ifttt
Trying out ifttt (if this then that), a web service that lets you create your own automated tasks, triggers and actions from various social media and digital channels (email, sms, instagram, twitter, dropbox, etc). For example, you can create a task to save every new photo you take in instagram to dropbox. Love the idea.
Mind Over Mass Media
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these ...
Time Machine 020507
While backing up 1,274,742 items to Apple’s time capsule via time machine, I thought of the original The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and re-found this quote: Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
Total Recall: Your E-Memory
I have a healthy obsession with self-documentary, data-streaming and collecting, so you can imagine my delight when Mark Krynsky twittered that he had just posted about 75-year-old Gordon Bell, lifestream pioneer, who was covered in the Wired article, Microsoft Researcher Records His Life in Data. Over the course of a lifetime, humans take in more ...
One in four songs sold in U.S. is from iTunes
Reading this and re-realizing that I live in a bubble of technological affluence: One in four songs sold in U.S. is from iTunes NPD MusicWatch’s report indicates that audio CDs remain the dominant format, responsible for 65 percent of all music sold in the first half of 2009. But digital music, which makes up the ...
My First Citizen/Social Media Inauguration
Yesterday’s inauguration of President Barack Obama was significant in so many ways. For web geeks like me, it’s the first time citizen media played such a significant role during an inauguration. Given Obama’s grassroots campaign and his message of citizen responsibility, this is only apropos. Numerous netizens, web sites, blogs, video sites and social networks ...
On the Go
I’ve been tweaking the design of my site behind the scenes for the last few weeks and made the changes live tonight. Of course, there will be continuous tweaks, but I feel purged! Overall, I’ve tried to reduce clutter and simplify the structure and presentation – a proper cleansing. It’s an evolution but also a ...
New Interface Paradigms
It still strikes me as fascinating that the iPhone and the OLPC (or XO) laptop were both released in the last year, and yet they’re such radically different “computing” and communication devices and concepts. I’ve spent some time playing simultaneously with the iPhone, the XO or OLPC laptop, and my regular computer combo – an ...
Now Your Plants Can Call or Twitter You
Botanicalls is a project by students at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program. It’s “a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the ...
Video Bits
It’s the weekend and I’m going through my digital archives and files again. I know, it’s an obsession. While I definitely output a lot to the web and the social sites I use, there’s always an exponentially increasing amount of digital data that I’m collecting on my computer and storage devices. The more I collect ...
Who’s the Best Presidential Candidate for the Open Source Community?
I’ve been a supporter of the open source movement since I first got on the web in the early 90s. Almost everything I’ve learned about the web and programming, I learned from downloading open source software and giving it a try, then hacking it to customize it to my own needs. If it weren’t for ...
Thoughtful Reduction and the Miniaturization of Expression
As I was designing for a client web application today, I kept living through John Maeda’s first law of simplicity: thoughtful reduction. The goal was to design a new comments system for parts of the site so members were more likely to leave little notes for each other. In order to make it fun and ...
My OS Doesn’t Work Like My Mind
I’m still thinking about simplicity/minimalism vs. experiential and emotional experiences. If memory is strongly attributed to adrenaline, then shouldn’t we design for optimal emotional attachment? Or, do we design so it’s “so simple” that you don’t have to think about it? The folder-file organizational structure of current operating systems (OS) does nothing to trigger emotional ...