The faceted, messy world of folk/tag/free/ethnoclassification seems to be a natural fit for zoomable user-interfaces, or ZUIs… or Zooeys*.
The latest in Flash-to-Flickr interfaces for Tag browsing by Felix Turner does a particularly nice job of using mouse-gesture, zooming layers and just good, tasteful visual design.
Here’s a grab for the tag "London" for instance:
* Zeitgeistfully, in the new film of HHG2TG, Trillian is played by a Zooey
Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell was featured on BBC Radio 4’s “Sunday” Programme about the increasing infiltration of personal mobile tech into spiritual practices around the world.
» BBC Radio 4: Sunday: Mobile Phones and Spirituality [5mins 43sec, Real Audio]
One upside of being down for the count over a long weekend is that there’s no guilt in eating an entire boxed set of TV all at once.
I sat down (well, lied down) to take in Joss Whedon’s aborted cowboy space-opera, Firefly; and was pleasantly surprised.
It’s no wonder it was cancelled – it takes ages to get going, it’s got a huge cast each of whom “have a secret” and some of the best lines are in Mandarin it seems.
One thing that did strike me about a couple of episodes was how very few ‘screens’ feature in Firefly’s vision of the future – and in general how tangible and situated digital technology seems in that universe.
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First the server that my mail and site live on gave up the ghost, then so did I. The mail is back, but I’m still sick so apologies for even-more-tardy-than-usual-reponse-rate to email.
A suprisingly chilled last day after the garage-hack science fair ecstasy of the Maker fair.
I need a shed, a soldering iron, a 3D printer and some flexible medical insurance, asap.
In the meantime, I’ll make stupid things with photoshop (see above)
Time to go back to Helsinki for a few hours, and then off again.
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Update: some of the best, concise notes and reflections on the sessions I’ve found so far at Kareem’s site Reemer.com.
Like Tony, I complained a while back, and I take it all back.
I think after yesterday’s outbreaks of the future in Danny Hillis‘ talk, the awesome debut of iFabricate.com, and both Neil Gershenfeld’s keynote and the panel discussion that followed – Mr. Stark would be quite happy and perhaps getting his cheque-book out.
And, y’know – if Tony’s happy, I’m happy.
Etech05: Esther
Originally uploaded by etech.
George Dyson was amazing – but this picture is priceless – sums up the feeling of the best bits of being confronted by the future (or the past, in the case of Dyson’s presentation about computing’s founding fathers and mothers) at Etech.
I know you’re meant to trudge around the city to tiny packed venues, but you could also just open up iTunes here…
Red Vs Blue folks on the post-production costs of serving content on the web:
“Imagine if the producers and distributors of Spiderman 2 got a bill from the movie theatres for increased air-conditioning because their movie was too popular”
Currently at their talk: “Why Free is a Good Price: The Terrible Business Model of Red vs. Blue” at SxSW.
Another couple of quotes:
“Homestar Runner is really a t-shirt store with a great cartoon attached”
and on bittorrent, not actually saving them costs…:
“We put bittorrent clips out there, received 45000 emails back saying ‘we don’t understand how to use this and I need to see your clip NOW!'”
Very good stuff on the way-new nanoentertainment industry from the trenches of the long tail.
Petafloptimism 
