Wow. What a pretentious title for a post! Let me explain myself a little. I’ve been playing around with Webb’s excellent little Lightcone thing, in the hopes of incorporating it somewhere. I’d been thinking about our “cultural lightcone” a couple of years back when I joined the BBC again.

Cultural lightcone?

If you remember the Carl Sagan book / film “Contact”, it plays with the idea of a cultural lightcone: that the alien intelligences have encountered our radio waves as they travel out at the speed of light towards them, and let us know by playing us back video of Hitler.

This from the nicely old-fashioned the offical movie site:

“Humans have actually been sending messages to the stars since the discovery of radio almost 100 years ago and the first television broadcasts earlier this century.

This means that among the first interstellar notices of our existence were the original episodes of I Love Lucy, first broadcast around 40 years ago. By now Lucy and Desi have travelled 40 light years into our surrounding neighborhood, an area inhabited by roughly 100 stars.”

I quickly sketched a little screen of a cultural lightcone, based on the BBC’s archive:

Here we see a 1975 episode of Dr. Who gliding by Vega.

The idea I had in my head was that this starscape would be simulated on a interactive (maybe flash-based?) client screensaver, which was grabbing and displaying the stars, media objects as they got located in the lightcone, and comments of others who had downloaded the connected-screensaver: memories of the programmes or other stuff that had happened that year. A kind of grid-blogging effort with the media as a mnemonic device to unlock people’s recollections of those years: a bit like a giant distributed version of the BBC’s I Love… series; and the starfield as a nice, vaguely poetic and attractive organising glue to the whole thing.

Other cool effects would be that as you got closer to our home, Sol; then stuff start to get really hectic, as the media output I guess has grown an awful lot over the 75 odd (light)years of BBC broadcasting; and the grid-blogging would start to resemble real time commentary on media…

Also, if it was truly decentralised, ie. the BBC just released the client and the initial media nodes and clips it would be fantastic – people would weave their recollection of Auntie between them and upload their own encodings of lost episodes or shortform clips that meant something special – and it would exist as long as someone had one of the client running… copying an un-burnable library ad infinitum…

I would really like the guys at Tribe to search-and-replace ‘REJECT’ with ‘No thank you’.

That’s all…

Found this comment on sound and interaction design by Hans Samuelson on the Ivrea Hub, which helped me understand in part why my Skype cold-calling experience made me have such a knee-jerk reaction:

“the public nature of sound – it projects and radiates, it is an active expression against which there is little defense. It’s essentially impossible to shut your ears; eyelids are a last line of defense against visual noise, but there is no equivalent for touch, or even sound. The always-on world…”

Very well-done [212k or so] dynamic map of the USA, showing photographs of moveon.org meetings to watch a documentary about the Iraq conflict.

The effect of zooming in 2-3 clicks from a semi-continental clean, vector map to rich, warm human-scale photos is powerful.

» MoveOn: Democracy in Action: Countrywide Map
[via Dan Gillmor]

The start of a collection:

• Pentagram’s Millennium project
• Timeline of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds editions
  Some great cover designs, my favourite being this one from 1963 by Virgil Burnett. Also interesting to see how the editions seem to burgeon (apart from when Jeff Wayne’s opus arrived on the scene in the late 70’s) in times of crisis: the late 50’s / early sixties hottest parts of the Cold War, and pre-Y2K

• Wattenburg:
  • Net Art Idea Line
  • History Flow by IBM Research [Earlier post on Histroy Flow]
• WGBH’s Commanding Heights TimeMap [requires Quicktime]

More contributions gratefully received.

Clay has a commentary on HistoryFlow, an IBM research piece that visualises change in collaboratively-authored content, mentioned (in a rather shallow fashion) here previously.

I hadn’t realised that data-visualisation-diety Martin Wattenberg was involved.

More Wattenburg:

• bewitched.com
• Idealine
• SmartMoney Map of the Market
• Martin Wattenburg: Profiled at IBM, Googled

The IBM profile lists a couple of things I didn’t know – that he is a doctor of mathematics, rather than having a training in interaction design or art; and that project of his there is “reinventing email”: a recurring mental note of mine at the moment. Judging [harshly] by what seem to be none-too-recently published screenshots on the IBM site, nothing particularly revolutionary there yet.

Over at the Guardian Onlineblog, they trail some new screenshots of Microsoft’s XP-replacement, codenamed Longhorn.

Longhorn-watching is an enthusiasm of mine, and some of the mocked-up/leaked screenshots have featured novel interfaces for email and personal information management… but as Jack Schofield says it’ll be 3 years till it sees daylight.

3 years to reinvent email…

I’d love to see a HistoryFlow type approach to my inbox, or even Ben Fry’s Valence. Maybe not as a primary task interface, but perhaps as an attract/nag mode, with some Bayesian magic bubbling up the topics and people I most need to get back to, as well as defending me from the offers of masculine enhancement.

That might be cool for my desktop / studyscreen – however, I get the feeling that interfaces which rely on visualisation-fireworks won’t work so well on the mobile devices that we’ll get more used to wanting to fetch our email from in coming years.

Any other contenders you know about / want to speculate on?

“The biggest problem is that if you’re the user, for the most part the technology doesn’t know anything about you. The onus is on the user to learn and understand how the technology works. What we would like to do is reverse that equation so that it becomes the responsibility of the computer to learn about the user.

The computer would have to learn what the user knows, what the user doesn’t know, how the user performs everyday, common functions. It would also recognize when the user makes a mistake or doesn’t understand something.”

This could either be really good, or the birth of an evil , all-powerful Uber-Clippy. Shudder.

&#187 BusinessWeek: The Ghost in Your Machine
[via slashdot]

Matt Webb is at the Hypertext’03 conference in Nottingham, and presents his rough notes here.

Amongst them are his seemingly hydra-compiled notes of “Uncle” Ted Nelson’s keynote. It seems to be about the problems of the dominant paradigms in personal computing and the web:

“broken promises of personal computing:

* easy record-keeping
* nothing lost
* simplify life
* easy programming

broken promises of hypertext:

* permanent availability
* deep connnections
* profuse link overlays
* frictionless reuse (with copyright management, transquotation)”

It’s also punctuated with gems like this:

“trying to fix html is like trying to graft arms and legs onto a hamburger. And that’s exactly what they’ve done”

Matt’s asides refer to the things that Nelson claims are failing us in current software, and how in actual fact people get by just fine. We have of course taught ourselves to get by just fine, “early adopters never switch” as Ted says, and subsequent generations of users haven’t even questioned the UI regimes we live within. How do you get to the next paradigm from within the tyrannical bounds of the one you’re operating in?

From the one before?

History Flow from IBM Research tracks revisions in a corpus of content created and edited by multiple authors, e.g. Wikipedia

Reminds me of Missoni textiles… here’s a pic of some from my moblog earlier this year.

» IBM Research: History Flow
[via Brightlycoloredfood]

Classic Scott Berkun:

“Most people are glad that the steering wheel in their automobile is easier to discover than the fuse box. They expect that whoever designed the automobile, or web site, is making good basic choices in their interest, so that they don’t have to think about it. In part, that’s what they’re paying for.

» UIWeb: The myth of discoverability
[via Anil Dash’s Daily Links]