Web Explorations

We feel fine is an interesting Java Applet utilizing colors, shapes, and motion. It summarizes phrases from blogs on the Web based on emotion keywords, weather, age, sex, etc.

Check out the presentation that its creator, Jonathan Harris made during a TED conference:

Here is a quote from their mission page:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Six movements of We Feel Fine

I often talk about my son Micah in my classes because he gives me so many real-life examples that show how the concepts I present in class are put to work out in the real world.

Micah has written an interesting resume building site named GigTide using Adobe Flex. When he first published the site he received emails from several users in Italy and Greece asking him to fix the application so they could use the special characters of their language.

Did he have to re-write the entire application? Nope. All he had to do was change the character encoding to UTF-8 (Read Tim Bray’s article if you’d like to know all the gory details about character encoding.) Now GigTide.com can be used by Americans as well as by people that use a script languages found in other parts of the world.

And, its a good thing too, because when Micah checked his Google Analytic numbers the other day he discovered a nice surge in hits from Thailand. He did a little research and discovered a Thai blogger had written about GigTide and it triggered a surge in interest with the site.

He did a little research and found the CyberBiz blog entry showing GigTide in Thai.

That’s the example. Here’s what I teach in my course:

• Keep in mind that when you put a web site up that you have the entire world as your market. Not just your town, or your state, or your country, but the potential of the whole world. (Think on how you can leverage your product/service/site to address more than the people in your own village…)
• Use Google Analytics to keep track of what your site(s) are doing
• Write your code and design your applications so they are accessible to people around the world

TED does it again. Check out this amazing demo that was shown at the TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) in Monterey, CA.

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I’ve seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth, a monumental piece of software capable of assembling static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.

One of the phrases that keeps resonating from Blaise’s presentation is how much your photo is enriched by being part of this collective memory. Your photo, when grouped with these others becomes an emergent entity which is greater than the sum of its parts. The last half of the presentation demonstrates this so well as Blaise shows individual photos working together to make an amazing image of Notre Dame. Cellphone photos, SLR photos, even a poster is all enriched with this collective memory of photos.

Thanks to Matt Potocnik for sending me the link on this one.

I’m forever doing the USB dance. Each time I start to insert a USB device I flip it back and forth wondering which way is up. I was complaining out loud during a meeting the other day. "Why don’t USB manufacturers use two different colors of plastic or a large symbol that we can feel?" I asked everyone. Someone pointed out that there is the USB symbol, but it is so small and I shouldn’t have to put my glasses on to figure out which side of a plug goes up.

I got an idea later that day and went and got a bottle of my wife’s fingernail polish. Here’s a shot showing how I marked the "up side" of each of my USB plugs. And, now a week later I’m pleased to report that this has made my life just a little smoother.

Now, if we could only get architects to design doors so you could tell by looking if you should be pushing or pulling… Instead of fingernail polish everyone has to put up signs telling us to push or pull. That’s great until you are in a country where you don’t know the language. Why not just design things properly so their use is obvious? Push or Pull ?

We shouldn’t have to resort to fingernail polish and push/pull signs.

Here’s a great tool that will make your Windows XP screens much easier to use. Microsoft offers the ClearType Power Toy as a free download. This uses the technology that was developed for the PocketPC and it is amazing how much easier it is to use the computer when the text is crisp and clean.

I don’t like customizing my Windows because I use so many different machines through the course of the day, but this Power Toy is definately one to have on the machine you use the most.

Heck, with ClearType installed my laptop the Windows dialog boxes and file lists look almost as good as my Mac! ;-)