Twitterholic Top 100 for Vancouver
Hmmm… I’m not sure if being #61 on this list is a good thing or not!
Listing of Entries Tagged as 'Technology'
Radiohead’s House of Cards
Man, I love Radiohead. Always innovating. Check out this post on PaperVision about their new “video”. They freely distribute their tracking data so that others could make new visualizations for their music. Very cool.
The Most Effective Way to Visualize Complexity
You’ve heard it before: “We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge“. Of course this isn’t an entirely new thought. There have been lots of elaborate methods proposed to combat this predicament we’re increasingly finding ourselves in. Google seems to do a good job of helping us out with sorting our data.
But I think the onus of meeting this challenge also lies somewhere else…
Rat Brain
Wow, this is really cool. The visualization itself rocks. Then I read about the research and effort behind it…
Graffiti Wall for the Richmond Winter Festival
There’s some really cool stuff happening in Vancouver. Here’s a kick-ass touch-screen project from my buds Alex and Brett featured last weekend at the Richmond Winter Festival–
Head Tracking VR Using the Wii Remote
This is so kick-ass, Johnny!
Truly Interactive Snow in Flash…
This is one of the neatest things I’ve seen in a while (if you have a webcam). Try letting the snow pile up on your head and shoulders and then brushing it off. Pretty cool, eh? Thanks to Darren for sending this one over.
Zoho
Zoho: Here’s a full suite of “100% free” MS Office-like online applications. Import/export common MS docs, create web-enable apps, build your own apps and widgets to extend the functionality… it’s amazing, really.
Am I ready to make the switch to complete web 2.0 100% free virtual desktops? Maybe… it’s pretty nifty, but would I trust my sensitive corporate data to their servers?
And am I out of luck during those rare times that I’m not online? Nope, they have a downloadable app version.
What’s Your Gnibber?
http://blog.bigsnit.com/index.php/2006/12/08/387
Ha ha! Sounds like a Futurama character.
Will keyword representation on blogs be yet another measurement of the technology divide? It certainly an indicator of public focus (mainstream and geekoid), although I’m not sure what that means in the big picture.
Regardless, before Gnibber gets too widely accepted, let me point out some statistical shortfalls:
- I suppose Technorati is the premiere blog aggregator, but is it truly representative?
- A standard measure of time would need to be established as a baseline, or the numbers are meaningless. GNP is usually annual for obvious reasons. I think a Gnibber should always be daily. Just because. (But then we would need accurate population numbers on a daily basis. Oh dear, this is getting too complicated.)
- Any number that needs to resort to negative exponents is retarded. Therefore, a Gnibber should be per thousand to bring the number up to something more meaningful. (Gniberths? Wouldn’t that be fun to say over and over again - instant lisp.)
- Places with higher Gnibbers aren’t always the coolest places. However, the comparison of Vancouver to Toronto does indeed confirm that Van is far cooler than TO, as does this comparison:
“Canada” posts the past 1 day
(12/10’s avg Gnibber = ~0.22, using the new per thousand metric).
“United States” posts in the past 1 days
(12/10’s avg Gnibber = ~0.03).Granted, there are more variations on United States (USA, US, the States, the Great Satan, etc.) than on Canada, but it sounds odd that the Canada should outrun the US by a whopping 7 times.
Rad Touch Screen Research Out of NYU
Touch screens are kinda cool, but you’ve probably never thought about one drawback most of them share: the “mouse” mentality. Most of those devices are just glorified mouse pointers. That means you can only “click” or “hover” on one tiny part of the screen at anytime.
That all changes when you go all multi-touch interaction like these dudes (and dudettes?) from NYU.
Check out that video demo–that’s pretty rad touchscreen action, yo. We’re talking Minority Report futurism, man. Think using both hands on the screen at the same time. Think sharing the screen with many other participants. And this isn’t about using this for some dumb museum kiosk. This comes all so closer to removing the whole monitor/keyboard/mouse paradigm from everyday computer interaction.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
Sure, it’s probably really slow in practice, and the potential applications just barely scratch the surface. Now, the BIG question is: HOW DO I GET ONE??!!
As I said, the idea of touch screens are kinda cool, but the execution of their lame uses usually sucks these days. Like those smudgy, cludgy screens you see at real estate sales centers, or next to exhibits in museums… museums that are trying to get hip with the multim3dia kidz by spending $100k developing a kiosk that wastes your time by making you wade through 5 minutes of tacky “interactive” PowerPoint-like presentations, when the same amount of learning and information could have been gained just by reading the stupid exhibit description or talking to the janitor. Never mind the scores of kids crowding the thing successfully hacking into the badly-hidden Window 98 / Internet Explorer combo that powers the “experience”. Man, have we fallen for the kiosk-developer’s pitch or what?
So when you think touch screens, I hope you think bigger than what we’re used to… I want to live in a touch screen box, baby.