I don't know if anyone's still reading this on the actual blog. But if you are you'll notice I've removed all that gubbins that ran up and down each side of it. The badges, the links, the counters. And all the FeedFlare and all that stuff. Don't know why. Just fancied a change really. If you want gubbins, there's quite a lot here. And there's a soupy stream of everything RSSable here.
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urban earth
picture by roo
Daniel Raven Ellison was a big hit at Interesting2008, talking about, well, the picture is a clue. He told us of his Urban Earth project, and his planned walks around Salisbury, London, Mumbai and Mexico City. The Urban Earth blog is now up, with some fantastic timelapse/stopmotion walking video. Excellent stuff.
north american speechifier?
Speechification seems to be going well. People like it. We're getting more and more listeners (resulting in slightly larger S3 bills for us every month) and Roo is steadily adding new, technically cleverer things. It's also clear that the BBC are hard on our heels, implementing things that will make some of what we do redundant, not right now, but eventually.
So it seems like we should work harder at our larger mission - curating English language speech radio from around the world - and doing that means we've got some big gaps to fill, the biggest being North America. We all follow shows like This American Life and Radio Lab via podcast but we can't keep linking to them all the time; we need someone to do the hard slog of listening to radio all day, ferreting out the obscurer wonders of NPR and CBC. Anyone fancy doing it? It's not very onerous, a post a week would probably do. And with a lot of NPR you don't even have to grab the audio, they archive such a lot online. Drop us an email ([email protected]) if you're interested and we'll get you set up.
skuwiki
We went to the Whipple Museum a while back and I was struck afterwards by the numbering system. Made me wonder if there's a Dewey Decimal System for objects. I've still not found out if there is.
Then, the other day, I was reading on the Rattle blog about some work they've been doing with the Science Museum, building an ObjectWiki. It's a splendid thing, you can see how it provides the perfect framework for a slew of ideas and memories and images to be added to a particular thing in their collection.
It struck me that this would be a perfect unproduct idea; a way for a maker of things to help add value to the things after they've been bought. An easy way to add serviceness and community to an object.
Imagine if every product you owned had an associated wiki.
I'm imagining a unique page - maybe one per sku (which seems like the smallest practical unit of consumed stuff) - that allows people to add all the basic info you need to know but also pictures of their use of the thing, stories of it etc. And, presumably tagging and scraping would let the page build itself from the stuff that people scatter around the web. Wouldn't that be handy?
It's like there's an unrecorded moment in the life of an object - the time when it's actually being owned and used.
Before we buy it we can talk about it loads and there's a huge attentional focus on it, once it passes into history it gets collected, accessioned, notated and recorded. In the middle, during the actual lived life of the object, not so much.
The people who make those products aren't interested in that process until it's time to sell us another object. Once we've bought something we're mostly on our own with it until it's time for the researchers and archivists and museum-keepers to start thinking about what it all meant to us. They (the museum people) are thinking fascinating things about how to collect and share what they know about things.
Wouldn't it be nice if we (the makers and owners of things) could hand them some of the stories we tell about our things.
Or does it already exist somewhere and I've missed it?
Some of the practical things (specs, links to the latest drivers, service information) are currently done on wikipedia, but it tends to be encyclopedicly dry, and some of it is obviously done on review sites and blogs and the like, but that tends to be a bit of a nightmare to find/navigate.
And there are projects like ProductWiki and Amapedia but they seem to be more about consumption than ownership. They're more about 'should I buy it?'
And there are fascinating thoughts based on barcodes but that's more to do with 'how was it made?'.
And Fiona was kind enough to point out Thinglink, which is close in a lot of ways, and a brilliant idea, but seems to be more about assertion of ownership rather than stories of living with the thing.
I'm thinking of something that's more about 'how do I make the most of it?', 'what's everyone else doing with it?' 'this is my life with this thing'. I'm after the human stuff, the memories, the associations, the stories, the material that ends up on fansites and curated by communities.
I guess there's no reason why all this stuff couldn't be aggregated in a single place, behind a single tag / identifier. It'd be like a sort of proto-spime. And there'd be nothing wrong with multiple tags and tagging systems as long as they knew about each other.
Wouldn't it be nice if the product page for some particular sku wasn't just an out of date features video, some driver updates and some broken links to extinct marketing campaigns, what if it reflected the lived life of the product, told by the people who'd bought it?
Annalee Newitz writes this in her essay in Evocative Objects: "Harvard professor of clinical psychiatry John Ratey says that because our brains link ideas together in memory, we are particularly well suited to the act of suffusing an object with emotional value." (here) It'd be nice if someone or something collected those suffusions.
watching the internet
I've never much liked David Bowie, but I loved the scenes with all the TV monitors in The Man Who Fell To Earth. For someone growing up in a land of three TV channels, it was a splendid vision of informational abundance. Imagine all those channels; you'd never, ever get bored. (That didn't quite work out as planned did it?) And I've loved that wall of monitors / control room feel ever since. The TV room at Graceland, Cy Ogle's sphere of monitors in Interface, this lovely control room in Appleseed Ex Machina, or the one at Fermilab, or at Cyworld. Or the genius of LiveNewsCameras.
Maybe that's why the surveillance/CCTV idea is still so pervasive. People like the idea of control rooms.
Anyway, I've started with a tangent. I didn't really mean to be writing about control rooms. I wanted to write about making glance-able web stuff, specifically a full-screen twitter. If I'm working at home I normally have laptop on my lap, feet on drum stool and a samsung monitor on the table connected to a mac mini showing some combination of itunes, twitterific or the telly. (None of this focus stuff for me, I like to be distracted). And, the screensaver is that RSS twitter combo described by Iain. I like twitter sitting in that bit of my attention, in the corner of the room, glanceable, but not pinging at me like twitterific or twhirl do on my desktop. I want it to be a fullscreen ambient thing, not a peering closely thing. And the Apple RSS screensaver is too slow to update, and too small and swirly to read across the room.
So, I'm wondering if there's a fullscreen twitter application. Something as big, legible and self-starting as twistori. Something I can configure for my friend stream, big type you can read from across the room, nice and clean, no need to be able to write twitters into it. I'm not alone in wanting this but I can't seem to find anything that quite does it. I'm probably being stupid, I'm sure I've read about this sort of thing being done at conferences. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Actually, I suspect we might be entering a phase where it makes sense to build internet things you watch rather than do, things for the other monitor, things that replace the TV you're not really paying attention to with a spare monitor you're not really paying attention to. Like Chumby widgets. Or Poke NYC's upl8.tv. There are lots of little apps that will pop something in the corner of my screen, or scroll it along the bottom but I don't want that level of distraction. I have to filter that cognitively. I want something that pops up in large-type on another screen, across the room, something I can filter physically, by not looking at it. Things in the corner of my screen are only pretending to be peripheral, they're still too close. I want my distractions further away, but bigger. Actually, that's not a bad brief for the internet in general is it? - make it further away, but bigger.
I don't know what I'm saying now. I'll stop.