What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

(tags: cards conjecture cybernetics doors hoops imagination interaction magic magician observation opening perception representation routinized theories of the world things visual windows)

Paraphrased for a new century and an old industry:

“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”

re: QWAN from: TWoB by: CA.

(tags: analytics collective cybernetics media more-human-than-human networks representation)

Late last week, Catherine twitterinvited folks to bulk up Ann Arbor on Placeshout. Three days later, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are the first and third most “shouted” cities, with San Francisco coming in second. This reminds me of the early, happy days of upcoming.org, when Ann Arbor was one of the locations with the most user and event churn.

So what the hell is Placeshout? Take a look. For context, see Ed’s notes on the KARB/KYIP Placeshout event. Here’s all of my activity on the site.

It’s too bad there’s no API, and no feeds. You can search and Google Maps browse and so forth right on the site, so there’s no pressing need, beyond the standard desire to pipe Placeshout white noise into various filters. Or grab a KML. Or update Placeshout from Twitter (I can only assume that’s what the additional 40 characters in twitterspace are for).

I do like how you aren’t expected to make friends with everybody. It’s enough, at least for now, to see a username you know and think O HAI and just move on with the pressing business of downrating inappropriately positive reviews of Ann Arbor’s crappier brewpubs.

(tags: annarbor coffee food interaction media microneogeography networks placeshout representation twitter ypsilanti)

The best networks are the ones that generate a new way of thinking about some part of the world. This way, the network and software and people stick with you, even when you’re not near them. There’s a sense of availability: that the new way of seeing, or measuring, has some nontrivial half-life — that it persists — once you close the laptop and stand up and start walking.

There are plenty of networks that change the way you work. When you find one, you grow into it over time, and it grows to fit you, like a glove.

But there are fewer networks that change the way you are. A network like this is life-changing in some small way. Maybe it gives you a way to relate to people you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Maybe it gives you a new measurement, so you can go out into the world and try to change it. Maybe it teaches you to slow down, or to speed up, or to remember, or to forget. When you find one of these things, celebrate it. You’re lucky.

(tags: collective representation web)

Thinking about the relationship between

1. sites or services that don’t generate easily digested text content and
2. strategies their proprietors use to squeeze a weblog or similar attention stream out of whatever does get generated.

Sometimes [1] is because there’s not enough text — maybe a video site — and sometimes it’s because there’s too much text — like a wiki. Any wiki weirdo can glaze over at RecentChanges, but it’s data, not narrative.

Ideally, there’s a weblog or proto-weblog that serves as a single, high-level summary of what’s going on: if you’re going to watch just one thing, that’s the thing; or if you’re trying to understand the service and take the community’s pulse, it’s what you load up and skim over.

So here’s what I got, relevant examples culled from my personal web haunts.

If there are any bird’s-eye blogs you think are particularly effective or ineffective I’d enjoy hearing about them.

AboutUs

AboutUs has a daily stream of featured wiki pages on its front page, and a separate log of conversation and cool stuff called the DailyBuzz. There’s a separate AboutUsWeblog.org, which is a Wordpress blog that republishes some of the featured pages — but not all of them, or at least not on a regular schedule — along with random clippings from the DailyBuzz and the occasional free-form blog post. Blog posts are typically written in the hasty, careless tone that pervades the AboutUs house organs — if you listen, you can hear the copywriting sausage grinder whining away.

CommunityWiki

The CommunityWiki used to have a cool front-page faux weblog as described here, but apparently it didn’t get exported to the future.

Hiveminder

Two prongs for Hiveminder: a Best Practical weblog which has announcements about all of the company’s products and some human interest stuff, and Hiveminder News for product-specific notices. Both blogs are written in a fun and sometimes digressive “friendly programmer” voice. The Hiveminder News is baked into the product, and the updates are usually nice and terse, with the occasional longer introduction for a new feature. Awesome!

Plazes

The Plazes crew keeps blog.plazes.com, which is the usual jumble of product announcements plus publicity and corporate updates. The thing I appreciate about the Plazes blog is that is showcases the mashups, integrations, and art projects people have done using the Plazes API and feeds. These community_indicators are signs of life for the service, but they also do a better job of demonstrating what Plazes is all about than the Plazes site itself can. For a service which you need to have an active network and client software in order to really enjoy, seeing some of these projects gives a hint of what the experience might be like.

Revver

Revver (aka Commie Youtube) has a very active blog that streams a mix of service status crap and surfaced videos. Seems like a few missed information interior decoration opportunities, though: the blog is buried in footer navigation on the main Revver site, its branding is way off — the header is a video thumbnail montage which fundamentally looks like crap, and you have to work your way beneath the fold in order to find the new Transformers-esque Revver logo (which appears only in the little tiny video rolls in the sidebar).

(tags: design media remediation representation web weblogs wiki)

More from The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century (”the one book from 1906 you should read today”) — which, warning warning forever, if you do read it, will continue operate after a month’s time:

Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in machinery — that is if there is no beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery for our modern life — there cannot be poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be. If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something, we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a Machine Age have a soul?

If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest form, for machinery itself — that is, the machines of steel and flame that minister to us — it will be possible to find a great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other machines — our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered — the better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern religion — (in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern education — the man-machine; for modern government — the crowd-machine; for modern art — the machine in which the crowd lives.

(tags: books media narratives process representation)

I’m not sure why this missile hits target:

(tags: design media narratives representation visual)