Today is the day of Kalevala, the Finnish national epic – and so all of Helsinki is decked in Finnish flags.
Kalevala means “Land of Heroes” and was basis for some of Tolkien’s Sillmarillion, according to the Wikipedia.
Filed under: Misc.
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“Meanwhile, a lot of other music lovers have subsequently started to come to their senses, realising that there is more to recorded music than just the music: there is also the packaging, and the sentimental value invested in it. While Japan has begun to reissue CDs in miniature replica album sleeves, complete with facsimile inner sleeves and posters, there are people who are keen to just own their favourite records again, with the cover art and sleevenotes they dont have to go blind trying to enjoy, and if pressed to admit it the ‘warm’ sound.”
Filed under: Blog watch
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DigiPsychoGeoLudiLinkage:
“What makes the game so exciting to me?
- It uses the GPS in my phone, and that’s so cool.
- It maps a virtual data layer onto Japan and brings a fresh new way to look at my map of Tokyo.
- All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me. I get a chance to discover parts of the city that I ignored, a motivation to check out that parallel street I never took.
Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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Via 2lmc, The beeb announced they are going to do their (pseudo?) p2p time-shifting media player using Microsoft DRM (at a meeting for designers…).
I sigh – Slashdot, predictably goes bonkers.
If you have a tolerance for /. you can find some nuggets in there like this one, which makes a good point about a public corporation that sets great store by it’s perception as a ‘trusted brand’ but seems to have little trust in its users:
Why consider all the Internet users/customers as thiefs? [sic] Imagine a shop where you are systematically checked walking out, will you come back?
and this one
...there’s a much deeper issue here. The BBC has been in existence for most of the 20th century and their archive includes a very detailed log of global history throughout that time as well as entertainment programs. The value of that archive cannot be underestimated as a historical, social and political eductaional resource for future generations – therefore, if it is to be “opened to the public” then it must be done so in a manner independent of DRM enforced by an American software company! Otherwise, the public ends up paying Microsoft to access information that should be accessible to all, no matter whether they can afford to pay MS for a DRM license....the core issue here is maintaining the right to free information. Just as anyone (in the UK at least) can stroll into a public library and have free access to important historical books, the factual BBC archive must be handled in a similar fashion, even to the point where there’s a PC in every library to be able to get to that archive also.
UPDATE: to the second quote from /., Tomski points out that he’s conflating the iMP with the creative archive, which will be DRM-free and be as close to a creative commons as possible. Fair enough. Still not sure about Tom’s assertion that “Of course the iMP will have DRM”...
Filed under: Misc.
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Giant robot spotted on flight to Oslo.
Shame I can’t sell the story to Eddie Clontz any more.
Filed under: Misc.
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as in…
“you said it wasn’t art, so now we’re gonna rip you apart”
Unless you read this with a feedreader, I guess with my design I’m already in by default. Has anyone created a snapshot gallery of grey tuesday sites around the web? Matt Haughey is right – The Grey Album is one of the best bits of hiphop in years.
One of my favourite groups, The Avalanches create incredibly rich and dense sampled soundscapes. The legal constraints they came up against in the release of “Since I left you” mean we will never get to hear what they consider their best stuff…
“as word spread about The Avalanches, they found themselves in some surprising conundrums.“I think if we thought it would be so widely listened to, we wouldn’t have sampled some of the things we did,” Chater says laughing.
Oddly enough, the roadblocks to sample clearances didn’t include Madonna, who allowed the group her first legal sample in the form of the bassline from “Holiday,” but rather from other, seemingly innocuous sources.
“It was frustrating when Rogers and Hammerstein were like, ‘You can’t use their stuff, you have to take it off the record,’” Chater says disappointedly. “There’s lots of stuff that didn’t make it. There’s a much longer version of the album that we’ve got that no one will ever hear.”
What a shame.
Filed under: Misc.
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Quinn rules. Read her post on Segusoland in its entirety:
“mistaking launchers for the capacity of a computer, either as a user or designer, is mistaking the map’s index for the territory.”
» Ambiguous.org: segusoland: the good and bad of jailing interfaces
Filed under: Interface innovations
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Filed under: Society and culture
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Abe from Abstract Dynamics has a wonderful post on Le Parkour and social constraints in the city, with a very beautiful illustration. Maybe his post will be transformed like mine was by Google, into an aleatoric place for conversation by freerunners. More on this eventually…
Filed under: Misc.
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“I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses”As a response to the Digital
~ Apologies to Billy Bragg.
“Tom mySociety Steinberg is organising a UK digital democracy teach-in (think My Society, iCan, Fax Your MP, Vox Politics and Up My Street).”
Hopefully, Rod/the YourParty folk and some of those blogging MPs might also show up…?
I wish that someone from Estonia had been invited to the fun in San Diego.
“President Meri who answers his own e-mail and can be reached at www.president.ee has even grander plans for Estonia.com. In 1997, he helped establish the Tiger Leap Foundation, an organization that united the Ministry of Education with Estonia’s computer sector in an effort to have one computer in place for every 20 pupils in Estonian schools. That goal was reached this year, and now Meri wants to create ‘a virtual government’ that would greatly downsize the state apparatus, replacing bureaucrats with online government services.”
Perhaps if there had been more than 45 minutes for the rest of the world.
Moreover – where was Dr. Gøtze, or the UK’s own professor of digital democracy, Stephen Coleman, from The Oxford Internet Institute??? They are joint-authors, of Bowlingtogether.net, a spin on Puttnam’s “Bowling Alone” cited famously as an influence by the founder of Meetup.com.
At a time where wars are being fought in the cause of “installing democracy” worldwide, one might think digital democracy – somewhat advanced in places other than just the USA - might be afforded a worldwide examination by O’Reilly.
Ah well… Thank goodness for ConConUK.
It’s like Billy says:
“If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middlemaaan Waiting for the Great Leap ForwardsIn a perfect world we’d all sing in tune
Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards
But this is reality so give me some roooomSo join the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just a T-shirt awaaaay
Filed under: Social Software
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Why sampling is important, by PWEI.
Touched By The Hand Of CicciolinaYoz has more.
- BBC Football coverage. Cicciolina herself
- Repeating metallic percussion shaker from ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ by Yes.
This has been an entry in the style of Ben Hammersley – and while we’re talking about the big fop, look what he’s gone and made: Linkr.
Filed under: Society and culture
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Had a couple of conversations with Danny and Quinn in San Diego about why Open Source UIs generally aren’t… Erm… Well… They suck*.
Here’s a half-formed one that was the basis of my side of the discussion with them.
Design generally operates at a different clock-speed, and generally evolves best over time when certain strata of it’s basis are moving slowly, such as the requirements, the code base or the context of use cf. “How buildings learn”, “Adaptive Design” etc.
Does the speed and diversity of open source iteration leave a designer – if they are involved at all – building on shifting sands?
Segusoland – a novel file manager seems to buck this trend, or at least suggest a new way forward in working with UI design in an open-source-context by establishing and publishing open-source human interface guidelines, to co-evolve with the code.
» Segusoland: Human Interface Guidelines
[via the more.theory weblog, and NooFace]
Filed under: Interface innovations
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Growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s, one sometimes heard mention of Cronkite.
A word synonymous with the news, rather than a person who read it. It sounded like a fantastic material – an element, unbendable and unbreakable that history was made of; over there in the wonderland of Shuttles and Star Wars.
Via the excellent Hypergene Mediablog, come some choice chunks of pure Cronkite, shaped into commentary about erstwhile colleague and essayist Eric Sevareid and news media past:
Rules of an essayist
Sevareid speaking in his farewell essay, shared his self-imposed rules of journalism that guided his essays:
- Not to underestimate the intelligence of the audience, and not to over estimate it’s information.
- To elucidate when one can, more than to advocate.
- To retain the courage of one’s doubts, as well as one’s convictions, in this world of dangerously passionate certainties.
- To comfort oneself in times of error, with the knowledge that the saving grace of the press, print or broadcast is it’s self-correcting nature.
and
“...when society values the impulsive spoken outburst, over the reasoned elegance of the written word, the implications for an informed citizenry are dire.”
Filed under: Society and culture
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Playing with my new Casio Exilim EX-Z4. I first got tempted when Barak showed me his Exilim and some of the neat features like the auto-white balance graphing.
On first impression, it’s a very, very nicely designed product – with the UI and the industrial design both delivering utility and delight in equal measure.
The proof of the pudding will be in the eating of the photons though.
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“Dr. Benford concluded that it was unlikely that physicists and engineers had some special preference for logarithms starting with 1. He therefore embarked on a mathematical analysis of 20,229 sets of numbers, including such wildly disparate categories as the areas of rivers, baseball statistics, numbers in magazine articles and the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book “American Men of Science.” All these seemingly unrelated sets of numbers followed the same first-digit probability pattern as the worn pages of logarithm tables suggested. In all cases, the number 1 turned up as the first digit about 30 percent of the time, more often than any other.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
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Gene has a skatelog:
“A nice long run, marred by an inglorious crash. No heroic high speed downhill flameouts for me, just a stupid crack in a flat stretch of pavement, trippedfellslidstopped. A nasty bit of road rash, and some ugly thrashed spots on my skates and pads.”
Emergent Quokka?!?
Filed under: Blog watch
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and technology prediction / futurism:
“At the time of writing his essay Bush knew more about the state of technology development in the US than almost any other person. During the war, he was Roosevelt’s chief adviser on military research. He was responsible for many war time research projects including Radar, the Atomic Bomb, and the development of early Computers. If anyone should ever have been capable of predicting the future it was Vannevar Bush in 1945. He is an almost unprecedented test case for the art of prediction. Unlike almost anyone else before or since Bush was actually in possession of ALL the facts – as only the head of technology research in a country at war could be.”
» VirtualTravelog: Vannevar Bush and The Limits of Prescience
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Marc Smith of Microsoft in his Etech keynote on social spaces online:
“if you’re 1 in a million, then there are 768 of you on the internet”
On Usenet:
“It’s not dead, it may be unwell. However, [its] 23 years as a standing structure for conversation is remarkable.”
Fantastic.
Filed under: Conferences and events
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As part of the Collaborative Mapping Workshop activities at Etech, a few of us took some maps, GPS units, cameras (digital and LOMO!) and a coin around the streets of San Diego for an hour or so.
The coin was part of the psychogeographical plan. Following point (8) of Derivé [” 8. A derivé seldom occurs in its pure form.”] we created some rules of our mapping game.
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We flipped the coin on each junction to decide whether to carry on in our established direction, and then again to decide a change in direction if necessary.
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This was working pretty well until we caught a glimpse of the beach…
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Once the coin started to lead us away from the glinting sunshine-on-surf, we rebelled pretty much as a group and abandoned the coin-based games in order to head beachwards.
As Matt Webb remarked, if the rules of a game are good for one thing, it’s for finding out what you really want once you start ignoring them…
Filed under: Games and play
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