As prompted, my top ten novels, unordered, with brief tasting notes. Not all of them are novels… but these aren’t just my top ten books, in the most generic sense, either. Maybe I should say “top ten stories that somehow do what a novel does.”

Kim, Rudyard Kipling. Lyra Belacqua has a brother.
Wind, Sand & Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince was once on this list, but WS&S is the unadulterated substance.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I’ve re-read this more than any other book in the world.
Light, M. John Harrison. Off the charts in terms of vision and prose alike. Science fiction without linguistic compromise.
A Distant Neighborhood, Jiro Taniguchi. No words for this; I keep wanting to write “melancholy” but it’s wrong. It’s everything you want from a story about going home.
The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander. Included for sentimental value… and because they live up to the sentiment again every time I re-read them.
Postwar, Tony Judt. I can’t even believe a book like this is possible.
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell. As with the Prydain books: nostalgia earned and re-earned.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, unknown, but translated by Simon Armitage. Read this and only this translation; read it out loud; read it to friends or family.
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. Lyra Belacqua has a country.

(I tried to write this list like a haiku—one swift stroke, top to bottom, no revision. I’m sure that, upon reflection, there will be other books I want to include here. But hmm, aren’t the really important books the ones that don’t require reflection to summon up?—the ones that are simply… there?)

 

If you’ve missed that today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, well, you’ve not been spending much time on Twitter today, have you? Here are a few links in honour of the day:

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have started a movement with their book Half the Sky. (The title comes from an ancient Chinese proverb: “Women hold up half the sky.”)

When Fangirls Attack collects links (LOTS of them) to articles on gender in comics.

The Guardian list their Top 100 women. Tellingly, only two of the 100 fall in the category of Technology.

Channel 4 Food have a list of the most inspiring foodie ladies in Britain.

TEDWomen is a treasure trove of talks and performances by awesome, inspiring women.

Today is a great day to re-read Sojourner Truth’s 1852 speech Ain’t I A Woman. (Or, even better, hear it read by Maya Angelou.)

And finally, if you really have been absent from Twitter today and haven’t seen EQUALS‘ video of 007, er… Daniel Craig dressing in drag to make a point about gender inequality, please watch it now:

;

We’re wrapping up our week teaching at SVA on the interaction course tomorrow.

It’s been an amazingly fun week – with an excellent group of students throwing themselves into material explorations, generative drawing, prototyping behaviour and surfaces and more.

It’s like Sterling’s cave of Taklamakan, made from post-it notes and acetates.

We’ve had a little blog for the week set up where we’re posting the work as it’s produced, and have put the briefs etc.

During the past few months, we’ve been working hard to improve the CSS editing experience for Web Inspector users. Now, we are happy to provide you with an update.

Style Presentation
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you entered a large, complex gradient definition for your background property and it suddenly disappeared once you hit Return? The reason was that the Styles sidebar only showed style content that the browser understood. If the browser didn’t understand the content, be it a typo or an unsupported property, the Web Inspector would show nothing. This has now changed. The Web Inspector now shows all the declared properties, and if the browser does not understand a property name or value then the respective property is denoted by an exclamation mark () next to its name. You can even edit (or remove) these properties like normal.

On a related note, the Web Inspector can now show the colors in property values exactly as they are written in an inline style, external stylesheet, or via the inspector. Just use the “As Authored” option accessible via the Styles sidebar’s Gear menu.

Editing Styles
Based on feedback from our users, we have improved the editing of CSS rules. Two separate fields are now used for the property name and value. You can navigate between them, and also to other rules and selectors, with the Tab/Shift-Tab or Return keys. Property and value keywords are suggested as you type, and can be auto-completed using the End or → keys, just like in the Console. Previous and next suggestions can be selected with ↑ and ↓ keys. If you wish to accept the current suggestion and move on to another field, use the Tab/Return keys.

Additionally, you can paste a compound “name: value” property into the name field, and it will work as you expect. The Inspector will break it up into “name” and “value”, putting each in its own field for you.

Persisting Changes
Every time you modify a style from an external style sheet the respective resource text is updated in the Resources panel. This feature is a work in progress but it’s quite exciting. While the Inspector remains open, the history of style sheet resources is tracked. Select any resource revision to see its differences from the original one. Changes are highlighted line-wise.

Textual resources, such as style sheets, html, and JavaScript resources, can be dragged and dropped from the Resources panel’s sidebar into your favorite text editor. This is a great way to work with new style sheet revisions and get changes out of the Inspector.

Did you know that…
Let’s take this opportunity to mention a few Inspector tips and tricks. While in the Styles pane, you can:

create a new property-value pair by double-clicking the blank space in the lines with braces, or by hitting Tab while editing the last property value.
add a new rule by selecting the “New Style Rule” item in the Gear menu.
click a link in a property value (say, background-image) to navigate to the respective resource in the Resources panel.
click the color swatch next to a color value to cycle through that color’s different format representations (for example, rgb(0, 0, 0), #000000, black).

We are currently experimenting with even more improvements to styles within the Web Inspector. Stay tuned here and check back often.

Note that for more information on the recent features of the Web Inspector, you can visit the Chrome DevTools documentation page.

Jack and myself are going to be teaching for a week next week on the Interaction Design course at SVA in New York, and as part of our stint there we’re doing a talk 6-8pm on Wednesday 2nd March.

Looking forward to it enormously – hope to see you there perhaps.

If you’re an iPhone owner and you’re attending the conference, you’re in luck. Thanks to the generosity of the talented folks at smudgeproof, now you can get the official Interaction 11 iPhone app. It lets you browse the full schedule of events, create your own personalized schedule, and map local venues and hotels. And it’s free!

If you’re on an Android or some other device, we’re sorry, “No app for you!” You’ll still be able to access all the important conference information by browsing to a mobile optimized version of the site (COMING SOON!), and hard copies of the conference schedule will also be within easy reach.

Click here to get the app

So New York’s latest snowstorm (that’s five so far!) is in full force. I ran out a few minutes ago to take some pictures for those who aren’t lucky enough to be here to enjoy it.

In a string of bad snow storms, I’d say this one’s topping ‘em all…and does this weather forecast seriously have two more days of snow predicted for Friday and Saturday??

Good news is: this is some seriously great packing snow. At least one snow man has already gone up, complete with mustache and charcoal briquette eyes (which, were they to be lit on fire, would make for one very brief moment the coolest snowman ever):

Bad news is: the roads are right now covered in a four-inch thick layer of packed down, VERY slippery snow. City-wide bus service is already canceled. Below, my (rental) car as of 1 AM. I’m terrified of what it will look like in six hours.

Well, this guy probably won’t be riding it for a while anyway…

Overheard from one of these ladies stumbling out of a nearby bar: “how long were we in there for??”

Piling up…

At least the trees are looking pretty!

Good luck tomorrow!

-SCOUT

PS – Send along interesting pictures of your neighborhood under snow and I’ll post ‘em here!

One of the guiding mottos of my work in data visualization is “eloquence through simplicity”—eloquence of communication through simplicity of design. I share this goal with many designers, present and past. Leonardo da Vinci once wrote: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Unfortunately, people sometimes misunderstand what we mean by simplicity, assuming that simplification is a pitched battle against complexity, striving to eliminate it. In fact, thoughtful simplification preserves useful complexity and makes it easier to manage by reducing it to its essence.

I was prompted to write on this topic while reading Donald Norman’s latest book, Living with Complexity. Norman is a brilliant designer, whose work has helped to shape me, but in the midst of many gems of insight in this book, some of his ideas about simplicity and complexity struck me as logically flawed, especially the following:

Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity: complexity is a fact of the world, whereas simplicity is in the mind. (p. 53)

Did I read correctly? Complexity is a fact of the world but simplicity is not? There are things in the world that are actually complex but none that are actually simple? Simplicity is in the mind (i.e., a matter of perception) but complexity is not? We might perceive something that is complex as simple, but never the opposite? Does this make sense? To me, it doesn’t. Nothing about simplicity and complexity requires Norman’s distinction.

Although simplicity and complexity are not in conflict with one another, they are indeed opposites in that they are two poles of a continuum—the more complex something seems the less simple it seems, and vice versa. They describe our perceptions of and interactions with things that we encounter in the world. All that we encounter falls somewhere along this continuum as experienced from a particular perspective and engaged for a particular purpose. Our understanding of something, whether simple or complex, is in our minds, a matter of perception; our interaction with something, whether simple or complex, is determined by our abilities.

The closest that we can come to declaring some things as simple or complex in and of themselves is rooted in the fact that things are composed of parts or units—the fewer the simpler. In this sense, the more units that combine to form what we perceive as a thing in the world (a product, process, system, etc.), the more complex it is. The idea that simplicity or complexity resides in the thing itself, something that can be objectively measured, and not in our perception of it, falls apart, however, because there exists no single correct way to draw the lines that break something into its parts. This is a matter of perception. Things that seem simplest are those that we perceive as a single conceptual unit. The more conceptual units that must be combined to form a whole, the more complex we perceive the thing to be. In other words, the only useful way to frame simplicity and complexity is as a continuum of perception, not as facts of the world.

Through experience and learning, things that we once perceived as complex become perceived as progressively simpler. We tame complexity by breaking something down into the simpler conceptual units of which it is composed, while working to understand how they relate to one another. Through experience (practice, practice, practice), we combine these simpler units into progressively larger chunks, which we learn to hold in our minds and memory as single conceptual units. These mental constructs are called “conceptual models” or “mental models.” As a cognitive psychologist, Norman has done a great deal to help the world of design understand the role of conceptual models.

When I preach the glories of simplicity, I’m not saying that complexity is bad or that it should be ignored or eliminated. Much of what we face in the world seems complex. Much that is valuable seems complex. Complexity can be a source of incredible enjoyment; grappling with it can be a delightful form of play. We seek to understand complexity, co-exist with it, and make use of it by taming it. We do so by representing it as simply as possible without sacrificing what’s essential and useful. We do so in part by removing all that is extraneous to the thing by paring it down to its essence in relation to a particular goal.

When working with information to understand and communicate it—the focus of my work—I strive to represent it simply by removing what’s not essential, but to never oversimplify. In so doing, I hope to make complexity manageable, refusing to let it become unnecessarily complicated.

By paring information down to its essence, relative to our goals, we can make a great deal of information manageable. This is especially true of dashboard displays: single screens of information that people monitor to maintain the situation awareness that enables them to do their jobs effectively. Most of the dashboards that exist in the world fail because, by including so much that is extraneous to the information that’s needed, relatively little information can be meaningfully displayed. Screen real estate is wasted by filling it with visual content that isn’t information, and the viewer’s attention is distracted by this fluff from the little information that’s actually there. When properly designed, however, perceived complexity can be tamed, making it possible for a dashboard to display a dense and rich collection of information. Airline pilots learn to manage a huge amount of information in cockpit displays, with practice, if the displays are well designed. This potential exists in dashboards and is made possible, not primarily by the wonders of technology, but by the effectiveness of the design.

Complexity is our friend. The more complexity we learn to manage, the greater our knowledge and abilities become. Complex information is definitely our friend. It’s time we learned to tame it.

Take care,

Via Zach Seward on Google Reader, here’s something fun: Pull up a New York Times story, e.g. this one. Scroll down a bit so you see mostly text. Hit the shift key twice. Neat, huh?

I think I like the fact that it’s hidden more than I like the actual feature (though the feature is certainly useful). Now, what you should do next is pull up a Michiko Kakutani review, close your eyes, tap in the Konami code, and…

Could 9eyes be any more sublime? It’s a perfect project, and a perfect piece of art, for the year 2010. Here’s why: It deals with the enormity of the internet not by lamenting that we’re adrift in a sea of data, etc. etc. (that’s such a boring response) but by using it—by taking something as mind-bogglingly massive as the Google Street View database and recognizing it, rightly, as a tool, in the same way that oil paint is a tool—and then doing something uniquely human with it. And that’s a big deal. We’ve realized pixels are tools for art; screens, too. But we’re still working on using scale as a tool for art. Jon Rafman is breaking new ground.

Will a computer ever be able to automatically recognize the sort of moment that he finds and shares here? It’s hard to imagine. I mean, I’m sure there’s some sort of non-human intelligence waiting for us in a hundred years, something built out of qbits or biobricks or both… so maybe some far-future descendant of that intelligence could curate this cleverly. But I’m not betting on it. This is a project that’s worthy of not just exaltation but exultation. We should, as humans, rejoice that we’ve build wonders like Google Street View—and that we’ve got minds like Jon Rafman’s to navigate them.

 

One of my favorite bits of unusual New York City history is located on the sidewalk in front of West Village’s iconic Village Cigars store. It’s pretty well known, but I’m going to re-tell it because it’s such a great story.

Set into the sidewalk is a small triangle (see my sneaker for size comparison), with the mysterious message: “Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes.”

In 1910, the area around Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue was being widened by the city. Over 300 buildings were condemned and razed under Eminent Domain laws, including a 5-story apartment building called The Voorhis belonging to David Hess.

Hess fought the city fiercely to save his building but lost, and by 1914, this small triangle was all that was left of his property. Thinking he’d been suitably beaten down, the city asked Hess to voluntarily donate the minuscule triangle for use as part of the public sidewalk – but Hess refused, and had this mosaic installed on July 27, 1922. Though it inevitably became part of the sidewalk anyway, anyone who walked over the triangle couldn’t help but be reminded of Hess’ battle.

The sign hasn’t been chanced since. In 1938, Hess sold the triangle of land to the cigar store for $1,000, and thankfully, the mosaic was left alone, cracks and all. I love seeing it walking through the Village, a reminder that sometimes the little guys win in ways you can never imagine.

-SCOUT

Logging onto Twitter to check out a few things quickly before running off to a homecoming football game, I couldn’t help but notice something important: “Pep Rally” was trending as a US trending topic. I immediately clicked on through and found countless teens commenting on their school pep rallies. These teens were posting about pep rallies that were happening at different schools across the east coast. The fact that teens are on Twitter still comes as a surprise to some but what surprised me about this trending topic is that it’s the first truly exogenous trending topic I’ve seen teenagers produce.

There are two types of trending topics on Twitter: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous TTs happen when a topic has a viral spread. Once it becomes a TT, everyone jumps onto it to spread it even further. So when we see a hashtag like #intenyears we know it didn’t happen naturally. It spread by a group of people until it became a TT and then off it went. Most highly visible teen participation centers on endogenous TTs. Sure, there are lots of tweens who like Justin Bieber but he trends on Twitter because people actively work to make that topic (or a related hashtag) trend. Exogenous TTs happen when everyone is talking about the same thing simultaneously, not really responding to each other or to the trending topic per say but responding to a cultural moment. This often happens when there are major new events or TV shows that are broadcasting something of great interest. For example, when Michael Jackson died, Twitter users were talking about MJ not because the topic was hott on Twitter but because it was simply of great public interest. Same with teens responding to events happening at the Teen Choice Awards.

So then why am I so enamored with “pep rally” as a trending topic? It’s Friday in the middle of October. A lot of high schools will have homecoming games tonight. Whenever there’s a homecoming game in the States (and often for other games too), there are pep rallies at the end of the school day. Schools typically let out around 2.30PM. So around 3PM, I login to Twitter and voila, Pep Rally is a trending topic. Click on through and there are thousands of teens from all over the east coast (because time zones haven’t shifted yet) talking about having just gotten out of the pep rally. Some were talking about it being lame; others were talking about it being awesome. But they weren’t talking about the same pep rally. They were talking about their individual schools’ pep rallies. Collectively, many teenagers are experiencing pep rallies right now, but it’s not the same event that they’re experiencing. They’re talking about pep rallies, but what they’re referring to isn’t a shared event. Collectively, their discussions are trending. It’s a fascinating exogenous trending topic that isn’t even about the same event but rather about an activity that teens across EST (and now CST) are experiencing simultaneously but not coherently. Thus, the TT is more about marking a pattern of day (like “good night”) than a particular event. And, in this case, an event that is wholly teen-centric. And now, as I finish this post, I can see the pep rallies finish in CST and start in MST. Amazing. And delightful.

OK… enough talking about pep rallies. It’s time to go get ready for the homecoming games of the night. Hopefully I’ll wear the right colors this time. (I’m really not good at color coordinating for football games.)

[Posted originally to the Digital Media & Learning blog.]

Carmen and her mother are close. As far as Carmen’s concerned, she has nothing to hide from her mother so she’s happy to have her mom as her ‘friend’ on Facebook. Of course, Carmen’s mom doesn’t always understand the social protocols on Facebook and Carmen sometimes gets frustrated. She hates that her mom comments on nearly every post, because it “scares everyone away…Everyone kind of disappears after the mom post…It’s just uncool having your mom all over your wall. That’s just lame.” Still, she knows that her mom means well and she sometimes uses this pattern to her advantage. While Carmen welcomes her mother’s presence, she also knows her mother overreacts. In order to avoid a freak out, Carmen will avoid posting things that have a high likelihood of mother misinterpretation. This can make communication tricky at times and Carmen must work to write in ways that are interpreted differently by different people.

When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

Ancient methods

Steganography is an ancient technique where people hide messages in plain sight. Invisible ink, tattoos under hair on messengers, and messages embedded in pictures are just a few ways in which steganography is employed. Cryptographers are obsessed with steganography, in part because it’s hardest to decode a message when you don’t know where to look. This is precisely why spy movies LOVE steganography. Of course, average people have also employed techniques of hiding in plain sight for a long time, hiding information in everyday communication, knowing that it’ll only be interpreted by some. Children love employing codes and adults generally pretend as though they can’t understand pig Latin or uncover the messages that children hide using invisible ink pens purchased from toy stores. Yet, as children grow up, they get more mature about their messaging, realizing that language has multiple layers and, with it, multiple meanings. They often learn this by being misinterpreted.

What fascinates me is that teens are taking these strategies into the digital spaces, recognizing multiple audiences and the challenges of persistence, and working to speak in layers. They are not always successful. And things that are meant to mean one thing are often misinterpreted in all sorts of the wrong ways. But that doesn’t mean teens aren’t experimenting and learning. In fact, I’d expect that they’re learning more nuanced ways of managing privacy than any of us adults. Why? Because they have to. The more they live in public, the more I expect them to hide in plain sight.

Image credit: Jon McGovern

It occurs to me that some newer members of the Snarkmatrix might not have been around when we did the New Liberal Arts back in 2009. We don’t do a very good job advertising its existence! I mention it because, frankly, I had kinda forgotten about it, until Snarkmarket pal Clive Thompson jogged my memory with a nice link.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out—there are terrific entries from Tim, Matt, and a whole host of others. And it looks great on Kindle and iPad.

I’m enamored of this post of Kasia’s, where she reports on how it feels to have your brain slow and gel* during two weeks away from the internet:

My peripheral vision grew back, my field of focus going from a small, Mac Book shaped rectangle to the whole horizon.

Also:

The best antidote to internet addiction is reading novels.

*The brain of an internet-surfer or blog-writer has the consistency of a hyper-agitated gas. The brain of a novel-reader or deep thinker, by contrast, is a viscous jelly. And the brain of a bookservative is a cold hard stone.

Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, talks about working for Alan Kay, starting the Criterion Collection and Voyager on laserdisc, Hypercard e-books, and interactive CD-ROMs — essentially, the whole prehistory of where we are now with just about all digital media:

The book was always fundamental to me. One of the things I really liked was that the original logo for Criterion, which we designed in 1984, was a book turning into a disc. It was central. When I was writing the paper for Britannica, I felt like I had to relate the idea of interactive media to books, and I was really wrestling with the question “What is a book?” What’s essential about a book? What happens when you move that essence into some other medium? And I just woke up one day and realized that if I thought about a book not in terms of its physical properties—ink on paper—but in terms of the way it’s used, that a book was the one medium where the user was in control of the sequence and the pace at which they accessed the material. I started calling books “user-driven media,” in contrast to movies, television, and radio, which were producer-driven. You were in control of a book, but with these other media you weren’t; you just sat in a chair and they happened to you. I realized that once microprocessors got into the mix, what we considered producer-driven was going to be transformed into something user-driven. And that, of course, is what you have today, whether it’s TiVo or the DVD.

And how did DVDs get commentary tracks? Let Bob tell you:

You have to understand how much of this stuff is accidental. I knew the guy who was the curator of films at the LA County Museum of Art, and I brought him to New York to oversee color correction. He’s telling us all these amazing stories, particularly about King Kong, because it’s his favorite film. Someone said, “Gee, we’ve got this extra sound track on the LaserDisc, why don’t you tell these stories?” He was horrified at the idea, but we promised we’d get him superstoned if he did, and he gave this amazing discussion about the making of King Kong, which we released as the second sound track…

We had people driving to our home, where our offices were, by the second day, and begging for copies. It was Los Angeles, it was the film industry—and finally someone had done something serious with film. Film was suddenly being treated in a published form, like literature. But this still wasn’t mainstream. Citizen Kane was three discs and cost $125. It cost us $40 to manufacture. The most LaserDiscs we ever sold was about twenty thousand copies of Blade Runner.

I don’t usually squee with delight, but: Squeee!

So the Old Spice campaign was funny, surprising, and perfectly-calibrated. These would be reasons enough to like it. But I’m not going to let you stop there. Here’s how I think the campaign establishes an important new precedent—not for online advertising, but for online storytelling across the board.

Here’s where I think it could take us.

Start here: as it became apparent that this wasn’t just a one-time media drop, but instead an ongoing live performance—a spectacle in progress—I was reminded of something that I heard Rex Sorgatz say years ago. I’ll paraphrase, broadly: blogs are actually more related to live theater than they are to, say, newspapers. The things that make a blog good are almost exactly the things that make a live performance good—and the most important, the magic catalyst, is the interplay with the audience.

So extend that beyond blogs, to Twitter feeds and Kickstarter projects and ARGs and whatever it is that Old Spice just did. I really believe in the analogy.

You know what else this campaign made me think of? 48 Hour Magazine. There was that same sense of you-gotta-see-this, and then that same sense of can-they-really-do-it. It was an event—and you know how I feel about those.

I actually think most of the ideas in my events manifesto apply here, but let me highlight one in particular:

But [an event’s] urgency—its live­ness, human vital­ity, and, frankly, its risk and unpredictability—is what makes it more than just another link in the stream.

It’s media as high-wire act. It’s immediacy—which is not coincidentally one of the eight things that are better than free.

If you’re a creative person interested in crafting worlds and telling stories and you are not chewing hard on this campaign, then you’ve missed the point (and quite possibly the whole zeitgeist). I actually think it’s a fluke that the substance of this stunt happened to be commercial. Is it so hard to imagine it another way? Let’s try:

The Old Spice videos weren’t one-liners. They actually pretty quickly established running themes and in-jokes. Taken all together, they mapped out a coherent world—a very small, weird world, populated by one man and one towel, but still: a world.

Now imagine for a moment that this hadn’t been the brain-child of some smart ad guys. Imagine instead that it was the opus of some young Lucas.

Imagine that all the parameters were the same: One actor. One scene. Simple, rich cinematography. Live production stretched over a couple of days. Lots of audience interaction. But the story he’s telling—the world he’s creating—is much more interesting. Maybe the scene is the cockpit of a spaceship; maybe it’s a cramped room in an interstellar hotel.

What would the Old Spice campaign look like if it was directed by a new Joss Whedon, just starting out?

Maybe I’m stretching this way too far; maybe it only works when it’s silly. But I don’t think so. I actually think you could get a lot more serious and a lot more sophisticated (although I’ll admit it would be harder to pull off). There are ways to interact with an audience that aren’t just jokey call-and-response.

Now, I don’t want to underplay the talent involved here; a room full of geniuses from Wieden+Kennedy made this media machine go. But this is where this new model—the live event, the ephemeral spectacle—saves us. Because to fund a room full of geniuses for a year, you need a business. But to fund a room full of geniuses for a day? All you need is a little chutzpah.

I think it’s awesome that Wieden+Kennedy did this first, though. I’d much rather work back from this campaign than work forward from some not-very-engaging piece of net performance art. (Which, of course, might already have been done. Who knows? Exactly.)

There’s more to say about why this was great—the fact that it produced a wide net of content, for instance, instead of a single video or a single live-stream. But you get the point. So I’ll leave you with one final reason to take this format seriously:

It’s fun to do. It’s tons of fun. Anybody who’s written a blog, or gotten deep into Twitter, or run a Kickstarter project, or pulled the strings on an ARG will tell you that there is a special joy to receiving real-time feedback on your work. There’s a special satisfaction to seeing its impact on the world immediately—and adjusting based on what you see. It’s alive, it’s electric, it’s addictive. It’s connected and communal.

The live theater folks had this figured out—their stages were just too small. Now we’ve got one that’s a lot bigger, and more flexible, too. So the question becomes: what’s on the playbill?

Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.

The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.

For instance, RFID was down in the trough when Jack and Timo did their ‘Nearness’ and ‘Immaterials’ work, and many of the components of Availabot are trough-dwellers, enabling them to be cheap and widely-available for both experimentation and production.

While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.

In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.

After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…

Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.

These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.

Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.

The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…

It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!

Mobsploitation (a.k.a. Crowdsourcing…)
Artificial Intelligence
<512mb thumbdrives
Blinking Lights (esp. in shoes)
Singing Chips (esp. in greetings cards)
Desktop Web Apps
Cameras
Accelerometers
MS Office Apps
Physical Keyboards
Mice
Cords & Wires in general
Non-Smart Phones
RSS
Semantic Web
Offline…
Compact Discs
Landline Phones
Command Lines & Text UIs
Privacy
P2P
MUDs & MOOs
Robot Webcams & Sousveillance
Google Wave
Adobe Flash
Kiosks
Municipal Wifi
QR Codes
Pager/Cellphone Vibrator motors
Temporary Autonomous Zones

The Jericho Turnpike, cutting east-west through Long Island, is pretty much a wasteland of strip malls, corporate office parks, and fast food chains…

…and the last place you’d expect to find anything of historical or cultural value is in the parking lot of a Home Depot.

I think that’s what makes this place so great.

Surrounded on all four sides by the Home Depot parking lot (also servicing the adjacent Modell’s and Old Navy), is this grouping of trees surrounded by a chain link fence…And if you actually take the time to look closer…

You’ll find what has to be the only 19th-century graveyard in the United States located in a Home Depot parking lot.

I first read about this on the excellent roadside Americana website, RoadsideAmerica.com, a few years ago, but only had the chance to see it for myself the other day…

“Surreal” is really the only word you can use to describe looking at graves of guys who died in the 1850’s…while a Home Depot shopper pushes his orange cart to his truck in the background.

This was once the family cemetery for the Burr Family, who first came to the United States in 1630 and arrived in Long Island in 1656, situating their family farm on land now owned by Home Depot. The cemetery was in use until about 1880. You can see it just below the purple dot:

It blows my mind that this has somehow survived, the only indicator that the area was once all farmland, and harkening back to a time when families might bury their dead on their own property.

This might be due to the fact that the farmland became an airfield during World War I, known as Brindley Field. Perhaps it was given special treatment during that time?

Though it’s in pretty bad shape, recent flag plantings show that someone still cares about the cemetery:

I really, really hope that Home Depot has a ghost problem.

-SCOUT

Why Jonah Lehrer can’t quit his janky GPS:

The moral is that it doesn’t take much before we start attributing feelings and intentions to a machine. (Sometimes, all it takes is a voice giving us instructions in English.) We are consummate agency detectors, which is why little kids talk to stuffed animals and why I haven’t thrown my GPS unit away. Furthermore, these mistaken perceptions of agency can dramatically change our response to the machine. When we see the device as having a few human attributes, we start treating it like a human, and not like a tool. In the case of my GPS unit, this means that I tolerate failings that I normally wouldn’t. So here’s my advice for designers of mediocre gadgets: Give them voices. Give us an excuse to endow them with agency. Because once we see them as humanesque, and not just as another thing, we’re more likely to develop a fondness for their failings.

This connects loosely with the first Snarkmarket post I ever commented on, more than six (!) years ago.

Just a note that if you’re new here, you should check out Annabel Scheme and Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store.

Also: what’s a media inventor, anyway? Here’s my (totally made-up) definition: It’s somebody primarily interested in content who also experiments with new technology, new processes, and new formats. Allen Lane was a media inventor. Early bloggers were media inventors. Right now, the indie video game scene is full of media inventors.

Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn’t satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS—a media inventor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.

Something like that, anyway.

Update: Frank Chimero connects media invention to Carmen Sandiego and Citizen Kane.

 

The philosopher Dan Dennett, in his terrific book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, coined a phrase that’s echoed in my head ever since I first read it years ago. The phrase is universal acid, and Dennett used it to characterize natural selection—an idea so potent that it eats right through established ideas and (maybe more importantly) institutions—things like, in Darwin’s case, religion. It also resists containment; try to say “well yes, but, that’s just over there” and natural selection burns right through your “yes, but.”

If that’s confusing, the top quarter of this page goes a bit deeper on Dennett’s meaning. It also blockquotes this passage from the book, which gets into the sloshiness of universal acid:

Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome or not—to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If [the cause of design in biology] could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn’t that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.

Whoah!

(P.S. I think one of the reasons I like the phrase so much is that it seems to pair with Marx’s great line “…all that is solid melts into air.” Except it’s even better, right? Marx just talks about melting. This is more active: this is burning. This is an idea so corrosive it bores a channel to the very center of the earth.)

So I find myself wondering what else might qualify as a universal acid.

I think capitalism must. Joyce Appleby charts the course it took in her wonderful new book The Relentless Revolution. “Relentless” is right—that’s exactly what you’d expect from a universal acid. I think the sloshiness is also there; capitalism transformed not just production and trade but also politics, culture, gender roles, family structure, and on and on.

I suspect, much more hazily, that computation might turn out to be another another kind of universal acid—especially this new generation of diffuse, always-available computation that seems to fuse into the world around us, thanks to giant data-centers and wireless connections and iPads and things yet to come.

But what else? Any other contemporary candidates for universal acid?

Part 1: Loading, projecting, and drawing geodata

I’m getting into more canvas and JavaScript for interactive mapping. Much of the Flash/ActionScript work I’ve written or come to rely upon is directly portable to JS/canvas. What’s missing is a sweet RIA framework and IDE for the kind of development Flash and Flex have made possible for years.

Luckily it’s not hard to roll our own interactive web map using web standard technologies. In this post I’m just showing off the basics: dynamically loading geodata, projecting it client-side, and rendering to the canvas element.

Hopefully the above map shows up for you. It’s loaded into this blog post with dynamic KML data, projected using the Proj4js library, and drawn onto HTML’s canvas element using JavaScript. You can check out the P.O.C. on a separate page.

Loading geographic data
It all starts with data. Points, polylines, or polygons — typically defined by latitude/longitude coordinates. Your data may be in a CSV file or in a database. For a simple interactive web map it’s best if it’s in a common GIS file format, like the Shapefile or KML.

These days, it’s not too hard to load a geographic layer on top of a web map — using Google Maps or OpenLayers, say. But since we’re looking down the road to interactivity, custom projections, and thematic mapping, it’s best to roll our own. Luckily, getting the data in is pretty easy.

In ActionScript I would use Edwin van Rijkom’s ESRI SHP parser, my own E00 parser, or some simple custom methods I’ve written to load in KML documents. Tom Carden of Stamen has done some great work porting the AS3 SHP library to JavaScript, with additional classes and methods to allow basic layering, panning, and zooming.

Carden’s classes are great; for demo purposes, and to keep this as lightweight as possible, I’ve just written a quick JavaScript method to grab what I need from a KML document:

$.get( "data/kml/generalized_african_countries.kml", function( xml ) {
    var features = new Array();
    $( xml ).find( 'Placemark' ).each( function() {
        var rings = new Array();
        $( this ).find( 'outerBoundaryIs' ).each( function() {
            var ring = new Array();
            var coordsText = $( this ).find( 'coordinates' ).text();
            var coordStrings = coordsText.split( ' ' );
            for ( var coordText in coordStrings ) {
                var coordinate = new Array();
                var coordSplit = coordStrings[ coordText ].split( ',' );
                for ( var coordInd in coordSplit ) coordinate.push( Number( coordSplit[ coordInd ] ) );
                ring.push( coordinate );
            }
            rings.push( ring );
        } );
        features.push( rings );
    } );
       
    /* feature coordinates all loaded -- now do something with them */
       
} );
You’ll notice a bit of jQuery in there. And you’ll also notice that it grabs only coordinate data and works only for polygons. But it produces an array of feature coordinates, which is an array of ring coordinates, which is an array of lat/long coordinates, which is all we need for the current application.

Projecting geographic data
One of my biggest beefs with the typical online map providers is that they’re all rendered in a Mercator projection. No problem for most purposes (and great for producing those 90 degree road intersections), but not so great for country-level mapping and bad for many thematic mapping pursuits. That’s one reason we’re rolling our own here.

PROJ.4 is a generally sweet projections library, originally written in C by Gerald Evenden then of the USGS. It’s been ported to JavaScript as Proj4js. To use it you just have to define source and a dest objects:

Proj4js.defs[ 'albersEqualArea_Africa' ] = '+title= albers_AFR\
                                            +proj=aea\
                                            +lat_1=20\
                                            +lat_2=-23\
                                            +lat_0=0\
                                            +lon_0=25\
                                            +x_0=0\
                                            +y_0=0\
                                            +ellps=WGS84\
                                            +datum=WGS84\
                                            +units=m\
                                            +no_defs';
var source = new Proj4js.Proj( 'WGS:84' );
var dest = new Proj4js.Proj( 'albersEqualArea_Africa' );
And thereafter you can call

Proj4js.transform( source, dest, pt );
where pt is any object with x and y properties. So all coordinates gathered from the KML above can be run through the Proj4js.transform() method, in this case applying a custom Albers Equal Area projection (proj=aea) for the African continent.

Drawing geographic data on the canvas element
The results of the above can be easily rendered to HTML’s canvas element using JavaScript. I’m used to ActionScript’s Graphics class, and its assorted vector drawing methods. Of course, given the common ECMAScript heritage, the JS methods are nearly identical. So the projected linework is rendered thusly:

function drawPolygonFeatures( features, minX, maxX, minY, maxY )
{
    var c_canvas = document.getElementById( "map" );
    var context = c_canvas.getContext("2d");
    var multiFactor = Math.min( c_canvas.width / ( maxX - minX ), c_canvas.height / ( maxY - minY ) );
    var x = 0; var y = 0;
    for ( var featureNum in features ) {
        for ( var ringNum in features[ featureNum ] ) {
            var ring = features[ featureNum ][ ringNum ];
            context.moveTo( ( ring[ 0 ][ 0 ] - minX ) * multiFactor, c_canvas.height - ( ring[ 0 ][ 1 ] - minY ) * multiFactor );                  
            for ( var coordNum = 1; coordNum < ring.length; coordNum++ ) {
                x = ( ring[ coordNum ][ 0 ] - minX ) * multiFactor;
                y = c_canvas.height - ( ring[ coordNum ][ 1 ] - minY ) * multiFactor;
                context.lineTo( x, y );
            }
        }
    }
    context.shadowOffsetX = context.shadowOffsetY = 3;
    context.shadowBlur    = 4;
    context.shadowColor   = 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5)';
    context.fillStyle = "#0099cc";
    context.fill();
    context.shadowOffsetX = context.shadowOffsetY = context.shadowBlur = 0;
    context.strokeStyle = "#fff";
    context.stroke();
}
That method’s made a bit longer by that bitchin’ drop shadow (sorry Firefox, but you Konqueror folks should be cool). See above, or the P.O.C. on a separate page.

Up next
So far this has been pretty sweet: we’ve loaded coordinate data dynamically, projected it, and drawn it to the canvas element. But it hasn’t exactly lived up to the “interactive” part of the title. Next time I hope to get going on panning and zooming, feature mouse-over, and perhaps even attribute loading and thematic mapping.

… (and note how The Future is capitalised) we were going to have personal agents, software that would act on our behalf and do things like book cinema tickets, wake us up early if it was raining and the traffic on the way to work was heavy, etc, remind us of our spouse’s birthdays, that kind of thing.

Right now, I want a personal agent who can manage my seemingly endless morass of software updates (WordPress 2.9.2 is available! You haven’t yet switched over to an SVN-backed install! You fool! OS X wants to install software updates! Tweetie needs updating!) never mind sift through my spam or be my Facebook birthday reminder.

Schooloscope is a new project from BERG, and I want to show it to you.

What if a school could speak to you, and tell you how it’s doing? “I have happy kids,” it might say. “Their exams results are great.”

Schools in England are inspected by a body called Ofsted. Their reports are detailed and fair — Ofsted is not run by the government of the day, but directly by Parliament. And kids in schools are tracked by the government department DCSF. They publish everything from exam results to statistical measurements of improvement over the school careers of the pupils.

Cooooomplicated.

What Schooloscope does is tell you how your school’s doing at a glance.

There are pictures of smiling schools. Or unhappy ones, if the kids there aren’t happy.

Each school summarises the statistics in straightforward, natural English. There are well over 20,000 state schools in England that we do this for. We got a computer to do the work. A journalism robot.

You can click through and read the actual stats afterwards, if you want.

Why?

A little of my personal politics. Education is important. And every school is a community of teachers, kids, parents, governors and government. The most important thing in a community is to take part on an equal footing and with positive feeling. Parents have to feel engaged with the education of their children.

As great as the government data is, it can be arcane. It looks like homework. It’s full of jargon… and worse, words that look like English but that are also jargon.

Schooloscope attempts to bring simplicity, familiarity, and meaning to government education data, for every parent in England.

A tall order!

This is a work in progress. There are lots of obvious missing features. Like: finding schools should be easier! There are bugs. There’s a whole bunch we want to do with the site, some serious and some silly. And full disclosure here: over the next 6 months we’re working on developing and commercialising this. Schooloscope is a BERG project funded by 4iP, the Channel 4 innovation fund. Is it possible to make money by being happily hopeful about very serious things and visualising information with smiling faces? I reckon so.

Anyway. The way we learn more is by taking Schooloscope public, seeing what happens, and making stuff.

The team! Tom Armitage and Matt Brown have worked super hard and made a beautiful thing which is only at the start of its journey. They, Matt Jones and Kari Stewart are taking it into the future. Also Giles Turnbull, Georgina Voss, and Ben Griffiths have their fingerprints all over this. Tom Loosemore and Dan Heaf at 4iP, thanks! And everyone else who has given feedback along the way.

Right, that’s launch out of the way! Let’s get on with the job of making better schools and a better Schooloscope.

Say hello to Schooloscope now.

A number of exciting new features have been added to the Web Inspector since our last update. This time, we’ve got three new panels to present: a Timeline, Audits and Dedicated Console. But before we go there, let us give you a brief update on the improvements to the existing features.

If you would like to play with most of these features you will need to be running a recent WebKit Nightly or subscribe to the Chromium Dev Channel. For WebKit Nightly users make sure that you enable the Web Inspector by checking “Show Develop menu in menu bar” under the Advanced tab in the Preferences.

Styles Inspection #
We’ve been working hard on making editing styles more complete and user-friendly. Now you can jump to rule definition right from the Styles sidebar entry.

You can view and edit styles such as font, color, spacing, list & text styles and others that are inherited from ancestor nodes. In addition to that we’ve exposed pseudo element styles such as ::before, ::after and many more -webkit-* ones. Inspect any input field and discover the ways you can decorate passwords, input placeholders, and many other aspects.

DOM Inspection #
DOM editing capabilities are now accessible via the context menu. Items in the menu are specific to the context, so that you will see different actions for nodes, attributes, local store entries, and others throughout the Web Inspector’s UI. Among them is a long-awaited feature called “Edit as HTML” available on DOM nodes.

We are also handling huge DOM trees much better now. For DOM nodes having more than 500 children, instead of waiting for the parent node to get populated with information you don’t immediately need, you will have an option to expand them manually should you need it.

Resources Inspection #
In the Resources Panel, we now display HTTP redirects information. Every redirect is displayed as separate resource entry providing all its meta-information such as timing and headers. This information is available by means of the new HTTP Headers View. Take a look at the screenshot below for the redirect chain produced while navigating to http://gmail.com.

Selecting a redirect chain entry gives you its status code and the redirect location in the response headers.

We have also worked on scalability all over the inspector. The Web Inspector can now be left instrumenting for days while inspecting AJAX intensive applications such as Gmail. It can also render large source files of ~100KLOC with syntax highlighting, while maintaining a reasonable memory footprint.

Scripts Panel Improvements #
We’ve found that users often manually disable numerous breakpoints in order to get to a single breakpoint or state they want to debug. To improve this there is now a way to deactivate and activate all breakpoints via a single click on the debugger toolbar.

While on a breakpoint, hover over elements to see their actual values evaluated on a selected call frame. The Web Inspector will not only render basic types, but will also present complex object trees and function bodies.

Keyboard Shortcuts #
We are constantly adding keyboard shortcuts to the Web Inspector, so make sure to check out updates on our wiki page. Most notably, page reload shortcuts will refresh the inspected page instead of refreshing the Web Inspector itself.

That’s it for the existing features updates. You can find the complete list of addressed bugs and feature requests using this query. Now it is time to talk about the new panels.

New! Timeline Panel #
Imagine that you’ve optimized your site’s network interaction using the Resources Panel and tuned all of your JavaScript using profiler in the Scripts Panel. Still, there are operations that could be taking a considerable amount of CPU time such as parsing HTML, calculating styles, painting, and others that you don’t normally see. Some of these operations may happen when you don’t necessarily expect them to. Its easy to guess that assigning an element’s innerHTML to a string results in HTML snippet parsing, but changing other element properties may trigger style calculations you didn’t expect. Now there is a way to analyze that.

The Timeline Panel provides you with a detailed view of what’s happening inside your browser as you surf. It allows you to zoom into the areas of interest, expand the nested records and investigate their details. The Timeline organizes nesting based on event causation. So, if a mouse down event handler sets a timer, which upon firing loads a resource using XHR, which later evaluates the result when the resource becomes available; then all the events caused by the mouse down will be placed under the mouse down umbrella. Solid parts of the bars show synchronous time spent on the operation, while the semi-transparent part shows the time consumed by everything this event caused (not necessarily synchronously).

Use the overview panel at the top to zoom into your area of interest. Overview shows the aggregated information on the three major record categories: Loading, Scripting and Rendering. Each category can be individually filtered out. The “Hide short records” button in the status bar will hide all the records that took less than 15ms.

Clicking or hovering over a record will show a popup window with its details.

Note that we’ve just started with the Timeline and we believe that we are only scratching the surface of what we can provide. We welcome your feedback, ideas and contributions.

New! Audits Panel #
The Audits Panel performs a number of sanity checks for your site. You start with the Audit Launcher Panel where you select the audit sets you’d like to run. The Web Inspector will then optionally reload your page and analyze it.

Audit results provide you with hints on unused resources, caching optimizations, the number of resources to load per domain, image tag parameters and many other suggestions.

We’d like to make the audits framework extensible so that everyone can contribute checks for various categories such as mobile browsing, security, and static code analysis.

New! Dedicated Console Panel #
You can now enjoy a large and powerful inspector console in a dedicated panel. Note that you can use panel switching shortcuts such as Command-[ and Command-] as mentioned in one of the previous posts.

How You Can Contribute #
Many of these new features were added by members of the Open Source Community. We would like to encourage you to contribute as well. Since the Web Inspector itself is mostly HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that means that you already have the skills you need to join in. Interested? Play around right now by inspecting the inspector itself!

If you’re interested in contributing and have any questions please stop by the #webkit-inspector IRC channel. If you have ideas for new features, any improvements, or if you’ve stumbled across a bug then please don’t hesitate to create a bug report. This link has pre-populated most of the fields so that you only need to fill out the Summary and Description. As always you should do a quick search through the existing inspector bugs first.

A Heat Map of the Firefox Menu Bar

The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot team recently ran a study to explore how users interact with Firefox’s menu bar. The study is now complete and the raw data is available, so in addition to the great visualizations that they have already made, I put together a heat map:

View the full size

The data displayed is filtered to only Windows users (since we are now in the process of adapting the Firefox menu interface for Vista and 7). The data also is filtered to only display mouse interactions (keyboard shortcuts will of course remain consistent).

The hue, lightness, and saturation of each menu item are being generated on a logarithmic scale based on the usage. Here is the source file used to generate the HSL values.

In the heat map we can see that the menu items that are used vastly more than all others are the user’s bookmarks, copy and paste.

If you generate the HSL values with just a linear representation to usage the huge disparity between heavily used items and infrequently used items is of course even more pronounced in the visualization:

Using Test Pilot to Inform the Design of Firefox

The Firefox UX team and Test Pilot team put together this study and are now sorting through the data to help streamline Firefox’s menu interface for Windows Vista and Windows 7 (note that we will be keeping the traditional menu bar for XP, OS X and Linux for external consistency). This interface re-factoring is still very much in progress, but here is a quick screen grab of some initial ideas:

In this design Bookmarks are accessible both through the Firefox menu, as well as through a control placed directly on the navigation toolbar:

For the common edit commands like Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste, we are looking into possibly placing these directly to the right of the Firefox button, but only when the user has focused a text field. The benefit is that they are even easier for mouse-based users to access, while maintaining an otherwise streamlined design. The downside is a slight amount of peripheral visual noise as they appear and disappear, which we may try to mitigate with a very light visual design.

We are considering grouping extension menu items that otherwise would appear in the tools menu together into one area at the bottom of the Firefox menu to make them easier to find.

We are also exploring the use of split menu items for every item in the Firefox menu that produces a sub menu. So for instance if you click on History you will navigate your browser to view your history, and if you hover over it you will get the normal History sub-menu. In addition to streamlining some mouse interactions, this will also help us adapt the Firefox interface for touch input, where hovering isn’t possible.

This is all very much a work in progress, but hopefully we’ll be ready to start working on implementing the Firefox button for Windows nightly builds soon now that an initial design is coming together.

[Ed. note: I attended Secretary Clinton's speech on internet freedom on Thursday the 21st, which I thought was a good combination of principle, policy, and illustrative stories. Talking to people afterwards, the commonest question was "What did the Secretary commit the State Department to?" The text below is my attempt to answer that question.

I don't have any inside information about the particulars of the State department's plans; the text below is simply an abridged version of the speech, from which I removed everything except statements you could judge future actions of the State Department on. Stripped of it's context (and with my apologies to the speech writers), my read of the speech is that the success or failure of our internet freedom policy will come down to our ability to live up to the principles outlined below. -clay]

[Topic Sentence]

We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.

[Internet freedom as an aspect of human rights]

We need to synchronize our technological progress with our principles. In accepting the Nobel Prize, President Obama spoke about the need to build a world in which peace rests on the inherent rights and dignities of every individual. And in my speech on human rights at Georgetown a few days later, I talked about how we must find ways to make human rights a reality. Today, we find an urgent need to protect these freedoms on the digital frontiers of the 21st century.

[Freedom of expression]

But the internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them. This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, emails, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship.

[Exceptions for incitement to violence; disapproval of hate speech]

Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people across the world. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible.

[Acknowledgment of hard cases, which are nevertheless subordinate to peaceful political uses]

And we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.

[Freedom of worship]

But the freedom of worship also speaks to the universal right to come together with those who share your values and vision for humanity. In our history, those gatherings often took place in churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Today, they may also take place on line.

Now, just as these technologies must not be used to punish peaceful political speech, they must also not be used to persecute or silence religious minorities.

We must work to advance the freedom of worship online just as we do in other areas of life.

[International coordination on cybersecurity]

We need more tools to help law enforcement agencies cooperate across jurisdictions when criminal hackers and organized crime syndicates attack networks for financial gain. The same is true when social ills such as child pornography and the exploitation of trafficked women and girls online is there for the world to see and for those who exploit these people to make a profit. We applaud efforts such as the Council on Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime that facilitate international cooperation in prosecuting such offenses. And we wish to redouble our efforts.

Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation.

[Freedom to connect, likened to freedom of assembly]

The final freedom, one that was probably inherent in what both President and Mrs. Roosevelt thought about and wrote about all those years ago, is one that flows from the four I’ve already mentioned: the freedom to connect – the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other.

The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace.

[USG support for the broad goals]

The United States is committed to devoting the diplomatic, economic, and technological resources necessary to advance these freedoms.

[Support for dissidents; return to theme of human rights]

And I’m proud that the State Department is already working in more than 40 countries to help individuals silenced by oppressive governments. We are making this issue a priority at the United Nations as well, and we’re including internet freedom as a component in the first resolution we introduced after returning to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

[USG funding research into freedom-supporting tools]

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely.

[USG support for the broad goals II]

Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom.

[USG funding research into freedom-supporting tools II]

That’s why today I’m announcing that over the next year, we will work with partners in industry, academia, and nongovernmental organizations to establish a standing effort that will harness the power of connection technologies and apply them to our diplomatic goals. By relying on mobile phones, mapping applications, and other new tools, we can empower citizens and leverage our traditional diplomacy. We can address deficiencies in the current market for innovation.

And the State Department will be launching an innovation competition to give this work an immediate boost. We’ll be asking Americans to send us their best ideas for applications and technologies that help break down language barriers, overcome illiteracy, connect people to the services and information they need.

[Pro-freedom agenda in the market]

Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions. I hope that their competitors and foreign governments will pay close attention to this trend.

And censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand.

[Support for Global Internet Freedom Task Force]

Now, we are reinvigorating the Global Internet Freedom Task Force as a forum for addressing threats to internet freedom around the world, and we are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.

[February 2010 meeting with network services firms]

As part of our commitment to support responsible private sector engagement on information freedom, the State Department will be convening a high-level meeting next month co-chaired by Under Secretaries Robert Hormats and Maria Otero to bring together firms that provide network services for talks about internet freedom, because we want to have a partnership in addressing this 21st century challenge.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been offering an invitation-only sneak peek at the Typekit service. Now, we’re happy to announce that we’re open to the public. You can head over to Typekit and start using it immediately!

We’ve learned a lot about how browsers handle fonts and what web designers and developers need from a service like ours. We’ve been iterating daily to make Typekit as robust as possible. And we’re pleased to have maintained 100% uptime since we invited our first users back in August. The introductory pricing will remain for a while, so sign up now to get the best deal. We’ll also be announcing new foundry partners and adding new fonts to the library soon.

As ever, we’re looking forward to seeing how typography will change web design, and how you’ll use it to build new things. Have fun!

Some pithy fellow once declared that modern sanitation is humanity’s greatest triumph. And, really, there’s a pretty good case to made there — even against formidable human accomplishments like DisneyWorld or photoshopping.

But the progress of sanitation has been terribly uneven and something like 2.6 billion people today lack all access to it while on the very same planet the Japanese have created futuristic toilets that automatically do urinalysis when you pee and play a birdsong soundtrack to disguise your “embarrassing bathroom noises.”

The big issue, of course, is that traditional sanitation infrastructure is expensive to install and maintain. So in places that are chaotic, corrupt and poor–which is to say, a large swath of the world–it can be difficult to bring together the requisite funding, political will and expertise to make sure potable water and shit are piped in and out of every home, respectively. A New Yorker story a couple of years ago recalled the vivid and depressing case of a slum in Lagos that lacked drinking water because the brackets attaching a colonial-era trunk main on the underside of a bridge that connected to the slum had rusted and broken, the pipe had collapsed, and that was pretty much that.

In all discussions of infrastructure strategy these days–whether for cash-strapped Cleveland or cash-strapped Cameroon–the question of cheap, imaginative, and durable work-arounds is becoming more and more relevant. One of our favorite recent examples specific to the developing world is the PeePoo bag. Developed by a Swedish architect who wondered why those in his profession weren’t showing more concern about sanitation issues, the product is a cheap and smartly engineered single-use composting toilet. Rather than going out and squatting in a vacant lot where you are subject to all kinds of threats (from cholera to crime), you do your business in the bag in the relative privacy and comfort of your home. It’s lined with urea, which sanitizes the feces, and it’s also biodegradable so it can be used kit and kaboodle as a fertilizer. Just throw it in the ground. Most importantly though, it’s easy to distribute and hard to screw up — as long as you can get your hands on one, you’re pretty much assured it will work, and that your dirty business won’t wind up giving someone else tapeworm or diarrhea.

Our notions of infrastructure are still generally rooted in the past and tend to favor large-scale thinking and construction. A new Hoover Dam instead of new building codes. At times–say, building out a high speed rail network or highway system in China–that’s appropriate. But in lots of other cases, it’s time to start discard the megaproject and start thinking in the cheap and improvisational terms that newfangled technology now allows. For example, pooping in a bag.

According to our friends the pundits, Congress has three big legislative priorities for the foreseeable future: Health care, climate and creating regulations that will tame those rapacious risk-takers on Wall Street.

Noticeably–and sadly–absent from that list is a new transportation bill. Earlier this year, it seemed like it would get done by September 30, when the current $286 billion bill expires. Momentum was building for a transformative replacement: a six-year bill that would rationalize the US DOT bureaucracy, realign policy priorities, set meaningful standards, and offer for an appropriate level of investment for our roads, bridges and transit systems. Everyone would have something to crow about: progressive policy advocates could wrestle a bigger share of a bigger pie for transit, state DOTs and the highway industrial complex would be well-fed anyway, and all the little people (that’s us) would get serious action on an issue we seem to care about intensely across all party and demographic lines.

Jim Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Transportation committee, even drafted an 800-page, $500 billion bill that offered a damn respectable starting point, including a $50 billion investment in high speed rail. For a glorious moment, it seemed like the US was ready to get serious again about a transcendently important policy area after decades of goofing off.

But then we started goofing off again and now, from the perspective of the first day of the fall session of Congress, the new transportation bill seems to be lost in the badlands that lie between public need and political will.

What happened? Let’s review.

In June, amid growing chatter from the Senate that 2009 was looking mighty busy, Obama (or Rahm Emanuel or whoever) had Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood go out and say, “Eh, let’s just wait till 2011–after the next elections and stuff.” Oberstar raged at the announcement calling it “unacceptable” and vowing to push ahead with his draft. By contrast, Barbara Boxer, the Senate’s pointperson, was “very pleased.”

The key players have been on openly divergent paths ever since. Oberstar now says he’ll hold a committee mark-up for the bill (this week perhaps?) and has a promise from Pelosi that it will come to a full floor vote later this month. The hitch, however, is coming up with an extra $200 billion beyond what the current 18-cents-per-gallon gas tax will pay for. Pretty much everybody agrees that raising gas taxes in the depths of the Great Recession is a bad idea, but Oberstar and his allies argue that there are plenty of other options–say, a small tax on energy speculators, or a bond issue paid back with revenue higher gas taxes after the economy recovers–to fund the bill. Sounds straightforward enough, right? But getting the Ways and Means committee to actually adopt one of those new funding mechanisms is a different matter, and they would need to identify a way to pay for it before it could proceed. The prospects of that look dicey.

The Senate, meanwhile, now seems to have no interest in a new bill before 2011. The relevant committees have already passed a $27 billion, 18-month extension of the current Bush-era bill, sans any reforms whatsoever. Boxer and her GOP colleague Jim Inhofe put out a statement saying, “There are just too many big questions left unanswered, not the least of which is a lack of a consensus on how to pay for it.” That old problem.

Of course, there is often a lack of consensus when the people who ought to be forging that consensus aren’t doing so. And the administration has chosen not to do so. Understandably nobody wants the political hit of raising gas taxes now, but in our humble opinion if the President said the American people, “We need to put a very small tax on energy speculators to rebuild our infrastructure”–accompanied with specific, graphic examples of what needs to be fixed–our bet is that most voters would go along with it.

The timing of the bill isn’t just a matter or pride or principle–there are some major risks in delay. The jobs picture in this country looks bleaker all the time (see prev post), and infrastructure spending is a time-honored method of putting people to work. But big projects, which create long-term jobs and long-term economic value, require long-term funding visibility before state and local governments will undertake them. Postponing the new bill until 2011 and going with an 18 month extension at old funding levels really doesn’t offer much long-term visibility–it’s a rotten in-between length of time that’ll just slow a lot of big projects down.

And what if the economy is as bad or worse in 18 months, and what if Obama’s already battening down the hatches for the 2012 election? Emanuel (or Obama or whoever) could well decide kick the issue down the road again until 2013 rather than getting involved with the gas tax.

One reason this is all kind of tricky is that in the flashing-graphics world of political news, “transportation” tends to play as a niche issue that matters only to the attendees of World of Asphalt conferences and a few crazy hippies who fantasize about aerodynamic trains. But what’s been revolutionary about 2009 is that Americans are starting to wrap their heads around the fact that “transportation” actually *is* climate change and *is* employment stimulus and *is* a foundation of future prosperity and *is* present-day quality of life. Not exclusively, of course–but meaningfully. A convergence of factors have contributed to this nascent insight: last year’s spike in gas prices, the debate around the stimulus bill, Obama’s campaign promise of an $80 billion infrastructure bank, the leadership of star-wattage state politicians like Ed Rendell and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ever-greater attention being paid to smart transportation policy meccas like Portland, the emerging excitement over getting a real passenger rail network in this country, the lingering memory of the I-35 bridge collapse… and on and on.

Sometimes the moment is just ripe. That was the case for a transportation bill in 2009. In theory, it could still happen–Oberstar could get his house vote, the administration could see the light and decide it’s an economic necessity to get a bill passed before 2011, Obama could hold a press conference framing the new transportation bill as crucial to employment and economic competitiveness (”Look at what China, Spain, England, are doing…”), and the Senate could be persuaded to go along.

But that’s all very unlikely. More likely, is shorter term extension — an apparent compromise between the the 18-month time frame and Oberstar’s more urgent one. But how likely is an adequate funding solution–”Hey, voters, more gas tax!”–in the months leading up to a congressional election. So a short extension could easily become two or more…

Will the moment be as ripe in 2011? Or 2013, if the matter gets kicked down the road again until after the presidential election? Maybe. But at best we’ll be 2-4 years behind where we’d otherwise be, which is a rotten shame.

Artist Ross Racine creates fictional suburbs. He describes his work–”drawn freehand directly on the computer and printed with an inkjet printer”–as a “a comment on the fears as well as the dreams expressed in suburban culture.” What’s eerie is that the images often seem entirely realistic, capturing that odd mix of uninspired marketing whimsy and impracticality that characterizes so many suburban developments.

For example, there’s cloud-shaped Walnut Village–a community that’s both absurd and believable. One has the sense that if we haven’t built a place like that yet, we will very soon.

Below are nine more prosaicly-named communities that exist only in Racine’s imagination.

Aspen Grove and Sunrise Park:

Sunshine Acres:

Highland Farms:

Dewdrop Village:

New Foxtown and Westhaven Villas:

Beachview Bluffs:

Mapleglen (version 2):

Chestnut Gap:

Greenfield Lakes:

Lots more at Racine’s site.

Secretaries of Energy are just like us! They’re on Facebook too, compiling their hobbies and likes and dislikes and throwing up a few old photos, including the one where they’re next to a celeb.

By “they,” we mean Steven Chu. Who we admire. But today we know more about him than we ever expected to–or perhaps even wanted to.
.
For instance:
* He likes biking and doing crosswords with his wife Jean and is “trying to learn golf.”
* He used to wear those big low-on-the-cheeks double-bridged glasses that hipsters wear now–and wore them pretty well actually.
* He shows good high-low range in his choice of quotes, from an inspiring but highly speciesist one from William Faulkner about how human beings are the best things ever to a Yogi Berra classic about taking the fork in the road.
*”My career has not gone exactly as planned.” (Wow, us too!)
* He planned to be a theoretical physicist but got sidetracked into experimental physics. He won a Nobel Prize anyway. (Never mind.)
* He graduated from HS when he was 18, so didn’t exactly follow the Doogie Howser-style accelerated academic plan.
* Jean is brilliant too, holding a PhD from Oxford–presumably the one founded in the Middle Ages, not “Oxford” the Internet diploma mill.
* His musical tastes are “Classical, some opera”–thankfully not a Dave Matthews fan or something.
* He took a meeting with Brad Pitt and is still a little bit aglow over it.
* He looks nervous when he’s talking to his boss.

* Pisces — as if we couldn’t have guessed!

Anyway, Dr. Chu, welcome to Facebook. As of about 5 minutes ago, we’re officially a “fan.” Do you play Scramble, by any chance?

from Don Nguyen
to sales@bbsdocumentary.com
cc Wilson Rothman ,
Jesus@gizmodo.com
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 5:37 PM
subject BBS pornography in 1979

Hi,
My name is Don Nguyen, and I work at Gizmodo, a gadget and technology website. We are currently working on features about technology thirty years ago, and one of the issues we want to look in to is the state of pornography on BBS ‘networks’ in 1979 and the very early 1980s. I came across your great documentary about BBS, and was wondering if there is any information you could provide us with that would help for the article.

Thank You,
Don Nguyen, Intern
Gizmodo.com

from Jason Scott
to Don Nguyen
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:05 PM
subject Re: BBS pornography in 1979
mailed-by textfiles.com

I am happy to be thought of as a go-to guy for BBS history, but I
can’t see how the article won’t be written in an exploitative way that
will demean users of BBSes for a quick chuckle. I think I’ll pass.
Keep me in mind for more uplifting aspects of that rich history.

from Wilson Rothman
to jason@textfiles.com
cc Don Nguyen
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:15 PM
subject Re: BBS pornography in 1979

Hi Jason – I’d like to compliment you on that succinct and insultingly reductive reply to my assistant’s genuine request for the information and expertise in your possession.

Let me know if you’d like to try again. Maybe you’d like to write the piece yourself? You’d be joining the ranks of guest bloggers ranging from astronauts to chefs, from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Adam Savage from MythBusters. Do you think all of them felt exploited when they willingly contributed their wisdom to Gizmodo?

Seriously, we’d love your input on this, if you want to share. And if you want to broaden it beyond the thrilling subject of sex, I’m all ears.

W
–
Wilson Rothman
Features Editor
Gizmodo.com
646-369-3252
Twitter: @wjrothman

from Jason Scott
to Wilson Rothman
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:34 PM
subject Re: BBS pornography in 1979

My answer remains no.

from Wilson Rothman
to Jason Scott
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 6:47 PM
subject Re: BBS pornography in 1979

Suit yourself. It’s too bad, because we really like working with people who are experts in their field, who are promoting their own projects. We reach 10 million people worldwide every month, and we’re happy to direct that attention to works we deem worthy. Your documentary seems like something people would actually want to know about — shame you’re not interested in promoting it.

I’m really just sad that you came into this dialog with such a sour attitude towards us. I certainly don’t deserve it. Can I ask, for academic reasons, what causes you to be so negative? Maybe it’s a misunderstanding that we can clear up?

W

(Conversation Ends.)

One of the major themes in Firefox 3.5’s user interface is a focus on privacy. So far Firefox’s approach to privacy has been essentially all or nothing. Users previously had the ability to easily clear all of the data the browser had stored about them, but this destroyed absolutely everything. Instead of being able to go off the record, this was kind of like shooting the reporter. Now users have considerably more control over their privacy, both proactively and retroactively.

There are 5 new privacy features introduced to Firefox with the 3.5 release. Here is a description of how each one works:

Tools > Private Browsing (Proactive Privacy)

If you would like to browse the Web without Firefox recording history, Private Browsing allows you to quickly launch a browsing session that will be completely off the record:

After launching into private browsing mode, you receive a confirmation explaining that Firefox isn’t going to remember anything:

It’s great to get private browsing mode into a shipping copy of Firefox, since private browsing mode was previously both targeted and canceled for Firefox 3 (and in the interim it was added to IE and Chrome, which is really great for users). Private browsing mode actually has a long history of not quite making it into a final release, way back in 2002 Blake and Asa prototyped it for Netscape. We all owe a huge thanks to Ehsan Akhgari who worked incredibly hard to get the feature fully implemented.

Tools > Clear Recent History (Retroactive Privacy)

Let’s say that you’ve been browsing around the Web for awhile, perhaps shopping for an engagement ring, or researching a medical condition, and you realize that you really should have been in private browsing mode. The Clear Recent History feature is kind of like Private Browsing, except it works in reverse. (All good interfaces support undo!)

After selecting Clear Recent History, you will be asked what time period you would like to erase:

If you expand details you can see the somewhat arcane list of things being removed, but the short version is that “history” refers to everything that is implicitly collected by Firefox as you browse the Web (and we really mean everything). You can also use this dialog to max out the time range and effectively reset Firefox, similar to the old dialog.

Thanks go to Drew Willcoxon, Shawn Wilsher and Johnathan Nightingale for implementing this feature.

History > Forget about this Site (Retroactive Privacy)

If you don’t want to clear a specific time range but would rather selectively delete items out of your history, Firefox now offers the ability to remove all of the history of a particular Web site. For instance you can select this article in your history (either through the Library window, or the History Sidebar), and then use “Forget About this Site” to remove every visit to blog.mozilla.com.

This is a bit more powerful than deleting individual visits if you are interested in pruning your history. This feature was implemented by Shawn Wilsher.

Simplified Privacy Options (Proactive Privacy)

We’ve also significantly simplified Firefox’s privacy options. By default Firefox will remember where you go on the Web:

However, if you are extremely privacy conscious, or you are setting up a computer that will be in a public location and used by many different people, like a hotel lobby or a computer lab, you can now very easily set Firefox to never remember history. This is basically the same thing as always running Firefox in private browsing mode, except that the mode is always on.

Of course if you have previously changed your history settings, or are interested in micromanaging exactly what Firefox will and will not store as you browse the Web, the full range of settings are still available:

This feature was implemented by Ehsan Akhgari.

Ability to Control What Appears in the Location Bar Search Results (Proactive Privacy)

When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed. In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarassing things that Firefox can to do you. So now in Firefox 3.5, users have complete control over what types of information are displayed in the location bar (or suggestions can be turned off entirely):

This feature was implemented by Ed Lee and Dietrich Ayala.

Even More Control!

But what if the five privacy tools described above still aren’t enough? You want to be able to save both bookmarks and history, but in a way that only you can access the information.

The most direct way to do this is to create a new user account in the operating system you are using, and to give it a password. Firefox will create a separate profile for that user, and you can use this new profile to store bookmarks and history.

Alternatively, you can launch Firefox and display the profile manager. This is a feature that is intentionally hidden from the normal Firefox UI, since it is a bit more complicated than creating a new user account in your operating system, and is more commonly used by developers who are testing Firefox. Instructions for accessing Firefox’s profile manager vary by operating system, but we have a detailed article explaining the feature.

The third, and perhaps most extreme way to keep your bookmarks and history private, is to use something called Portable Firefox. This allows you to put both Firefox and your profile onto a USB thumb drive. You can then place the thumb drive into a physical box, and literally lock it, bury it, etc.

What’s Next?

While Firefox’s profile manager is currently more of a tool designed for developers, with emerging tools like Mozilla Lab’s Weave, users may soon be logging into their Web browsers to access all of their personal information. The great thing about this is that similar to Web mail and other online services, users can create multiple accounts. Also (unlike Web mail and most other online services) Mozilla Lab’s Weave encrypts all of your information, so you can be assured that you are the only one who has the ability to access it.

Firefox takes your privacy incredibly seriously, and we hope that you enjoy using all of the great new features we’ve added in Firefox 3.5, which is available for download starting today!