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Are you a heavy user of Gmail? It's handy to have so much information in one place isn't it? Phone numbers, addresses, logins for various websites, and so on, and all nicely searchable too. But what if your account got disabled? It happens, and it happened to someone close to me once. She had to effectively reboot her online life. It's worth taking steps to make sure your gmail information is backed up locally.
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Collection of underwater photographs, including beluga whales and a Bengal tiger looking ready to take on a shark
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links for 2008-11-07
Posted November 7, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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links for 2008-11-01
Posted November 1, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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A somewhat racy exercise in visualisation, using heatmaps and other techniques to display statistical information about erogenous zones, common nipple patterns and the occurrence of body parts in song titles, by genre. The hand is most mentioned in blues songs, apparently, while hip-hop artists are obsessed with the behind.
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This 3D Flash site utilises a visual metaphor based around the solar system to display tag relationships from Flickr. Related tags "orbit" the core tag and matching photographs form the surfaces of the "planets".
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A 3D web browser that I've yet to try.
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A useful online tool for extracting audio from video files embedded in websites
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links for 2008-10-31
Posted October 31, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Splashup is a browser-based image editing tool that mimics the functionality of Photoshop.
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BBC News feature on typography in cinema art. You've probably seen this already…
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links for 2008-10-20
Posted October 20, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Review of an iPhone application released by the Barack Obama election campaign. The application does more than you'd expect – rather than just download speeches and videos it integrates with the phone's address book and GPS to identify contacts living in battleground states and the location of the nearest Obama office. It indicates that the campaign "gets" digital communications to a large extent and one would hope that this level of savvy will persist in a possible Obama presidency
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links for 2008-10-11
Posted October 11, 2008 in links | 1 Comment so far
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Samples and reviews of a number of clear, monospaced fonts suitable for programmers specifically and typography fans in general.
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links for 2008-10-01
Posted October 1, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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A clearly-designed interactive graphic allows you to flip between October 2007 and September 2008, seeing the difference in market capitalisation among 29 financial services firms. Well, there are 29 to begin with, but only 27 by September 2008…
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Bookmarking this for future listening, as I really enjoyed the explanatory post. The producer's now dead father made a number of background recordings back in 1977, when the producer was eight and the marriage of his parents was experiencing problems. Apparently the calm and relaxed nature of the recordings belies the emotional situation of the time.
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A Flash animation visualising the spread of Walmart across the US from its inception in 1968. To paraphrase Jamais Casco, it's a powerful visual argument for treating the study of markets as a form of epidemiology.
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links for 2008-09-23
Posted September 23, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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From Strange Maps, cartography meets typography as a pair of Brazilian designers explore what the world would look like left- or right-aligned.
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This site collects infographics of a slightly unusual or quirky nature, or with a particularly pleasing aesthetic. Recent posts include a graph charting the changing length of US #1 songs since 1950 and the sub-neighbourhoods of Greenpoint in Brooklyn.
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links for 2008-09-22
Posted September 22, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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Slightly bizarre 3D shoot-em-up from Japan, quite similar to Space Harrier and so on. Built using Papervision, it runs in the browser and is pretty addictive
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Monday morning links
Posted September 15, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
This weekend everything here was moved from brelson.com/blog to brelson.com, and a couple of links summaries were missed as a result. So I’ve decided to post them manually instead…
Planet of the Lemur: 10 Beautiful Little-Known Species
Here are some excellent pictures of lemurs. My favourite is the crowned lemur.Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
The titular concept of sociologist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book “Future Shock” was a predicted social reaction against a period of accelerated technological change. Or, in other words, social and technological change leading to a large section of society with a feeling of disconnection and disorientation. The author of this article, Adam Greenfield, had always imagined ‘future shock’ as a sudden outbreak, like a flu epidemic, but in this article, whose sentiments I wholly sympathise with, he speculates that this condition may have been slowly starting to manifest itself for several years now, and that Sarah Palin is among its prime exemplars.BBC NEWS | Magazine | Compact and bijou – the slums of tomorrow?
The shiny, aspirational and modern-looking blocks of flats dotting the modern skylines of suburban London are, once you’re inside, cramped and claustrophic, and have strong potential as the cornerstones of future slums. JG Ballard was right, etc.Local paper ‘tweets’ the funeral of 3-year old boy killed in ice cream shop
“When Twitter goes wrong” – a bizarre case involving a reporter posting updates from the funeral of a 3-year-old. There’s something intrinsically trivial and quotidian about microblogging in the same way as there is about text messaging, which is possibly the reason why the headline of this feature alone triggered a confused/repulsed response on my part. I should add though that I’m also faintly repulsed by the tone this article takes in its final paragraph.Social Networking Watch: Friendster, Kent Lindstrom – CEO Interview
To be honest I’d assumed Friendster must have died a death after its explosive growth in 2004-2005 was bogged down by general infrastructural fail. But in fact Friendster lives on and is the number one social network in Asia, with loads of users in Malaysia, Singapore, Korea and so on. A happy ending!The end of the beginning of Web 2.0 – broadstuff
“In other words, the current generation of ’2.0′ technology is becoming settled – reliable, predictable etc – and, well, boring. That layer of bedrock is done, and people are using it for the next layer…”Tags: links | Comments (0)
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links for 2008-09-12
Posted September 12, 2008 in links | No Comments so far
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I only spend around 20-30% of my time working from home but can still sympathise with the sense of social alienation it would lead to if I did it much more. This article contains links to co-working initiatives for digital nomads who miss the social interactions of an office. I can see myself getting involved in such schemes if my working situation were to change and I was spending more time at home – my kitchen could serve as a comfortable office for three or four people, I reckon
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Marissa Mayer of Google posts an insightful piece about where search might go in the next 10 years or more. Among the suggested directions are ideas coming from ubiquitous computing (the wearable device that continually runs searches for words it picks up in your conversations) as well as less far-fetched notions such as location-sensitive or rich media search. I get the feeling, however, that for a lot of these ideas, there's a pay-off between usefulness and privacy. For example, if Google knows where I am it can give me a much more useful answer to the query "sainsburys opening times". But do I want it to know where I am? Personally I anticipate that people will be less hung up on privacy than we might suspect – the recent past has shown that people are more than happy to surrender personal details as long as there's a tangible benefit for doing so…
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Interesting in-depth case study involving Amazon's Mechanical Turk. "Feed the Animals" is an album comprising samples from over 250 tracks. Andy Baio wanted to carry out some analysis on them and so went to Mechanical Turk. What follows is a fairly complex exercise in data aggregation and visualisation of data such as what years were most frequently sampled and how far through tracks samples were introduced. It makes me tempted to investigate Mechanical Turk further (and perhaps carry out a similar analysis on a mix I helped produce called All Cylinders).
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