Global village idiot

Piclens presents images in a nifty 3D gallery, but it's Flickrvision that really impresses me because of the eerie way it suggests a brain. A big brain. A big ceaseless brain. Neural activity going.. elliptically? epileptically? Like a butterfly dreaming. A big butterfly. A big ceaseless butterfly with a camera.

None of this is done in realtime - yet. At the moment Flickrvision picks up images only when people get home and upload them. However its not too unfeasible to imagine them being uploaded as they're taken. More like Twittervision.

With sensors uploading data into the ether there's all sorts of possibilities for the visual display of information, as in GoogleEarth.

Bet you look good on the dance floor

It's early early days yet on this course, of course. But already, despite being psuedonymed, virtualised, templated, abstracted into quotes, links, and other people's photos one thing is apparent: most staff who work in this library are female.

Who knew? Actually Schler, Koppel, Argamon, and Pennebaker would've. They could tell you your age too. Here's a quote: "Regardless of gender, writing style grows increasingly 'male' with age." (pdf)

Hmm.. Schler, Koppel, Argamon and Peenebaker may very well think that. You may very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

Lion in meadow finds keg

How.. discombobulating. I had dropped my matchbox, and was so busy looking for it in the long grass that I'd forgotten about the lion. Then I heard an almighty clunk behind me, followed by a protracted hiss, and there he was, jaws clamped around the rim of a keg. Forty-two elephantine bubbles were everywhere.

Before fleeing I barely had the presence of mind to take a photo, and sign up for a Yahoo account and upload to Flickr, and adjust the privacy settings, and add some appropriate tags, and chose the layout, and join a group, and design a buddy icon, compose a profile and send a postcard, and create a mosaic, a jigsaw, a badge, a card, and locate the event on a map, add some notes, a comment, and send it to my blog.

Anyway, that's what happened, officer. When I got back to the car I smelt like I'd been sliding down a dragon's tongue, though I changed my wig, several times. Honest. Look, I can prove it, here's the link. Let's be friends.

I pink I am

Good to know I've chosen the mostest template..


Blog spot on. Go pinks.

Land of the long white page

Here's a great technology story: Google pages in Maori - fantastic, absolutely. They use macrons, which make me hungry, but it brings up the words without em, no problem.

Now, if only someone could fix the New Zealand English Google page. Come on, we're no longer a fashionable part of Holland.

Fifty!

Video comments make you lean

The camera never lies; it also makes you look fatter and taller. A webcam, on the other hand, make you look.. pyramidal; only more mad, like the hill in Close Encounters. Especially when the screen is tiny and the face is back lit, and they lean in, (and then you lean in..)

Check out the sidebar in TechCrunch for examples of video comments (pictured); and here for discussion of. Comments have always been the many Mini-Mes to the mighty blog Me. Only now, it seems, increasingly literally.

Hmm.. if they built into the comment bit of a blog the same functionality as the blog itself, then ones "blog" could be the aggregate of ones comments. Perhaps the internet is just a bunch of boxes.

By the way: is a 'video comment' a vommet? Well, that would explain why they make you lean.

That liquefaction of his prose

BlogList is a nifty new tool Blogger has added to Layout. I've chosen to have the list set to a "rolling boil" so the blogs most recently posted rise to the top. It's a bit of a chore for what are temporary blogs though. I wonder how the rolling affects the PageRanking. Just makes it more fluid I guess.

Anyway, is it inevitable to compare information to water? Just because it moves? So do turtles and ants. Actually Rudy Rucker wrote a novel about information-as-ants; as did Terry Pratchett.

You see such metaphoring all the time: datastream, datapipes, streaming video, the Matrix code raining down the screen. Kind of ironic really as real water messes with networks. Not that it ever rains in Auckland.

Still, unless you can think of another way to pistol-whip the ants into line you've got to go with the flow.

Fifty ways to fold a lover

Smarter Systems are getting smarter all the time. Here is a screenshot of the opac's new request procedure.

Actually it's clear from the Vodafone advert that the technology has advanced well beyond this point. I'm not thinking of the scene where the bloke folds up his bookcase (read 'library') and puts it in his pocket, but when he folds up his girlfriend.

Creepy? Just a tad - everyone knows centrefolds must go out with the magazine they came in. Though no doubt before long we'll be folding ourselves into our own pockets without giving it a second thought.

Which brings me to an inevitable observation: cellphones are increasingly looking like teletubbies; and teletubbies are increasingly.. us. It is a matter of some urgency then to see how this folding technology unfolds. I wouldn't want to end up the green one.