Joseph Corr

Game Link

This is absurdly cool. Using GPS data from real sharks in the wild, you maneuver a virtual ship around the sea to collect data and monitor sharks. What a beautiful mix of the real and virtual world. A logistical challenge of significant proportions, the engineering behind the site must be an interesting blend of technologies. I don’t remember the game last year, but evidently this is area/code’s second try at the same concept. Definitely one to watch.

Site Link

Subaru pokes fun at the sexy bikini shoot, by using a Sumo wrestler, and inviting the user to act as photographer. Technically sound, and a good application of the features of Flash 9 (image manipulation, video). Wouldn’t work without the nice, cohesive creative.

Article Link

Yahoo recently announced the release of BOSS which allows you to utilize Yahoo’s search infrastructure in any way you’d like. It’s an ‘open web services platform’ which means that you aren’t just massaging results the way that Google’s Search API lets you, but rather you can do higher level manipulation of not just search results, but the DB of records. The idea is that your users don’t have to ever be aware of where you got the results or records, its just ethereal data.

The BOSS Mashup Framework is a Python library with a vaguely SQL-like syntax. Using it, you can combine BOSS results with other bits of XML, JSON, or RSS/RDF. In addition to merging results, it can handle sorting, grouping, removing duplicates, and so on. Armed with this Framework (and of course Python skills) you can easily combine Yahoo’s search results with just about any other data you can get your hands on.

Ad, Wanted: Kool-Aid Man
Article Link

Art, Ugly New Buildings
Site Link and Article Link

Both via UrbanPrankster

Article Link, from ContextOptional’s newsletter.

Rundown

• Profile Changes: Lots. Instead of the wall area for apps, they have to use the sidebar. Tabs introduced for use by larger apps.
• Feeds: More flexible. One liners and short descriptions. Apps can ask the user which they want.
• Apps/Sessions: Apps will now require that they be seen before they can be added. Apps will have ‘light’ versions.
• More: Apps can add features to a profile, like ‘Favorite VW’ alongside facebook specific ones.

Very much recommend anyone working with Facebook to read the POV. It goes into detail how this may affect your current apps.

Wired Article Link

The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called “Lively,” represents Google’s answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality.

I haven’t had the opportunity to play with Lively yet (it’s currently only for Windows users), but I want to. Google likes to build on open standards, and if I can infer anything from Google Friend Connect, they want this new offering to be integrated in ways and places they haven’t yet thought of. That is a win.

I’ve been waiting for someone to do the metaverse thing the right way for a while, and Google has as Good a shot at any to accomplish this. Second Life had an interesting business but bad scaling model. Kaneva has a content problem, and tries to be an end-all-be-all for social communication. There.com has a bad content and distribution model. And Project Darkstar while awesome and powerful, is not a front-end solution. Can’t wait to see who wins.

Article Link

In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.

The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being. The current video is actually the third iteration of a project that began in 2003, when a friend, using a Canon pocket camera with the capacity to record brief videos (when it was still something of a novelty), shot Mr. Harding doing his dance in Hanoi.

What I really like about this writeup is that it clearly defines why it is successful: because it makes you happy. As an employee of an advertising firm factory, clients and coworkers often try to add a ‘viral component’ into a traditional or non-traditional campaign. What I think they don’t really ‘get’ is that all ‘viral’ means is ‘popular’. So saying, we need to add a popular component to this campaign, is a little ridiculous.

Successful viral videos elicit sincere emotions. Sincerely funny, is often where ad firms start and stop. But Matt’s videos elicit a sincere happiness. It makes you smile.

Some folks were talking, and hypothetically, given the opportunity to ask Ballmer a question with Gates stepping away, I wouldn’t be able to pass up the opportunity to ask him if he thinks the shift towards centralized computing (utility, cloud, whatever) will be the tide that rights Microsoft.

(ed: it’s late, and I’ve been reading Faulkner)

I believe that MS was forged to brilliantly and correctly, yet bluntly and forcefully, redirect the entire global workforce away from the ineffecient and incapable computing powers at that time into their vision of the future of computing. We know what happened next. So now, as the tide rolls back and we all start to see the obvious and evolutionary horizon of centralized computing, does he not feel supremely qualified to redirect the world?

(ed: the following is likely gibberish)

Seeing the opportunity of the PC revolution and having what it took to not just capitalize on it, but create it, does not necessarily have to be the defining event of Microsoft. It’s likely the defining event of the Gates era of MS, but Ballmer has an equally large opportunity. And ignore the arguments about being late to realizing the power of the internet. The internet’s fatal flaw is it’s unfathomable power and celerity. It’s currently a gasoline fire. And I think that the internet was just an accelerant that forced us, the world, into our current epochal position. It’s my opinion that we’ve been brought too quickly to the threshold of this next era of data and processing power.

As technical folks, we have been recently focused too much on the problems that the explosion of a new, Live society creates. Our major engineering challenges have been focused on either how to re-develop our infrastructure as it falls into obsolescence before our eyes, or how to take advantage of these new and puissant technologies. The Internet has not just delivered on the simultaneous and incomprehensible promises of interconnectivity and immediacy, but also (and we should have expected this) brought us their immediately.

With the acquisition of Yahoo, Ballmer can literally laugh off any former criticism of MS and the web. This is hard for me to put into words, as I pay my mortgage from it, but the web hasn’t truly been special since the mid 90’s. It captivated me with it’s potential then, and, like a new fabric, we designers and entrepeneurs have been fawning to it’s beautiful and ultimately irrelevant properties. The power is in it’s permeating potence.

Changing entertainment and communication consumption patterns is not a big money game. Changing all of the global mercantile markets is.

I’ve been frustrated with our reticence to acknowledge this truth. I’m tired of hearing about ‘the future of computing’. The future was yesterday. The future has happened.

The world is begrudgingly swinging back towards the paradigms that Gates and Ballmer set out to defeat. In their first decade, they accomplished this. In the second, they created their empire. And in their third, they raced to catch up with what they had ignored while they built the infrastructure to support themselves. Now, entering their fourth decade, they have the power to pull humanity towards a future where information technology and management is invisible and everywhere. A future where devices don’t need to habitually and cannibalistically improve themselves. They simply can be the best at what they need to be.

MS still controls the tools we use to manifest our ideas. Their decision to own the software, the mechanics of thought and intention, rather than the hardware allows them to adapt more quickly than their peers. Can MS separate Office from a machine and associate it with a human? Can they put it duplicitly in his pocket, on his TV, and on his lap? If they can, they empower everyone, everywhere. Maybe the ultimate and poetic fate of Windows is to be truly that: a transparent and ethereal lens.

Gates and Ballmer’s vision was to put a PC in every home. Ballmer can put the power of the PC everywhere.

thoughts i couldn’t fit in
- nikolai tesla is the ghost in larry and sergey’s dreams
- Like an axe before metal, our current devices still split wood.
- hardware is the brittle and feeble body, software is the soul and spirit

Here’s the link (it’s time sensitive, unless you have a Creativity account).

Goes over the award winning campaign, including the outdoor work, website, mobile, and short film. Pretty incredible, and under 3 minutes.

If you haven’t seen the site or heard of the campaign.

So i’m neck deep in ‘Silverlight v Flash’, and it looks like Flash just met one of the crucial points that SL is beating them on: indexable content.

Here’s the original post from Google’s Webmaster blog.

And here’s a good writeup/review from Peter Elst. And here’s an even better post from Peter, publishing his findings.

(oh and lot’s changing, so this post will likely be out of date … now)