The Future of Art
What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.This video was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale […]
Interestingness
Want to get radical? Try being interesting. Interesting on a human, social, emotional, spiritual, meaningful level. Make stuff, do stuff, talk stuff, live stuff, breathe stuff that challenges, provokes, infuriates, amazes, inspires, and elevates. Make stuff that feeds, nourishes, seeds, and cultivates the heart, body, mind, and soul way, way, way beyond the limits of […]
Nielsen Survey of Connected Devices
The Nielsen Company recently surveyed more than 5,000 consumers who already own a tablet computer, eReader, netbook, media/games player, or smartphone to get a better sense of who is using these devices and how they are using them. Download a summary of the findings. Unsurprisingly, the majority of users are on smartphones and only 4% on tablets […]
Smartphones Begin to Replace Hotel Keycards
Two Holiday Inn hotels have begun using iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones as room keys, meaning guests don’t even need to stop at the front desk on their way in the door. With the new system, which will be in testing through December, hotel guests can reserve their accommodations online. A text message is sent […]
Internet consumption trends
Steve Rubel has an interesting article in AdAge, although I would argue that innovation, simplicity and utility have always been dominant trends even with PC internet browsing. I do think that the scale in which we consume has rapidly changed and the “always on” generation views content and connectivity as ubiquitous. Technology is just catching […]

Buy an iPhone from a vending machine
Gadgets for sale in vending machines aren’t that new of a thing, especially in airports or in Asia, but this was the first time I saw one selling iPhones or iPods in Macy’s in Union Square.

iA Webtrends Map Poster
Poster arrived today!
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 […]

Super Tuesday Online
I always get excited when it’s an election year, but particularly this one because it’s been eight long years. Two web projects related to the U.S. election caught my attention today. First, the New York Times, Design Observer and AIGA teamed up to create an initiative in citizen journalism. The Polling Place photo project accepts […]
Twitter: Is Brevity The Next Big Thing?
Jack Dorsey has long been obsessed with status. [I’M WRITING THE LEAD TO MY COLUMN] Not in the snob-appeal sense, but status as in “where are you and what are you doing.” Twitter: Is Brevity The Next Big Thing? – Newsweek Steven Levy
U.S. “No Longer Technology King”
The US is now ranked seventh in the body’s league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations. A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said. The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden. BBC NEWS | Business […]
Self-Sousveillance
I came across this post while looking for information on attention recording and one of the paragraphs regarding self-documentary really resonated with me. Greg Yardley writes: I’m also running the Attention Recorder because I’m afraid of forgetting. When I studied Russian history, some time ago, I was struck by just how little remained of people, […]
Fluid UI: Multi-touch screen
[youtube]PqXPD7EHDto[/youtube] As we amass more and more data, it seems only natural that we’ll need new methods to navigate this space. Jeff Han’s multi-touch screen is impressive. I don’t know if it’s the best way to manipulate all types of data or more fine-grained scenarios, but it clearly opens up possibilities for using a wide […]
Tagging Yourself and Others
Like a lot of web people these days, I’ve been actively tagging my “stuff” in del.icio.us, Flickr, rojo, BlinkList, and Technorati. The more I tag both the content that I produce (blog posts, photos, links) and the content that I find (bookmarks, news stories, blog posts), the more I’m looking for a web application or […]
Info-bits in Flux
In a recent blog post at O’Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes, “A while ago, I thought I’d try an experiment: could I organise all my work, all my personal stuff, all my writing, in one huge text file?” You may think he’s crazy, but my first thought was “Cool! Another geek like myself who keeps everything […]
Tag This
Yesterday I wrote about the need for more integrated tools to organize the various bits of information that we need, use, and collect in our daily digital lives, both online and offline, work-related and personal. Whether we organize online or on paper, whether it’s a result of today’s information overload or a librarian gene in […]
Smarter Bookmarks
“Smarter Bookmarks. How do you find your favorite websites? Some people, reports Lisa Guernsey in The New York Times, “try to keep track of websites by sending themselves an e-mail message with the link and a note of why it might be useful. Others,” she writes,” print pages or use sticky notes. Increasingly fewer people, […]
RSS
Remember “push” technology? It was all the rage back in 1997 when Pointcast launched its software that turned a PC screensaver into a headline ticker for all sorts of real-time information. The problem was, users quickly tired of the constant onslaught and network administrators complained the massive data downloads overwhelmed their systems. By 1999, the […]
Audio-on-demand service for cellphones
RealNetworks and Sprint will announce today that they’ve teamed up on a digital audio service that will offer content from ABC News, Fox Sports, National Public Radio and others. The service, which will cost $4.95 a month, will be available on various handsets and ill include a monophonic digital audio program and the ability to […]
Personalized searches
Kaltix, a Web search venture formed by three members of Stanford University’s PageRank team, is bent on out-Googling Google by developing a speedier version of the Stanford PageRank algorithm and using it to develop a more personalized Web search service. “Kaltix is a ‘stealth-mode’ startup… (leveraging) research done at Stanford University as well as several […]
The Accelerating Rate of Change
Futurist Ray Kurzweill says that “the whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then […]
Opera browser gaining users
The Opera web browser has been downloaded 10 million times already this year and is “showing growing signs of use despite Microsoft’s continued dominance,” says this piece. The Norwegian company behind Opera “sees America Online’s reduced commitment to developing future versions of Netscape as a good sign for its own future.” Opera CEO Jon von […]
Why iTunes has bands on the run
Explores a growing split in how musicians and their fans view online digital music services. Some bands say fans downloading only a song or two dilutes the artistry they put into creating an album of songs, but customers, on the other hand, like being in control. Story at BusinessWeek [via VirtualR]