24 hours of theremin music, with brief pauses as bicycles passed overhead.
<p>Hymn To The Manhattan Bridge from Nick Franglen on Vimeo.</p>
File under: what you can do with 64 pixels
As a kid my friends and I played a lot of video games. We gave up slices of pizza, candy bars, sodas--everything but new trucks and wheels on our skateboards--to save money for visits to dark, tomb-like video game parlors with deafening 8-bit soundtracks, and hoodlums waiting to steal your money in each corner. We watched as Centipede was upgraded to Millipede, and Mario to Super Mario and thought: the people who make these magical devices must be geniuses, magicians, gods.
Many years later, a student at Carnegie Mellon University has shown us that you can create Mario using Arduino and just 64 pixels (LED's in this case). Now it's magical that you can create these games (or something like them) using $50 and a few weekends of hacking.
Via news.ycombinator.com.
Newspapers, revenue, and technology
Hal Varian, Economist for Google, follows the money and tells us where newspapers make and spend their cash.
http://gigaom.com/2010/03/10/hal-varian-is-right-newspapers-need-to-engage/ One nugget:Percentage of costs spent on the physical newspaper: 52%
Percentage of revenue received from print subscriptions: 3%
Conclusion? Distribution by Internet would cut costs by more than half, and you'd lose 20% of your revenue (news stand and print subscription)
Question: Revenue would go down, but the savings are much greater than the lost revenue. What would net-based news apps do with that 32% extra revenue?
New York City in Miniature
You can see my neighborhood at the beginning of this video. It was made with a photographic camera, and 35,000 frames stitched together. <p>The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.</p>
Crowdsourcing the news at Demotix
I ran across Demotix and have just started using it. See http://www.demotix.com/
It's a 100% crowdsourced feed of journalistic images and writing. What is news? Anything that tells a story.
The site is built on Drupal, an open source content and community management platform.
Domain name problems and checkout SoundCloud
In case anyone was wondering (probably not), my domain www.smagula.net expired recently. What a pain. Just when you need something...it's gone into a never-never land of forms, fax machines, and missing account numbers from ten years ago. I recently came across something called SoundCloud. Check it out here: http://soundcloud.com/katharinaIt reminds me of MixTape. Remember that site? Good stuff, no? I think MixTape ran afoul of the copyrights of a few of those mix tapes, but soundcloud doesn't appear to suffer from that ailment. Soundcloud is for musicians to share their stuff with us. Maybe I need to dust off that keyboard and saxophone...
Haitian earthquake: Help route crowdsourced crisis information sent via SMS
Ushahidi is an open-source project that enables citizen-journalists to use their cell phones to report violence and crime in Kenya. Yesterday it launched a similar service to report emergencies in Haiti. Here's how it works:
See: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/17/the-4636-sms-shortcode-for-reporting-in-haiti/
- People in Haiti use a cell phone to text a message to 4636 with a name, location, description of an emergency situation
- The message enters a database, where a mechanical turk crew (basically an automated system for using human intelligence) structures it
- The information is passed to rescue and relief organizations in Haiti (with the help of an organization named Sahana)
How you can help
If you'd like to volunteer to join the mechanical turk crew that reads and structures the messages, go here: http://wiki.ushahidi.com/doku.php?id=4636instructions
We can only hope this will help bring relief to people in need.
How to build a simple site using Drupal and other open source software
All the computers in my life are littered with failed Drupal sites. Usually after installing Drupal, I'd poke around the admin UI, try to edit some files, get flustered, give up. I didn't know where to start. Well, I finally I succeeded in getting a very basic Drupal site up and running. In case some of you might be interested in learning more about Drupal, here is a summary of how I went about teaching myself the little I know.
- I started by watching some screencasts from Lullabot Had I seen the screencasts on Drupal.org, I probably would have watched a few of those, too
- Visited drupal.org and took a looked at some sites built using Drupal, and looked at the kinds of modules that are available
- I downloaded MAMP (for Mac). Or XAMPP (for Win, Linux, Solaris, or Mac)
- I read a book about Drupal by David Mercer, and started to learn a few of the many Drupalisms
- I downloaded Drupal
- And installed it using the Drupal Installation Guide
- Read this tutorial on theming and started to follow it (big warning: there are quite a few errors and ommissions in this tutorial, so you'll need to be comfortable with troubleshooting and debugging things, generally)
- I flailed for about 4 weeks while image uploading was failing, and eventually got help via the imagecache troubleshooting guide
- After I got things working, more or less, I tackled ratings by following Lullabot's Building views with Fivestar and Voting API
- I logged in as admin and set the permissions I wanted, built the site menu, tacked on a logo, tried out a various site names, etc.
- I showed it to a few people at work who helped me catch bugs, and helped me realize we needed notifications
- I started using it to post real ideas that related to the product I'm working on
- I set up an action that sends an email to the idea creator when a comment is made
- Then I Installed and set up the Notify module to send everyone (who doesn't opt-out) emails about new ideas and comments. Knowing what I know today, maybe I should have tried out Notifications module first
Right now we're using this site inside The Economist to crowdsource product development ideas, to pitch and evaluate new features and technologies, and to generate new ideas for making money. The site is internal at this point, but my goal is to improve it (it needs work) and perhaps eventually incorporate it into The Economist, so that we could collaborate with our users to invent new stuff. That would be fun.
While I can't show you the site we're using at The Economist, I can show you a similar site that has some placeholder content at the moment. It is called, and is in search of a name and purpose. Perhaps we can use it to gather ideas for how to practice agile user experience design?
I'd love it if the spirit would move you to register, and start posting ideas about agile UX design, your work, quandaries you have that relate to Agile and UX, and related topics. I'd also love it if you sent me bugs, or features you think are missing (like better profile pages, and ways to browse by author, or to view all ideas in a certain category).
Hope you enjoy experimenting with Drupal. Keep me posted on how it goes.
Where do Twitter users live, and other data-driven maps
Here's a map of the USA showing where Twitter users live. The map is generated by CartographerJS, http://cartographer.visualmotive.com/, using data from http://tweemap.com/.
CartographerJS specializes in thematic maps, such as choropleth maps (more about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map) that color states or countries to indicate population data, etc. Now I wonder if you can use CartographerJS with openstreetmap.org?
CartographerJS via Andrew Otwell's FriendFeed.
