The above map was created by Paul Butler, a data infrastructure engineering intern at Facebook. Paul was interested in seeing how geographical and political borders effect where Facebook users live in relation to their Facebook friends, and set off to create a visualization of which cities had a lot of connections between them.
In a scrupulous world, this would be a really cool idea. As part of his residency with EyeBeam in New York City, Aram Bartholl has created an interesting sociological experiment. An anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file sharing network. On the sly, he has secreted USB flash drives into walls, buildings and street curbs, in publicly accessible spaces
Google Goggles is now available for both the iPhone and Android-powered smartphones, as a feature of the latest version of the Google Mobile App. Expanding on the concept of Augmented Reality, Goggles is an innovative application that works in conjunction with the camera and GPS on your phone to help you discover more about the world around you.
Citing privacy concerns, a group of Chinstrap Penguins on Half Moon Island, Antarctica, have filed a formal complaint against Google regarding its use of “Street View” images of their ocean-front residences.
There’s no hiding, Google has now officially mapped and imaged everywhere. Brian McClendon, Google’s VP of Engineering, announced earlier this week that with the addition of Ireland, Brazil and Antarctica, anyone with a web browser can explore (virtually on foot) all seven continents via Google Maps and Street View.
Google’s Page Rank Algorithm isn’t without its fair share of critiques. This one contributed by Really Magazine slams the search engine for “pushing up” pages which are already popular, in a sort of ‘the rich get richer’ scheme. In retaliation, the folks at the magazine launched Inframutt, which displays Google’s results in reverse order.
The new App has everything that is in the print edition and more: extra cartoons, extra photographs, videos, audio of writers and poets reading their work.
You’ve just sent a pressing email to a colleague, a friend, an alter ego. One to which you’d expect a follow-up or return message in a timely manner. But it’s Thursday night. And Thursday night, as we all know, is the new Friday night. Your recipient might not be paying a whole lot of attention to their crackberry. Perhaps it would be helpful to all if your (insert euphemism) was to receive a follow-up reminder in a couple of days?
With the success of the Kindle, Nook, Sony readers, and tablets like the iPad, it seems like electronic books have finally arrived. But I think we’re actually still stuck in between two developmental phases on the way to the future.
For a long time, work on interactive books was about building either theory or prototypes. People talked about what multimedia reading might or could or should look like, and they built what were mostly one-off or low-volume projects using CD-ROMs, software applications, or the web.
Now, though, the theory and the prototypes have blended:
Building on their esteemed collection, innovative programming, and an already digitally-savvy approach, MoMA continues to position itself as a standard-bearing institution of the 21st century with today’s release of their free iPhone application. The mobile software integrates familiar features from the museum, like
Matt Forcey
Watch. Read. Repeat. 