Following a friend's recent interest in Thing Theory, I dug up my copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things from the storeroom (not quite a junkspace but definitely a pile of space-junk). Leafing through I was reminded of the array of (typo)graphical techniques employed by the book's designer Lorraine Wild, with the visual linkage device above being my favourite.
I see this as a form of what I would call augmented textuality; a superposition of layered semantic relationships on text. Having recently read the thought-provoking iA article on bringing web design concepts to newspapers, I'm wondering if the web couldn't learn something from book designers in terms of augmentation. In this example, I think there's scope for a javascript-based implementation to draw Bezier curves between anchors in HTML using canvas to achieve the visual linkage effect.
Wild also uses type variations in a single text body to convey meaning, with a number of typefaces reserved for particular neologisms or words imbued with specialist definitions in Sterling's lexicon. I find it a bit naive/obnoxious, depends on your typographic stance. The web-based alternative might be to re-examine link typologies, since the consistency mantra in web design tends to crowd out attempts at applying multiple link styles to a single body, creating a homogeneity of linkage on a site-by-site basis that is bemusing if you take a step back. With regards to keywords and specially loaded (technical) terms however, I probably prefer the approach taken by the English language version of Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis,
The text of which possesses a good rhythm, induced by both typographic and linguistic techniques. A mix of bold and italicised emphasis abound, the former reserved for words with significantly enhanced meanings in the hands of Lefebvre. It's simple but makes a difference. That the book itself is on rhythm makes it doubly effective.
A disproportionate amount — disproportionate given how much online text I've read daily over the past decade — of the ideas that have influenced me over the years have come from books or essays. A lot of that no doubt has to do with copyright and IP, but some of it is down to the forms of communication themselves. Whereas the web has naturally gravitated towards networked/collaborative knowledge systems, the essay, in contrast, is standalone and demands sustained attention.
The essay and the academic research paper are still amongst the foremost textual knowledge communication formats around, despite having a fairly antagonistic relationship with the web, the former seemingly sidelined by the blog post and the latter still published as a PDF or print artefact. I'll reserve my ideas on modern research publishing for the web (itself such a huge topic) for another time, but I simply think there's scope to improve on these knowledge forms in Webby ways, without stripping them of their fundamental offerings. For example, I would love to see a web publishing engine dedicated to the essay form.
Here's a quick implementation of some crude augmented textuality techniques using HTML5 and Javascript, applied to a Rem Koolhaas essay, the hyperbolic diatribe, Junkspace, from 2001:
→ View Augmented Junkspace Demo
The techniques are completely web native (though you'll need recent versions of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view them). You could argue this is no longer an essay but a thinly disguised term frequency vector smattered with relational graphics, a set of wordnets or a pliable series of strings. Perhaps. I would apologise to Rem if it wasn't a calculated attempt at altering the state of the text through superposition, an uninvited act of post-production.
If you're an IE user, I guess you can make do with this graphic for now:
Most Fridays we hold talks known as 'osmotics' at Last.fm. Their purpose is to share understanding about the various things that are going on in different departments; an open session which anyone can use to present recent work. It's a response to our growth, as it's now impossible to know what's happening throughout the company at any given point in time.
A few weeks back I presented some of the work we've been doing on interaction path analysis. As web developers we're completely spoilt for usage information on our apps, and interaction histories are sitting in our apache logs the entire time. We've been using tools to mine these and better understand real interaction flows on our site, in order to improve our understanding of common use cases.
You'll often find that your users don't use your software exactly as you designed for. That's natural, and as web developers we need to be equipped to observe these flows and adapt/optimize our software accordingly. As Stewart Brand observed of buildings, so too good software should learn from usage patterns rather than working against them. A good app should flow.
We use a tool suite from Omniture - the pricing may well be out of reach of most startups, but anyone can mine apache logs to get similar information. Bear in mind the presentation assumes no technical knowledge and was prepared in about 20 minutes - it's more of a lightning talk than anything. I've blacked out some sensitive bits of information.
→ Interaction Path Analysis - slides with annotations (1.1MB)
The flickr code blog has an article on how Flickr is integrating Last.fm gig names into its photo pages using machine tags. We've been including their photos on our event pages for a while now. I head up public API dev at Last.fm, so it's nice to see both systems playing well with each other as a result of our recent API upgrades. It's how the web should work.
This talk is worth a look. Forgive the title (which is a misnomer) and the way it frames REST; equating it to feeds designed to be consumed by polling clients - Newtonian physics to PubSub's quanta (poorly formed analogy). REST and RPC simply are suited to other types of services (I fail to see how RPC over XMPP is useful unless the time to process a request is long and callbacks are required). The talk goes on to use concrete examples that illustrate how hijacking Jabber servers and XMPP for generic push messaging using a pubsub architecture is far more efficient for lots of web services outside of IM that are currently pull-based. They even manage to fudge oAuth in for protected resources. It's the kind of pragmatism that smacks of real life problems solved (I salute).
I'd be very surprised if Last.fm's 'now playing' notifications didn't switch over to pubsub very soon.
This is the year in which hAudio ushers in the era of distributed music publishing and playback on the web. As enthusiastic as I am about OpenId, oAuth and DataPortability (the emerging protocols of the distributed social web), it's microformats that are going to be the building blocks of this shift in the short term. Microformats can be seen as "the nanotech of the semantic web" (Jeremy Keith) and the metaphor for usage is one of proteins and surface-binding. My hope is that this year microformats will have a big impact on media publishing. It's more than a hope because I will be dedicating some of my time to help make it happen.
Download the free AJAX Control Toolkit which includes over 30 AJAX controls including rounded corners...
- Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express website.
Uncanny similarity in conduct between Microsoft, Scientology and Neo-con Republicans here, all going ahead and creating their own new realities. Conclusion: positions of such power allow organisations to disregard the actual state of the universe. By this logic, Microsoft is purely an ideology machine and no longer a technology company.
Yahoo! is the Xerox of Web 2.0
- Someone (ok me) at the Last.fm kitchen table, whilst discussing Ian Rogers' presentation, Winners Leverage Scale
Ian Rogers is VP of Product Development at Yahoo! Music.
It has long been my plan to call it a day at the blog after five years, but more recently I've decided to draw a line under all my online contributions... Why am I going "offline"? I think I've explored every aspect of the experience and that now it's time to do something different, not necessarily something public either, the shape of which I'm still figuring out...
- Woebot, Jan 2008
Woebot has long been one of my favourite music writers (since 2004 or so). He will be sorely missed. To get a flavour of his writing try posts like Post Punk obscurities judged unfairly by the cover, A Pre-History of British Electronic Music, Prog(ish) or his sprawling Jazz retrospective. His archive is a goldmine of commentary on overlooked music. He also set up the popular forum Dissensus. Best of luck with new projects Matthew.
How others compared you recently: "Who is hotter", you won 0 and lost 1 time.
- 'Compare People', Facebook App Email Notification
Thank you Facebook application platform, for all that you have done for me in 2007.
I wrote a piece for the New Statesman this week on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy. It's pretty short and doesn't delve too deep, but such are the limitations of print. You can read it in full here.
The 'Bundles' view in Zim gives you a simple way of grouping outlines.
Dan from Plan B sports an immaculately tailored youth chosen to represent my selling out.
I'm joining social music service last.fm as a full-time developer in a couple of weeks over at their new office in old st (it still looks like a mess - story + pics). As those who know me will confirm, i have views on social software and how culture can suck less under new classification, distribution and publishing models, so i'm really looking forward to getting stuck into moderation strategies, web services, folksonomy and data mining. Particularly psyched to find individuals i respect (e.g. Joi Ito) among the investors.
It should be a tremendous year for last.fm. Hopefully i can play my part in that.
If you'd like to help me build a Dymaxion house in second life - click the 'find' button down the bottom, click on the 'people' tab in the window that pops up and type in 'bucky'.
