“web”
142 posts under this tag.
National unity? The whole point of America is that we’re the country where dissent is welcome. We’re a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people.
When out of dumb luck I found myself the owner of an advance-reading, not-for-sale copy of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother (Amazon, Facebook, Cory’s reading), due to be released this April the 29th, I knew I’d have to gulp it down in one rapt, sleepless night. Cory’s a writer worthy of that, but it was also, well, my first “scoop” ever.
It’s past 6am and I’ve done just that. And before crashing into bed I just want it out that it is Cory’s best novel yet. Science fiction about our present, with our current, unevenly distributed future only slightly jiggled. A novel about America after a terrorist attack bigger than 9/11 and the young hackers who rebel at the idiotic police state that ensues.
It made me feel I belonged to San Francisco, to California, more than ever. It was stomach churning and exhilarating and fun. Yeah, it can be a tad over-educational and preachy at times but just a tad and to its great merit it makes security topics accessible and immensely interesting. The teenage voice of the main characters is a gem (Cory has always shined in dialogue, the more technology mediated the better) and their sexual fumblings are so masterful and eerily accurate (to me, at least) that wistfulness tore me apart. It made me want to hack a new world.
An important book, sure to change many lives.
Believe.
I owe Bill for introducing me to Here comes another bubble, a fantastic parody on bay area culture that most of you will probably have seen by now but that I can’t just not put here because it’s pure genius.
The most interesting part for me was to discover how most every reference was familiar. At a recent Stanford conference on legal futures (ah, I love the bay area!) there was talk of how national newspapers created the national conscience needed for nations to emerge and how something similar may be happening with the web. This video definitely felt like that to me—somehow or other, thousand of miles away in Mexico’s center and having never visited it before, bay area culture became my culture.
I’m reminded of xkcd’s legendary comment: ”I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’”
Oh, and btw, that glib, charlatanish, bubble milking attitude parodied in the video was one big thing that kept me away from the bay area for a long time. While I have stumbled on it once in a while, it’s easy enough to ignore and often comes not out of guile but out of Sturgeon’s law and just how damn hard it is to predict in advance what will end up being important.
Who of all the wise could have foreseen it? Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know before the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
PicLens is the breathtaking image-viewing browser extension (now compatible with Safari, Firefox, and IE!) that has caused some deserved news furore lately. It frees photos from browser-bound Google Images or Flickr pages in favor of a fly-able, zoom-able 3D wall. It’s like nothing you’ve seen, a masterful technical accomplishment and an eye-opener of the rich, delightful interactions that are just now becoming web possible. Go play with it and gape and gawk! (It works particularly well with Mac two-finger trackpads.) Interesting times for interaction design!
I’ve been meaning to learn me some physics since forever and I think I’ve finally found the right textbook in Motion Mountain: a beautiful, massive (1498 pages!), free book on physics.
The brainchild of one Christoph Schiller, after some 17 years it’s in its 21st edition (though still unfinished!) and has been enriched by the suggestions and contributions of the web community. Elegantly type-set, full of multimedia (graphs, photos, animations, tables, videos), problems, experiments, and excellent quotations (in the original Latin, Greek, German or French), the book covers pretty much the whole of physics with a passionate, philosophical approach (there’s a whole subchapter on language and many a Wittgenstein quotation!). Forget condescending, dull textbooks, this is one man who thinks (and argues! see subchapter 39) that “exploring physics is more fun than making love” (“Sex is the physics urge sublimated.”).
Truly breathtaking. One of the best web finds in quite some time. Download the book and flip through it just to marvel at one’s man labor of love.
Boy, boy, boy. Syntax across languages, a massive compilation of programming language features, is so damn cool, so damn useful, so damn usable in its text-only simplicity, in its many angles to approach the collection (sorted by language or by categories, or all in one big page). If you’re a programmer you must bookmark this. Now. (If only a similar thing existed for general languages…)
All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned schoolmasters, and vast libraries; and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying as we see at this day there is. Nor must any adventure henceforward to come in public, or present himself in company, that hath not been pretty well polished in the shop of Minerva. I see robbers, hangmen, freebooters, tapsters, ostlers, and such like, of the very rubbish of the people, more learned now than the doctors and preachers were in my time.
Francis Rabelais, Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And Sayings Of Gargantua And Pantagruel, see eemadge #334
SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.
I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.
Update 11/Dec/07
Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)
In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.
But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.
Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.
A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.
But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).
You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.
Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.
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