Keven Steele: Photo.menu

Steele Photo of TorontoKevin Steele’s Photo Menu page has a large collection of small photo essays by Steele. He has a nice clean touch – small numbers of images arranged on a white background using repetitions of different elements.

Steele is a designer who cofounded Mackerel an innovative early Toronto multimedia company that Cory Doctorow says,

“Together, they built the first iteration of a project that would go on to virtually create the market for multimedia in Canada. They laughed. They smoked. They blew a bunch of doobs.”

Previously I blogged his new site for Smackerel where he and David Goff have some great essays on early multimedia – see Mackarel Smackarel.

XFN – XHTML Friends Network

XFN – XHTML Friends Network is a way to tag relationships. Here is an example:

<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...

The attribute “rel” uses a set of simple keywords to describe the relationship between the author of the page linking from to the person represented by the page (blog or home page) linking to. Interestingly, XFN was designed to only allow positive or neutral relationships.

What can you do with XFN? Well … in principle it will allow the graphing of relationships between people representative sites. rubhub.com is an XFN lookup engine to which you can add your page and then, once it has crawled your site you can see the relationships linking out or in.

I discovered this playing with Word Press which has incorporated it into its links/blogroll feature.

The Flâneur and the Arcade: Hypertext on Walter Benjamin’s, The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk: Reading in the Ruins by Giles Peaker is a hypertext project that brings together passages from Benjamin’s The Arcades project on themes like the the flâneur and the prostitute. Benjamin’s project is about fragmentary spectacle in the city, it is itself a collection of fragments, and the hypertext by Peaker re-represents thus. In some sense, this pre-modern moment of the flâneur and the arcade, is the urban precursor to the liesurely browser in the arcade of the web – watching, and through his (her) blog, posing for others.

The arcades were replaced after the convulsions of 1848 in the Second Empire by the great halls of industry of modernity according to David Harvey in Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003). The arcades were scaled up to the modern exhibition spaces from Les Halles to the Crystal Palace. The Paris arcades, thanks to critical interest Benjamin, have become a way to think through the spectacle of the hypertextual (and therefore fragmentary) web. Thanks to Marcel O’Gorman for pointing this intersection out to me.

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine is another service that lets you create custom search engines that only search a “Searchroll” set of domains/sites. You can have multiple Searchrolls and you can create small Rollyo search panels for your site.

They are onto something, especially if they allowed hierarchies of shared (public) Searchrolls. The down side of the service is the limit on sites you can include (25) and the advertising that shows up in the results.

Here is one I created form my personal website www.geoffreyrockwell.com:


Sophos: US has the highest Spam output

US Spam Decline Stalled in Q1 according to a Sophos press release. This press summarizes where spam is coming from – 23.2 % originates in the US. What is interesting is the growth in European zombie networks that are advertised. The press release links to a picture of a Russian ad advertising services. Most spam is now coming from zombies or bots. In effect we are sending ourselves spam.

The United States accounts for the highest spam output as a country, but together China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan account for almost half of the worldwide spam output, making Asia the top offending continent. In addition when ranked by continent, Europe has now surpassed North America and has risen to the second position on the chart with a marked rise from Q1 2006 due to increased zombie activity.

If it can be shown that the poor security design of Windows is responsible for so many machines being hijacked by malware, does that mean Microsoft bears some responsibility for all the spam?

The Pool: Float Your Ideas

Pool ProcessThe Pool is a networked collaboration environment that presents a visualization of proposed projects distributed by approval and recognition. The idea is that people can propose ideas, approaches to ideas, release implementations of the approaches and then reviews. I guess that as ideas mature they will migrate from the lower left to upper rights. It only works on selected browsers.

This online environment is an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. (From “learn more” -> “purpose”)

GAM3R 7H30RY

GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 is a networked book in progress by McKenzie Wark. It is hosted by The Institute for the Future of the Book as a “thinking out loud” project. They have an interesting interface for creating a structured book (chapters with paragraphs as cards). There is a syndicated version, search, comment area and documentation on the interface. I’m not sure why they didn’t use a wiki with plug ins and will have to think about what is missing from wikis other than a stack of cards look.

Digital Humanities 2006

I’m at the Digital Humanities 2006 conference this week. With Marcel O’Gorman and Rafael Fajardo, I participated in a session on Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts:

Why the Digital Humanities Need the Digital Arts
Marcel O’Gorman, Humanities Research or Digital Art?
Geoffrey Rockwell, Interactive Matter in the Arts and Humanities
Rafael Fajardo, Videogames and Critical Practice: case studies and a potential future for digital humanities

Marcel gave a great talk going from a discussion of his installation Spleen House to theorizing about design through Derrida. Rafael showed interesting games he and his students have developed that mimic games like Frogger but are about crossing the Mexican/US border.

McClelland and Stewart Ltd: Catalogue

bksecrets.jpgI just finished The Book of Secrets by M. G. Vassanji who spoke at our convocation this June. A layered book about, as the title suggests, the secrets carried in journals, notes, and archives.

it is a magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits; … Yes, we should steal this book, if we could, take back our souls, our secrets from him. …

Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows. (p. 1-2)

Vassanji uses the novel to take back East Africa from the colonial stories, to tell about the English as if they were the natives seen through the eyes of the Indian shopkeepers, teachers and later immigrants.

Vassanji, M. G., The Book of Secrets, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994.

Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive

I just came across a peculiar dictionary, the Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. It is a dictionary of words of Indian (and other) origin that would have been used by the English in India. It is a dictionary of the Raj and traderoutes that is full of surprises. It is a work of its time, published just at the end of the 19th century. The title, “Hobson-Johnson” is an example of the colloquial terms covered:

HOBSON-JOBSON , s. A native festal excitement; a tamƒÅsha (see TUMASHA); but especially the Moharram ceremonies. This phrase may be taken as a typical one of the most highly assimilated class of Anglo-Indian argot, and we have ventured to borrow from it a concise alternative title for this Glossary. It is peculiar to the British soldier and his surroundings, with whom it probably originated, and with whom it is by no means obsolete, as we once supposed. My friend Major John Trotter tells me that he has repeatedly heard it used by British soldiers in the Punjab; and has heard it also from a regimental Moonshee. It is in fact an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram — “YƒÅ Hasan! YƒÅ Hosain!’

Alas they don’t have the word “dylok” – supposed to be an Indian-East-African version of “dialogue” – used for variety shows and drama.
Update: I just discovered that this is “back-ended” by The ARTFL Project.