August 2000

The Favorite Poem Project. A wonderful idea, to record Americans reading their favorite poems. Lately I’ve been reading Pablo Neruda’s beautiful Memoirs and also thinking about how web sites might be different if we looked to writers, to poets, to provide the beauty instead of visual designers. I’m grateful to my cable modem, flickering away,…

Flag Education & Etiquette…an example of early branding guidelines?

The ultimate in exhibitionism? The Icepick House has cameras and sensors and stuff everywhere tied into the web site. The data is fascinating (though I don’t think I would make it all public). I particularly like the Cattracker where you get to watch the cats eat. Interestingly enough the bar chart tracking eating events by…

World’s First Armed Roboguard: “The robot is equipped with a camera and sensors that track movement and heat. It is armed with a pistol that can be programmed to shoot automatically or wait for a fire order delivered with a password from anywhere through the Internet” Skeptics say, “The apparent goal here is to make…

Great mission, published papers, and work from SustainAbility, who strives to: …help create a more sustainable world by encouraging the evolution and widespread adoption of thinking and practices which are socially responsible, environmentally sound, and economically viable – satisfying the ‘triple-bottom line of sustainable development’. I love the triple-bottom line idea, and I’m working it…

Just ordered a pair of custom made sneakers, designed by me, at Customatix. Maybe I’ll write an epinion once they arrive, but the process was pretty cool. As is the custom with hipster sites, the browser requirements are high and download time is just above acceptable over a cable modem. Pros: I’m psyched that they…

Interesting story on Intuition. Highlights: “Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do,” concludes Klein. “And what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental.” “We used to think that experts carefully deliberate the merits of each course…

Seems like one of the biggest invasions of privacy is the white pages in the phone book. Let me see if I get this straight: I buy a service from the phone company and this allows them to publish my address and phone number and distribute it to everyone in the county, and if I…

One of the authors of the Gnutella report below writes back: “…In the Napster case, users lie about their bandwidth rates to deter users from connecting to them…” Very sneaky, and kinda stupid too. What kind of machine/connection are you sitting on that you don’t mind using as a Napster client but don’t want to…

A Xerox study finds that gnutella users are taking more than they’re giving. I think there may be a usability lesson to be learned here. Personally I’m still not sure if Napster/Macster/Gnutella has to be running for others to download files from my computer, or if there are extensions or whatever that do that in…

Deepleap is closing down. Sad. It’s not often I wish Microsoft would buy up a company and integrate the technology, but that would have been a nicer ending in this case.

Just read that Blogger’s going down for maintenance…Blogging against the clock! In my love/hate relationship with New York City it’s been mostly love lately. After seeing a bunch of co-workers from other countries tour the city I see it with new eyes. Tonight as I walked north through SoHo and the West Village there are…

Courage Thomas Paine

Perseverence Harry S. Truman

The Feature, a hippish, smart mobile magazine thingy from Nokia. For some reason I look at it and think James Bond.