Webilus.com :: le meilleur des images du web is a French web site that gathers images and visualizations of the web and computing culture. The image above, for example, compares e-mail collaboration to wiki collaboration showing how much more work it is to use e-mail.
The site is a blog curated by Frédéric COZIC and it has a widget you can install to see the most recent images on your blog.
I Hardly Know Her (IHKH) is an alternative way to view Flickr photostreams that is simple and effective. You just add your account name to “ihardlyknowher.com” – for example, my stream at geoffreyrockwell. Mouseover the images to get info, click to get a bigger one. Thanks to Peter O for this.
Pliny, the annotation and note management tool by John Bradley at King’s College London just got a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.
The Mellon Awards honour not-for-profit organisations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not-for-profit activities.
Pliny is free and you can try it out on the Mac or PC. John has thought a lot about how tools fit in the research process of humanists.
On the Independent I came across the interactive visualization above onMapping the crisis in Gaza. The visualization environment looks like your standard bubblegraph, but has lots of other features as you can see from the toolbar at the bottom. Here is another view:
The maps can be edited by users – they have wiki features for those who register accounts. In some ways they are communal mind maps. The software comes from Debategraph.org.
TouchGraph now has a Facebook Plugin that lets you visualize your friends and their location. Its an interesting example of what can be done with visualization of people and relationships.
Stan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.
If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature†of “space itself†then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)
That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)
These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars – or the people within the space (and persistent time.)
Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!
So … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM – see Lohr Free the Avatars – this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando – a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)
In A Brief History of Neon in New York Magazine I came across reference to Artkraft Strauss one of the first and most important makers of neon signs, ads and marquees. Artkraft Strauss dominated the design of neon signs for Times Square including the new year’s midnight ball-lowering. Artkraft Strauss is still around as a design and consulting company and they have a great archive of images of “100 years of commerce, design and Times Square celebrations”. It is a treasure of neon sign design in New York from the first days.
Newsknitter is a project that gathers news from RSS feeds and then generates a visualization that can then be knitted into a sweater. Check out the images of sweaters knitted. This project has been exhibited at Ars Electronica and is the work of two PhD candidates at Kunstuniversität Linz. At first the idea of machine knitted sweaters of text visualization sounds like a conceptual art work with no future, but as I think about it, the idea of just-in-time information being visualized and used to generate stable material objects like a sweater sounds timely. All sorts of objects could have their designs generated on the spot and on demand from information off the net. Why should data be only visualized and not materialized?
Just found this delightful, simple, slightly addictive text toy called Wordle.
This example is a big chunk of text from Corporate Ipsum, my new favourite dummy text generator.
Found at ouroboros.
I just noticed that Mac OS X has a RSS feed screensaver that shows headlines in spiraling columns. When you see an item you want to read you press a key and it opens the item. It is an interesting example of live text visualization. You can see it on YouTube – RSS Feed on my Screen saver.
The RSS Screensaver seems to be built in a visual programming language for the Mac called Quartz Composer. From the documentation and discussions online it sounds like something one can play with easily (when I have the time.)
What would an academic screen saver look like?