Did you dance this morning? I did, with my daughter. I think it's one of the healthiest things you can do.
Don't expect the same effect from virtual dancing (as with virtual champagne in ActiveWorlds, if you get my drift). But Dancing Paul at least makes me laugh. He won last year's Webby for best personal homepage.
On a more serious note (or beat), Dancing Paul is a perfect example of what Lev Manovich calls the variability of new media in his book The Language of New Media. I think this is a whole genre of Web toys, which we might call variability engines or variability toys. Combinations is the game, the user chooses among a handful of choices in a handful of channels, and can start to feel creative. It is possible to practice to make Paul dance quite well, and to me doing that is very much like playing an instrument. Or mixing records DJ-style.
My DSL provider runs a portal with broadband content, called iCanal, and they hail Oddcast as "the future of media". Oddcast is elegant and great fun, but "current media" would be better, than "future" I think. This is an old trend, and there must be hundreds of these sites around. Ken Perlin's homepage is full of such toys, i.e. Body Guy. Most variability toys are visual, but audible ones are easy to imagine. I used to play with a ShockWave demo of a DJ tool, but I can't find it anymore.
The dream of interactive information graphics is of course that the manipulation of such toys actually teach you something, that they are simulations of some system, which you can alter and see the effect. Jakob Nielsen hails this use, as seen in Apple's Knowledge Navigator video, as the right way of using multimedia. Can't remember actually seeing one such graphic on the Web, though. Tips would be appreciated.
Another thought: Nowadays, games are supposed to be simulations, not narratives, according to Gonzalo and friends. I guess the borderline between variability engines and games is whether there is a quantifiable outcome (which games have), but it would be interesting to pursue the parallell a bit, I think.
<< Previously in Surftrail:
El Pais on 9/11
Next: >>
The new iPod