December 06, 2005
Good Question
How was Napoleon important to the development of the modern computer? That kind of question is typical of James Burke, host of the well-known Connections television series. You'll be able to find the answer to this and many other trails of connected thought on his forthcoming KnowledgeWeb project. Burke and his collaborators are creating a database with "almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events." A smart web within the web.
Posted by colsen at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2005
grow your music network
Audio Scrobbler is a website (and suite of plugins for various audio players) that keeps track of what music you listen to and makes suggestions based on that music. There are some social networking aspects, as you can keep a list of friends and neighbors. When you've listened to enough music, there are all kinds of interesting statistics to dig into.
While I'm on the subject of social networking sites, here's a lazy web idea: What if there was some site and/or software to keep track of all your social networking accounts in one place? You could make a change to a single profile, and it would propagate to all your accounts all over the place. (Or better yet, allow you to choose which accounts to update selectively.) I'd use it.
Posted by Martin at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
We're Lame
Haven't posted for too long; here's some linkage for your enjoyment.
Google News, Mapped
My Googlephilia is insatiable, and I just saw a Slashdot article about buzztracker that piqued my interest. Why not map the news? buzztracker.org aims to do exactly that. It's interesting to move backwards through the archive and examine the geographic "hot spots" with respect to time.
Rube Goldberg
Purdue's 18th national Rube Goldberg competition has been won by... Purdue (also according to Slashdot). Stories are available here and here.
Beware of Filler Copy!
...lest it become part of the final site. A post on BoingBoing describes that very phenomenon: apparently, a web designer was tired of using the standard lorem ipsum text. His solution? Write paragraphs of the most prolix and overstuffed prose possible, and voilá, the copy was used on the site.
Don't Believe the Photos
Finally, check out this guy's digital retouching work. Amazing!
Posted by Matt at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2005
viral marketing, the BBC, and Dr. Who
Wired reports that the first episode of the new Dr. Who series may have been intentionally leaked onto the internet, even though the BBC denies any involvement.
Posted by Martin at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2005
The Magic of Photoshop
Check out the invisibles quiz on FilmWise. The web site asks you to guess which movie each scene is from. The catch? The actors' flesh has been digitally removed from the frame. Neat stuff. (Via BoingBoing)
Posted by Matt at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2005
Hack Your Mind
Neurohacking has crossed my mind many times. While the marriage of machine and gray matter is not complete yet, there are still interesting tricks and shortcuts with a human's default hardware. O'Reilly, publisher of many fine technical books, has expanded into wetware hacking with a new book.
Mind Hacks is the latest in the O'Reilly Hacks book series. Mind Hacks collects some interesting observations and thought experiments designed to help a person use their own "operating system"—the brain.
I saw an Mind Hacks blog entry on adaptation linked from BoingBoing—check it out. I think I need to buy the book. Has anyone read this?
Posted by Matt at 09:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 02, 2005
The Reptillian Brain
I'm not really a marketing guy, more of a code-monkey, so when an article on marketing keeps me reading, it must be interesting, right?
I forwarded this around the office a while back, but this interview with market researcher Clotaire Rapaille came up in conversation again today.
Apparently the interview is from when Rapaille was featured on PBS show titled The Persuaders, which you can watch online.
Posted by Martin at 06:07 PM | Comments (1)
January 28, 2005
A Blog With Bite
Nowadays there are blogs for everything and everyone, but I've been watching for unconventional ones, partly for curiosity's sake, but also for ideas on how to use them.
One such blog is What is Happening to Me. The clincher? It's fiction.
Visitors follow the day-to-day, first-person narrative of a New Yorker who has been bitten by a werewolf. Judge the quality of the writing yourself, but the concept of serial fiction that allows for comments, seems really fresh. While a few users just comment to critique the writing, most play along with the story, interacting with the writer and even suggesting links to 'potential cures.'
Posted by Andy at 06:15 PM | Comments (1)
my favorite links...
The internet is good at so many things, not the least of which is helping you waste time. But that wasted time doesn't have to be completely useless. When I spend an hour just staring at the screen and clicking from link to link, I like to think that at the end of it, I've learned something.
Here are a few of my favorite sites to read. Each of them gets updated frequently with interesting (and often fascinating) content. Interestingly, each of them might also be considered a blog of some kind.
Google News is where I turn first if I'm looking for a quick internet reading fix. Headlines are magically generated from google's search results. I have a particular fondness for the Sci/Tech section.
A List Apart gets updated about once a week, which might make it more of a zine than a blog, but almost all the articles are interesting, whether they're on the nuts and bolts of web design, or high-level articles on what a user really wants from a their website. (Like this week's What's the problem?, an article introducing and explaining the concept of Use Cases.)
Slashdot.org takes a lot of slack for being overly populated by "trolls" looking to incite flame-wars (aka, teenage posters looking to start arguments), but the articles are still interesting, and often relevant even if you're not a nerd.
Gizmodo, "The Gadgets Weblog", is chalk full of stuff I'd love to have and probably never will. It's posts about gadgets and gizmos that do interesting stuff. Nuff said.
Metafilter is king when it comes to funny and/or interesting but questionable links. I take this kind of stuff with a lot of salt, but when I want to laugh, I look here or over at Memepool which is just as funny, but without the comments and/or discussion.
The Writer's Almanac is a radio show on public radio, but the online counterpart actually expands on a lot of what is said in the five-minute show (narrated by Garrison Keillor). It features a poem a day, and interesting writing/literature related news.
Arts and Letters Daily is where I go when I'm looking for more "intellectual" news items. Like many of the above, it just links to articles themselves. It's also a great bookmark for the links along the left side of the page.
Finally, IP News Blog is one I just discovered today. It contains bunch of interesting tidbits about copyright and legal issues.
Enjoy!
Posted by Martin at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)