• Over at the University, Ali Momeni’s Art for the People is becoming more active with their Art on Wheels project. From what I read in the blogs, the bikes are mostly built and the students are making more outings. There are some newer videos, but this is probably the best overview video, made back when the GRL folks were in town. I can’t wait to see more action with these bikes over the summer and during the RNC.
• Our friends over at the Brooklyn Musuem are been running a sweet little project called Click!, “a crowd curated exhibition”. Here’s the deal: people submit their photos that are about the changing face of Brooklyn, visitors like you and me vote on them, and then the top rated photos are put in an exhibition in the Museum. The submission part of the project is closed, but you can still sign up and vote for three more weeks. I’m usually pretty skeptical of sites that depend on user generated content, but it seems the enticement of getting work in the museum is a strong motivator. We learned this with the Worlds Away video project. And it is actually pretty fun to log in and see what has been submitted, to see the range of work by artists that are unknown. For someone that hasn’t been around Brooklyn much, it is a unique way to explore.

  Shelley warned me that the interface is limiting, but it seems to me the limits are perfect for the scope of the project. Plus, they’re also using mootools, which I know and love. Nina Simon has a great article on the project which you should read if you haven’t yet.

• Two posts about the internet and culture that do some hard thinking for you and make you think: The New Social Circulation: Frontline, Out of Print, and the XO Laptop Photo and Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.
• The most amazingly non-akward akward TV spots ever, featuring local circuit benders Beatrix*JAR, who are participating in a Workshop here at the Walker this summer. The duo is also participating in Bent Fest happening this weekend in the Twin Cities.
• The true power of the internet: Helen Thomas asks a tough question about Torture when no other journalist does. The internet is happy with Helen and wants to make a point to the other white house journalists. What to they do? Send her $1000 worth of flowers.

• I have a thing for “ugly”, 1996-esque sites (I think they’re awesome). Here are some of my recent finds:
  • The Best Webs.net
  • Jim Jacobson’s Home Page
  • Killer Japanese Seizure Robots! (seriously, you might get a seizure)
  • American Beauty Equipment
• The Daily Mole has a good op-ed about the problems with accessible web video for hearing impaired people. This is an interesting topic, and one can see both sides of the issue, but clearly at some point the technology will have to evolved and web video will need captions. Target lost a suit for not making it’s website accessible, so one hope major media outlets are aware of the ramifications for avoiding accessibility. One has to wonder, though, what should someone who’s putting a video on YouTube be responsible for? When everyone is a media outlet, what is the cutoff?
• The 48 hour film project moves into second life.
• This is a pretty slick hack of Canon cameras to get a very high speed shutter.
• Neat threadless shirt, “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.” Cool, except the internet doesn’t close, and right now it’s 7 degrees outside, so I’ll just stay in, thanks.

Hat tip to Paul Schmelzer for some links.

• I have a thing for “ugly”, 1996-esque sites (I think they’re awesome). Here are some of my recent finds:
  • The Best Webs.net
  • Jim Jacobson’s Home Page
  • Killer Japanese Seizure Robots! (seriously, you might get a seizure)
  • American Beauty Equipment
• The Daily Mole has a good op-ed about the problems with accessible web video for hearing impaired people. This is an interesting topic, and one can see both sides of the issue, but clearly at some point the technology will have to evolved and web video will need captions. Target lost a suit for not making it’s website accessible, so one hope major media outlets are aware of the ramifications for avoiding accessibility. One has to wonder, though, what should someone who’s putting a video on YouTube be responsible for? When everyone is a media outlet, what is the cutoff?
• The 48 hour film project moves into second life.
• This is a pretty slick hack of Canon cameras to get a very high speed shutter.
• Neat threadless shirt, “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.” Cool, except the internet doesn’t close, and right now it’s 7 degrees outside, so I’ll just stay in, thanks.

Hat tip to Paul Schmelzer for some links.

• Two blogs that I’ve recently stumbled upon are the Open Blog at the New York Times and Alpha Channel on MSNBC. Both are blogs from the developers behind the NYT and MSNBC, respectively. The entry on how TimeSelect was eliminated, partially powered by Amazon S3 is pretty interesting (if you like grid computing and the word terabyte), as is the entries on the redesign of MSNBC. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC and NYT have had blogs for a while, but not developer blogs. Welcome to the party, guys.
• The Brooklyn Museum has been doing some experimenting with Twitter and it turns into a bit of a mixed bag. Is there a phone-based opportunity here? Certainly so, but Twitter doesn’t quite seem to be the right vector. Something we’ve discussed before, bluejacking the phone number of Art on Call, might be another approach.
• Jason Kottke has an interesting post up about FFFFOUND!, which, thanks to him, is my new daily RSS post-count king. FFFFOUND! is a social image bookmarking site that has amazingly good content. Jason thinks that perhaps our curators should be looking over their shoulder:
  

  Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people.

  I don’t think curators have to worry quite yet, but it isn’t unreasonable to say that the internet has and will continue to exert influence. It also works in the other direction. Jason points out a few bloggers that have crossed over into curating gallery shows. To that list I would also add I Heart Photograph.

• Two blogs that I’ve recently stumbled upon are the Open Blog at the New York Times and Alpha Channel on MSNBC. Both are blogs from the developers behind the NYT and MSNBC, respectively. The entry on how TimeSelect was eliminated, partially powered by Amazon S3 is pretty interesting (if you like grid computing and the word terabyte), as is the entries on the redesign of MSNBC. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC and NYT have had blogs for a while, but not developer blogs. Welcome to the party, guys.
• The Brooklyn Museum has been doing some experimenting with Twitter and it turns into a bit of a mixed bag. Is there a phone-based opportunity here? Certainly so, but Twitter doesn’t quite seem to be the right vector. Something we’ve discussed before, bluejacking the phone number of Art on Call, might be another approach.
• Jason Kottke has an interesting post up about FFFFOUND!, which, thanks to him, is my new daily RSS post-count king. FFFFOUND! is a social image bookmarking site that has amazingly good content. Jason thinks that perhaps our curators should be looking over their shoulder:
  

  Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people.

  I don’t think curators have to worry quite yet, but it isn’t unreasonable to say that the internet has and will continue to exert influence. It also works in the other direction. Jason points out a few bloggers that have crossed over into curating gallery shows. To that list I would also add I Heart Photograph.

You’d think I’m on a posting spree. Here are three quickies for the day, finally welcoming WebWalker in the Web 2.0 era.

• Hack A Day links up Pong implemented on an oscilloscope. I’m not an electricty geek, but this is a pretty cool hack. Anything with an analog (vector CRT) display is worth looking at.
• Advertising Lab points out some beautiful irony in the NYT’s story about ad blocking.

• Information Aesthetics links up an amazing photograph and entire article on the science of boomerangs on Popular Mechanics.

• According to BoingBoing, Jenny Holzer is on twitter. As Xeni Jardin says, she is perhaps “the only person who should be allowed to use twitter”. And perhaps Holzer is responding to that tittle with her latest twitt, or whatever you call it… “DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES”.
• Eric recently found a super useful site full of browser widget resources for web designers. Search no more for a good photoshop template of Navigator 4.8 for OS 9! And we should also note that Eric’s firm’s work on the Adobe CS3 interactive wall has been getting some notice lately, too.
• Nate points out the creepiest photo ever on mnartists, by Mary Britton Clouse of Minneapolis. And if you’re not so keen on roosters, then you probably should avoid eating the comb of one.
• We’ve been told through the grapevine that the Walker sites work great on the iPhone. Art on Call, in particular is a pretty slick deal. You can play the tracks through the website, or if you’ve got the podcast, listen to it in iPod mode. And in iPhone news, it seems someone has finally gotten an application to run on the iPhone. It’s just too bad their typography is going to be no good.