A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende. The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia.…
You know, I’ve loved Firefox for a long, long time. I can’t live without my tabbed browsing, I’m literally lost without it, but with Firefox 2.0 someone at Mozilla has totally dropped the ball when it comes to the most compelling feature I use Firefox for, and that’s the tabs feature. —Duncan Riley —2 things…
One day when we’re literally halfway through SQ4, Mark and I were called into Ken’s office. We were asked what we thought about using the (dumbass) point-and-click interface that they were using, in I guess it was King’s Quest 5 then, and what we thought about putting it in SQ4. We said we wanted to…
I’ll return to my analysis of Kairos as a project identity later. But first I’d like to consider one other aspect of Jerz’s critique–attention to audience. Kairos’s design (referring to Issue 5.1), Jerz says tongue-in-cheek, “has drastically improved,” making it “no longer an easy target.” The only mention of audience in Jerz’s critique is when…
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. —Jakob Nielsen —Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (Useit.com) Similar:Former student: "I remember sometimes being annoyed with all of our blogging assignments, …A third alum in the last few…
Is this the way we will all be ‘enjoying’ our television programmes and computer games in the future? —One giant step for home entertainment? (Daily Mail) This will exercise your neck muscles, that’s for sure. Wait a minute… someone forgot to put the flat broom head on top of that helmet. Ohh this makes me angry.…
The parser in Adventure is harder to use than most interactive fiction parsers, because this is the first of its type and fairly primitive. This is almost immediately evident when a user makes it to the building. One obvious thing to do would be to input “enter building;” doing so, however, returns the message “That’s…
That’s cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute. Here’s where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. —Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch) An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing…
Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I’ve fiddled with Flash before, but I haven’t yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed…
But it turns out that even when I try to live an Apple life, that is a pretty lousy experience too. How could that be, you say? The apparent point of Apple’s existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic…
Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to…
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has…
Having used the device for many hours, I found it to be a comfortable, pleasing way to read, after initial hesitance. And it’s a sharp-looking, techno-wow device with a durable feel. Its size, its screen, its general “thingness” were all appealing. But I love the feel, heft and smell of books, the tangible touch of…
Documents to Go and VersaMail Woes (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I love my Tungsten T3 handheld computer. I also love Documents to Go, which is bundled software that lets me edit files (mostly word processor, but also spreadsheet and slide show) on my handheld, and then synch my changes with the version of the file on my…
Firefox Upgrade 1.5.0.7 Resets Personal Settings (and keeps resetting them) (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My preferred web browser is Firefox, but this morning when I logged in, Firefox had upgraded itself automatically, and it wiped all my bookmarks and personal settings. I was able to reload the bookmarks pretty easily, but the darn thing is resetting to…
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. —F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Useit.com) Your goal as a web author is to put your best stuff in the hotspots. Obviously you can direct the user’s attention somewhat, using whitespace and graphics. But…
When I look back through my old journals and photos, I’m struck by how much travel has changed since 1994. These days, I take it for granted that the Internet keeps me in touch with friends and family, even from far-flung places like Mongolia and Patagonia; in 1994, contacting a single person from Montana or…
—Wired News: Star Trek Submissions (Flickr) What a cool idea! Wired News has created a Flikr account, and invited readers to sumit their Star Trek memorabilia photos, in preparation for Star Trek’s 40th anniversary. Similar:A 20 sq cm section of #steampunk #blender3d goodness. #blender3dartAestheticsOther than #StarTrek memes, my favorite part of the web is how it's…
—books.google.com Google’s latest offering is the ability to download full-text versions of out-of-copyright books, and to sample the contents of many other books. Similar:Social Media Companies Aren’t Liberal or Conservative. They’re capitalist.Facebook cares more about scalability—th…BusinessThis is about half of the #steampunk control panel details I've created in the past m…AestheticsThe Game (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch,…
—Crisis in the Middle East: Mapping the Conflict (Truth Laid Bear) While the computer-generated flyovers do help give me some sense of geography on those rare occasions when I watch TV news, I’m really never satisifed unless I can click, click, click. Try out this map — it’s really very useful for making sense of the…