For the New Version of Gawker Stalker, which launches today, Gawker are using Wists as their blog publishing system. This allows them to publish items and create maps which show pictures and locations of celebrity sightings in Manahattan and gives a sneak peak into some of the kinds of things that you’ll be able to do with the new version of Wists that we are working on.
The Apple Newton showed that form factor is everything. The Newton was pretty cool and ahead of its time – the first PDA. But it was the wrong size. The Palm Pilot did less (it didn’t even try to do full handwriting recognition), but it was the right size. The same form factor as Walkmans and cigarette packets and wallets and iPods, it slipped into existing shirt and jacket pockets, to be carried everywhere. Good design is about the right choices not technical wizardry. The Segway looked like magic – a two wheeled stable vehicle. But it needed gyros and computing power because its two wheels were next to each other. If its wheels were inline then it would have been a bicycle and the conservation of angular momentum alone would have kept it aloft. The bicycle is a better design for a two wheeled vehicle than a Segway. The…
Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000 Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000 Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000 Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica. You don’t get what you pay for. Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article – Wikimedia Foundation
Windows Live Local – Virtual Earth Technology Preview In 1994 lot of people thought VRML was cool, but it wasn’t cool compared to offline video games and it wasn’t useful compared to regular web-page search and browse. This mockup of Microsoft’s Local Live’ reminds me of VRML. As a video game, it’s crude by the standards of 1994 and as a web app it has none of the design sensibility of Google Maps. The mockup is from a multi billion dollar company whose most obvious online avenue of attack against Google is local advertising – and the end result is a maps application that allows you to choose a view that superimposes crappy vignettes of the interior of a ‘race car’ or ‘sports car’, as you ‘drive’ around maps. The product substitutes kitsch and gimmickery for ergonomics and usefulness.
I love San Francisco, but when you realize that the Castro Safeway and the Sony Metreon are landmarks, you realize that its a small city. It is the worlds best sleepy seaside town. One of the two landmarks has some architectural merit, the other is the Metreon, a failed attempt at a French style Mediatek – a multimedia library/art complex. In the end the Metreon, complete is a shopping mall, and now its being sold to a mall developer. Metreon’s shattered dreams via kottke
I put together a wists list of locations in Greenwich Village, which were frequented by Bob Dylan in the early 60s. Wists: Bob Dylan locations.
Wists maps launches Part of Wists rev 2 which I’m busy working on, Wists maps is being released early for a really cool showcase application which will be live shortly. What is wists maps? When you click on ‘add to wists’ bookmarklet and are in the edit screen before you submit your new item, there is a checkbox at the bottom, marked
The best blonde joke ever meme has resurfaced after a couple of years. You put a link that people are likely to click on – like ‘best blonde joke ever’ and this links in turn to the same headline which in turn links to it somewhere else again, recursively. Kafsemo has built an edge labeled graph
Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece. Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert? The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously. For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn’t a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees. The…
“Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up using them and coin others.” The role of viruses in the continuous evolution of life is further evidence of the fact that there is no finite line between what is alive and not. Years from now people will be putting stickers in Kansas schoolbooks saying that viruses are just a theory. Unintelligent Design – Discover Magazine – science news articles online technology magazine articles Unintelligent Design
supernova2 Explosions seem messy, the ultimate destroyers of order. What about the biggest explosions of all, the ones that are responsible for the creation of every single atom in our bodies? This picture shows what happens if you focus a laser with the same bursting energy as the entire continuous electricity supply of the USA on a pinhead sized representation of the elements within a star, in order to simulate a supernova. Amazingly, the model reveals fleeting, scale free structure reminiscent of a fractal.