- ARCHIVE / November, 2007
- Paper puppets
My favorite video production company, CommonCraft, put out another in their series of “paperworks” videos explaining how things work. This time, about blogs. As part of the CHI 2005 Student Design competition, I once dabbled in paper puppets and video myself.
- There’s a bathroom on the right.
Archie: (presenting the WWF catalogue) I changed my mind about Christmas.
Me: (Relieved to be off the hook for an “actual working jetpack”) You have? Tell me.
Archie: I want a bald eagle. (points to the catalogue) A real one.
- Visualizing the information stream
Not so long ago, Digg challenged its community to a contest to make use of the Digg API to feed creative and dynamic Flash visualizations. Digg Radar, a visualization of new diggs created by Brian Shaler and profiled here in the summer, was one of the entries that tried to move the news stream out of the standard most-popular list format that is the default of the site. Although Twitter has not yet issued a similar challenge, their open API is already being used by some developers to examine the information stream in new ways.
- Speechless
To support the Writers Strike, members of the Writers Guild Of America (WGA) created some artsy Public Service Announcements featuring A-list Screen Actors Guild talent. The campaign—”Speechless”—was created by George Hickenlooper and Alan Sereboff, and the short black-and-white videos have now been released into the wilds of YouTube.
- Keeping time with humans
The Human Clock isn’t new. In some form, it has been around since 2001 as an effort to photograph a depiction of every minute of the day and change photos every 60 seconds. This summer, human clock creator Craig Giffen launched a sequel, the human calendar. The project was featured today in information aesthetics, a great blog on visualization.
- Work break
In busy times like now, this is a photo I enjoy seeing show up on my screen saver. It captures the very best of my two boys. - Learning on the web
In one of my past jobs, my co-worker and I attended a training in which the presenter ranted about “antispanking nazis” and offered a very complicated refrigerator chart system (still allowing for pro-spanking democrats, I guess) to replace any parenting common sense. We left early, requested a refund, and determined that there were phrases in [...]