I ♥ data visualization. Part of it is because there’s a lot of interesting design, but also because it gets at new ways to trying to understand complex systems and environments. If nothing else, it forces me to think about stuff in new ways.
I re-discovered a site this morning, Visual Complexity, and it made me want to share a list of faves — not only of collections, but some nice examples as well:
Common Craft has a great video explaining RSS in Plain English.
It’s funny, while I’ve been aware of and been an advocate for rss for years, I wasn’t a strong personal user until probably about a year ago. There was something about going to a website and seeing the design and and general experience that was really important to me. It still is; I’m a bit of a snob and aesthetics mean a lot.
But, at some point, trying to keep up with more than 50-75 sites on a regular basis ended up being pretty time consuming and using an aggregator to start watching feeds just made good sense. Right now I have about 175 feeds that I mostly follow (although it’s really easy to get behind on some high-volume feeds) and I feel like I get a lot more throughput. It’s still up to me to find the signal, but at the end of the day, signal strength is still larger than it used to be.
Now, I just need to work on the strategy of bringing the utility of rss feeds into our organization to a suite of folks that already feel overwhelmed with technology. Look! Here’s more, newer technology that will, um, reduce your tech load…
We got the Printed Circuit Boards back from the fab shop last week and I spent a few days this week inserting all of the components and getting things soldered up. They turned out great, and our design of wiring a couple in series works like a charm. It was the first real soldering project I’ve ever done, and I’ve learned the very valuable lesson that wires and components can get really hot during the soldering process. It’s also incredibly gratifying to watch the solder soak up into the little holes and around the wires.
So, this generation is for our next prototype table in which we start to work out projector angles, size of mirrors for the bounced image, and more of the wiring. Oh, and also hopefully starting to work out how to keep more of the IR actually in the table rather than also illuminating an area above and below the plane of the surface. Hopefully just some baffling or something, but we’ll see.
In any case, I’m really proud of our PCBs and they look like they’re going to be a great solution. I was expecting them to come back green, so I was a little surprised, but I’m still psyched with the end result.
I get a kick out of IMA’s (Indianapolis Museum of Art) tagline — It’s My Art. Among a bunch of things that they’re doing is reaching out to the community and creating videos of what art means to people. I like it. They’re directly involving their community and capturing a diversity of opinions. And, while there’s nothing groundbreaking here in the responses, I think it’s a great example of a museum making their visitors part of the experience.
Hopefully the series keeps growing and they cover new topics in the future.
Someone asked me earlier today what Web 2.0 is. There’s a lot of stuff out there that could be called Web 2.0, but the most succinct way I have to describe it is like this:
The first iteration of the web was about creating destinations. A virtual exhibit, or cool music and photos, or good articles. Web 2.0 is all that, but more importantly it’s about creating what’s in-between.
It’s about creating that in-between stuff whether it be a type of interaction, a way of connecting different resources, or creating community.
One of the things that was a predominant theme at last week’s Museums & The Web was about developing Web 2.0 (with a focus on community building). I can’t find my notes so I can’t give attribution (whoever you were smart person), but one simple statement made was along the lines of:
Community grows where there is a community
A simple reminder that you can’t just expect a community to emerge or simply seed the beginnings of a community, but you actually need to be engaged and help foster that community. You need to keep tending it in order to see any tangible results for quite some time before it can self-sustain.
And, having been a member of any number of BBSs (what’s the plural of BBS?) a decade or two ago, that was always the case. People needed to work at creating community.
I’m at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco this week and today I chaired the session on Tagging & Terms — essentially looking at some of the issues around tagging and opportunities that present themselves as a result of tagging. I’ve been a huge supporter of user-contributed tagging for some time as part of the Steve project which is a multi-institution collaboration to create a suite of tagging tools and open source software that allows users to describe artworks for museum in a variety of differently deployable models.
Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum (great blog, btw) has been a leader in the museum web community with the things they’ve been pushing over the last couple of years. His presentation today focused on some of the real benefits that they’ve realized from their own tagging implementation. In particular, they’re finding users explore portions of their collection that aren’t actually on display and finding many new entry points into their content. Reading his paper presents a compelling set of positive experience and is worth a read.
One of the things he said during his talk was:
Search tracking is more powerful than tagging
I agree. I particularly like it because it reminds me that some of the deepest moments of understanding come from just watching how people do something. You don’t always need to build deliberate tools that interrupt a user’s experience to get at really good results.
Bruce has written beautifully on our use of macs for video playback and the reasons why we do so. I just want to add my view point on using them and why I think its a real advantage to what we’re doing. There are two main things that I think sets using macs apart from my usual route of using Windows based PCs. The first is the Mac’s relationship with Quicktime. It’s easy to use Quicktime for video/audio playback and control all aspects of that playback, but honestly thats what you would expect. The real benefit comes when you realize that Quicktime is so ingrained in the Mac and in mac culture that your not going to go wrong with it. The Windows equivilant would be a .bmp file, You know how any Office program can handle a .bmp file. Well macs can handle quicktime in the same way except Quicktime evolves and doesn’t suck. New stuff comming out of Apple is made to work with Quicktime, and stuff ported over from the unix world is made to work with it too. In fact, in some cases thats what the bulk of the work is for a unix port of video software. Which brings me to my second point of using macs. OS X has unix underpinnings and that can be extremely helpful when your trying to do something thats out of the ordinary. Because a lot of the time it’s already been solved by a Linux or a BSD applications and a lot of the time its already been ported. Now true, a lot of that software works for windows as well, but as far as video and graphics, widows is a lot more complicated than the mac is. (In my opinion) so if you put the two together you have a pretty nice package that is fast to develop with and produces quality results.