If the Mashup Awards are any indicator we are far from the future. I believe web application hybrids (or mashups) will mitigate, aggregate, and supply returns all our information retrieval needs when we eventually move away from paging through text-based preview links in a single channel of discovery. Wikipedia, feeds, and dynamic dashboards are training a new generation of digital natives to expect information to be composited onto one platform, and why shouldn’t it? And yet, although I’ve seen some stand out mashups this year, a majority of those getting press seem to extend off of Twitter. Snooze.
Here are my Mashup Awards, ending with the meta-Mashup to the third degree
NY Art Beat Bubble Machine
Paul Hagon’s Then & Now
Map of Amazon (hint: once you’re there double click)
TubeGraph (Kayne & Obama Mashup Mashup)
via Private Circulation
Private Circulation: a renegade publication meant for 32 lb paper, archived decidedly nowhere save the email boxes of those who have subscribed for free, reminds us that we have, at times, chosen luddite language to articulate the potential of social media. With Philip K. Dick’s estate suing Google for using the name Android, and Apple looking to H.G. Wells for nomenclature, I wonder if linguistic nostalgia is important to making today’s Electric Sheep seem more like dreams come true.
via the NYTimes
“According to the IT staff, the space station is equipped with 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops and 32 Lenovo ThinkPad T61p devices. The laptops are all connected via Wi-Fi access points…The Internet connection is also relatively speedy. The Astronauts have connections speeds as high as 3Mbps up and 10Mbps down, which is comparable to most home DSL connections.”
–Bits 1/22/10
Cooliris: a new 3d image wall plug-in that allows you gorgeous, high-speed, gesture-sensitive spacial navigation of image search returns. Honestly, it’s kind of blowing my mind, although one could argue it belongs to the already well developed “cover-flow” model or the iPhone “touch and flick” generation.
Why limp through 20 pages of google images (next, next, next), when you can whip down a wall of all your options erstwhile rotating, enlarging and culling metadata?
Below is a screenshot from my search of the NY Public Library Digital Gallery, although perhaps the more meta example would have been my google image search for “Cooliris” which I navigated using Cooliris to find the picture above. My keyword on NYPL was “romance.”
A kind of dorky demo in video form here.
In February’s Harper’s, Jaron Lanier—the man who coined the phrase “virtual reality”—uses a new phrase with sound bite potential. “Oracle illusion” as defined by Lanier, is the super-human validity attributed to text when authorship is suppressed, such as it is on sites like Wikipedia.
Concurrently, it seems WikiScanner, the brainchild a Virgil Griffith (a PhD candidate at Caltech’s Computation and Neural Systems department), is about to roll out its version 2.0. The project links the IP addresses of corporate companies to Wikipedia edits—so that effectually you can see when, for example, Kmart has edited their own entry or others.
via http://virgil.gr/
Artist Andres Laracuente, my partner, has long wanted to make a piece using images of Vladimir Putin’s daughters. The elusive offspring have managed to avoid being photographed on a scale that seems incomprehensible in today’s paparazzi-fueled celebrity culture. According to Andres, only two images of Maria and Yekaterina Putin as adults are publicly available online.
Fortunately for Andres, 3D morphable face animation has advanced to such a degree that its now possible to create a realistic video from any 2D photo; the technology can used to animate a photo’s subject while altering their expression, weight and illumination. You can even make a female subject “a man” and vice versa. See this video, made by Volker Blanz & Thomas Vetter at the MPI for Biological Cybernetic’s, for more info.
Right now I’m interested in:
