I’m not too sure of the business model nor of the benefit of collaborative fiction writing vs. the single creative artist,” Moffitt said, and Trgovac added, “It’s well implemented as a concept, but how are you going to monetize it? Advertising, or no-advertising with subscription?”

While it would be have been great to have had a chance to sit down and discuss our plans for developing and monetizing the site with the judges before the article hit the newsstands, we’re still very happy they selected us for the award.

There’s an interactive panel / discussion event planned for September 16th down at the Wosk Centre at at Harbour Centre, as well as a meet and greet with PICK 20 winners and cocktail party. Protagonize will be attending — we hope to see you there! Here’s a little more information about the venue, or you can take a look at the event listing on Backbone Magazine’s site.

Backbone and KPMG: 1st Annual PICK 20 Web 2.0 Awards
Vancouver — Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
5:30PM – 8:30PM (includes cocktail reception 5:30PM – 6:30PM)
WOSK Centre
$50

Protagonize featured in Georgia Straight

Nick Bouton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:24:00 +0000

In what has been an excellent week for traditional press coverage (including a sidebar yesterday in the Vancouver edition of 24hrs, a free daily newspaper published across Canada), the Georgia Straight, a large-format weekly paper in B.C., featured Protagonize today in Blaine Kyllo’s Techno Logic column.

Here’s are a couple of excerpts from the article:

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who, when I saw what hypertext could do, thought the technology was perfect for Choose Your Own Adventure stories. The books, which let readers decide what happens in the narrative, were part of the inspiration for Nick Bouton’s Protagonize ( www.protagonize.com/ ), a finalist in the social-media websites category of the 2008 Canadian New Media Awards, to be presented in October.

But Bouton’s site does much more than provide an opportunity for readers to decide whether a story’s protagonist will climb the stairs to the dark, cobwebbed attic or open the mouldy door to the dank basement. Site users actually write the stories. Or, more accurately, they write additions to the stories that appear on the site, what Bouton calls “addventures”. Over coffee in Gastown, the Vancouver programmer explained that the term refers to stories that contributors can branch at any point.

This quote pretty much sums up the interview:

In Bouton’s view, Protagonize is as much a community Web site as it is a writing site. “You can’t have one without the other in this case,” he said. “It could be a writing site without a community, but it would be a one-sided affair. I think you need the community to keep driving it forward.”

You can check out the full article here:
http://www.straight.com/article-152025/web-community-spins-protagonizes-yarns

[Rod Filbrandt illustration]

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Protagonize named as finalist in 2008 CNMA Awards

Nick Bouton — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:06:49 +0000

Protagonize has been recognized as one of Canada’s new media leaders. Protagonize, developed by Taunt Media, is one of three finalists to be named in the “Excellence in Social Media Websites” category of the 2008 Canadian New Media Awards (CNMA). A Canadian celebrity host will be joined by industry supporters on November 18, 2008 to celebrate and present 14 Pixel Awards at CiRCA in Toronto.

“It’s an honour to be selected as a finalist in such a prestigious competition, representing a new awards category for 2008,” said Nick Bouton, Founder and Principal, Taunt Media. “The exposure provided by this event brings important attention to new media organizations across Canada and I’m very proud that Protagonize can be a part of it.”

“The CNMA recognizes great talent and work in the Canadian digital interactive industry.” said Adam Froman, Founder of CNMA and President and CEO of Delvinia. “This year 43 finalists from across 14 award categories demonstrate the innovation and creativity driving the success of the Canadian interactive and new media industries.”

The 43 finalists hail from across Canada with 24 finalists from Ontario, 8 from BC, 8 from Quebec, 1 from Alberta, 1 from Saskatchewan, and 1 from Manitoba. More information about the 2008 finalists can be found on: http://www.cnma.ca/index_e/07finalists.html

See the full contents of the press release here:
http://www.tauntmedia.com/media/Protagonize_PressRelease_2008CNMAAwards.pdf