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"While many HTML4 elements have been brought into HTML5 essentially unchanged, several historically presentational ones have been given semantic meanings." I particularly like '<i lang="ja-latn"> to indicate “an idiomatic phrase from another language” (e.g Japanese)'.
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"Dr. Quandary's first release for World Around is his tribute to the music of India, from tabla-based traditions to mid-70's Bollywood soundtracks." Funky Hindi soundtrack excursions and cut-up dialogues. And it's a totally free download! Nice.
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"On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest — bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be “de-anonymized” by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations." The research paper is pretty mind-blowing.
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This is an absolutely fascinating article about the principles of archiving and preserving digital data, particularly from artists and novelists. It touches on the preservation of the medium and form of the data itself, as well as the actual data, as well as the seemingly increased ephemerality of digital data compared with hard copy. It also has the amazing fact that just before he died, "John Updike sent 50 5 ¼-inch floppy disks to the Houghton Library at Harvard."
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I'm not exactly sure what you would call these. 'Concept maps', maybe? Incredibly visually inventive, anyway.
March at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2010 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
paulcarvill.com
Hi, I'm Paul Carvill and I'm a web developer. I am Head of Interface Development at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for March, 2010
links for 2010-03-17
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Sneering and electioneering – digital media and politics in 2010
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Here’s a great Guardian article about the 2010 election being the first real online election. Its argument is driven home by the fact that at the time of the last election in 2005,
“YouTube was only two months old; Twitter and Facebook weren’t even invented.”
I think exciting times are definitely ahead, but I do worry that the flurry of digital activity around election time will be an ephemeral phenomenon. Surely long-term engagement should be paramount, and there are big blogs out there like conservativehome which are successful in that area, but most people’s focus does seem to wander when not faced with immediate political decision to be made.
MyDavidCameron.com is a great example of this short-focus politically reactionary approach. It’s very, very funny, but does it cross partisan boundaries or reach any further than sneery articles in the leftist media? Probably not, although its effects may be more subtler than that, perhaps just acting as a gentle background hum, adding weight to peoples’ existing prejudices.
I do try to be as politically engaged as possible, and the web is such a perfect vehicle for it, but I find most of the offerings out there to be spectacularly biased or single-issue. Someone please prove me wrong, with some intelligent debate and positive action that can be found outside of the national press.
links for 2010-03-13
Saturday, March 13th, 2010-
"The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps"
links for 2010-03-12
Friday, March 12th, 2010-
"It represents an incredible opportunity, but I can’t get excited about it because of Apple’s attempt to control who creates for it, and what they can create for it. Their policy of being the sole distributor of applications, and even worse, requiring approval on all applications, is insulting to developers. Even the people who have created Mac software for years are being told they can no longer be trusted."
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"Sketch-a-move is a concept for a toy car that allows you to explore the unique relationships between small surface doodles and actual physical movements. If you draw a circle on the top of the toy car, it will move in a circle. If you draw a complicated spiral, the car will move in a spiral."
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"Bollywood actor Preity Zinta is all set to don a new hat. She has been officially appointed goodwill ambassador of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS in India.
As UNAIDS ambassador, the film star will promote public awareness on HIV prevention, treatment, care and support with emphasis on women, children and the oppressed. To begin with, she will travel to the rural areas of Punjab to create awarenes on how to keep the disease at bay. "
links for 2010-03-11
Thursday, March 11th, 2010-
Beautifully detailed walkthrough of creating a NYTimes interactive, from design to implementation.
"Still, the hardest part about this graphic was designing the interface. We wanted readers to be able to find a given movie quickly, but a search box didn’t really work visually. We also wanted to give readers an idea which movies were most popular and which were most critically acclaimed.
I mocked up at least ten versions. None were any good. The challenge was navigation. As a user, I wanted to be able to see one movie in a bunch of different cities, fast, or I wanted to see a bunch of movies in one city just as fast. So there are two major navigation elements – cities and movies – but the map itself still needed to be the visual focal point of the graphic."
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"A new exhibition celebrates the work of Ronald Searle as he turns 90. Steve Bell on what makes him Britain's greatest living cartoonist."
links for 2010-03-09
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010-
"Let's hear it for New Dorks"
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Ceefax-style "Pages from Google", for when YouTube shuts down overnight
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“The pack design reflects the dark potency of the product inside. With vintage details like the heraldic crest and watchstrap seal, and a strong black, gold and cream colour palette it’s a bold, sophisticated design that stands out on shelf.”
links for 2010-03-08
Monday, March 8th, 2010-
How many hits does YouTube get? It seems wrong to just arbitrarily change their URLs. And I wonder what they need to change them for aynway.
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Edward Tufte appointed by Obama to "provide transparency in relation to the use of [$787 billion in] Recovery-related funds."
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Dry-as-a-bone first blog post from new W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe (ex Novell CTO), in continuation of the style of his Novell CTO blog (http://www.novell.com/ctoblog/). He doesn't use 4 words when 3 or less will do. Unfortunately what the W3C desperately needs are better communicators, and I'm not sure he's it.
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"You could hardly count layer tennis as physically demanding, but its breakneck speed and creative intensity do require dexterity and stamina — the fifteen minutes allotted to each volley is surprisingly intensive and vanishingly brief. Still, what I didn’t expect was how much fun the live atmosphere of layer tennis was. In the past, I’d always come to layer tennis matches after they were over and done with, perusing each match’s archive of volleys after the fact. Layer tennis in real time, though, is where the fun is."
links for 2010-03-07
Sunday, March 7th, 2010links for 2010-03-05
Friday, March 5th, 2010-
"By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap."
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What are the most important changes browsers could make to improve performance?
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"Today, YouTube is rolling out automatic captioning for all videos uploaded to the service, using Google's speech recognition service. The captioning won't be perfect, since Google's speech recognition isn't perfect, but it is really, really cool."
links for 2010-03-04
Thursday, March 4th, 2010-
I love the ENORMOUS Alan Fletcher book. I've picked it up so many times just to flick through a few pages and ended up sitting there for an hour, still finding new things. I've had it for years and still haven't read all of it.
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Nice to see the W3C are considering codifying this sort of thing.
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Gource is a software version control visualization tool.
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Includes the brilliant "put filepath in Finder window title": defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES