• 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.

• Teddy Banks, writing for Design Observer, shares some commentary on Olia Lialina’s newest article: Vernacular Web 2. The article is a great read on it’s own, and as Banks tells us, should be a must read for every web designer. Lialina’s work, My boyfriend came back from the war, was featured in the Walker’s online exhibit, Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.

  Lialina touches on the similarties of myspace of today and the web of 10 years ago. Instead of being designed by computer geeks, it’s “designed” by teens and ameteurs, and the music is mp3s and not midi.

• And speaking of MySpace, Danah Boyd has some new thoughts posted on myspace and remix culture. Seb Chan offers some thoughts on what this means for institutions that offer graphics and resources that can be remixed (legitimately or otherwise).
• Here’s an interesting article on the paradox of large displays, written by Jeff Attwood. He quotes Dan’s Data:
  

  Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

  I use three displays at work, two on my main computer and one on the laptop. While synergy makes this a very useful setup when doing video work, it can also be extrmely distracting at times. I find it necessary to sleep my laptop so I can focus on important tasks on my main displays.

• Interactive Architecture had been quiet for a while, but they posted a brief blurb on a conference going on next week that will discuss the many implications of signage in public space. Hopefully some of the papers and presentations from the conference will make it to the web.

• 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.

WebWalker is getting touchy feely all over in this edition with some computer interface goodness.

• This one might be a bit old, but it seems Panasonic demonstrated some sort of multi-touch table a last year, as well as a gigantic interactive video wall. I don’t really know how to describe the table. The video looks very nice in 720P glory, but the narration that goes with it is worth a chuckle and the interface is just a bit weird. Translucent fish?
• Another big multitouch screen, this time from DAHAN T&S (via nuigroup via engadget). This time we get dolphins instead of fish, but my questions still remain, why so many creatures of the sea on multitouch screens? There’s no video, so I can’t tell if their dolphin talks like ours.
• Speaking of sea creatures, did someone say calamari? The iPhone is certainly putting some pressure onto the demand for multitouch, we should remember multitouch is not actually that new. Case in point, Powerbook trackpads have been multitouch for years, giving users that lovely two-fingered scrolling. Apple even owns a multitouch patent. The iPhone is taking the idea and coupling it with a screen, which is really the important part. I’m rather curious to know how it works and what kind of tech they’re using to make it happen. None of us in NMI plan on getting an iPhone for various reasons, so who’s going to be the first person to take apart their iPhone?
• And while it is not multitouch, this is a neat project: The digital newsstand. It is basically a newspaper box with a computer screen replacing the window showing todays issue. It is not entirely practical, but I certainly appreciate consistency of the visual language and presentation. If you were going to show newspapers, you might as well do it in the right box. (via Paul)

• Stats galore: Our account of google analytics has finally been updated to the new version and it rocks! It seems very intuitive and a lot more clear than the old adapted from urchin version.

  And another new stats tool we’re liking a lot is crazyegg. The heatmap tool is especially impressive, since it makes it very easy to visualize what visitors are clicking on.

• Quartz Composer tidbits: Steve Morkis over at fdiv has been doing some very interesting work writing custom patches, so far providing an xcode template, custom inspector how-to, and an apple remote patch, amongst others. I’m interested in seeing a cli patch that would send commands to the terminal and run external scripts. Very exciting, though the QC community is a little unsure about what this means in the face of Leopard.

  I also found out about another interesting app called Millicent that seems like a mash-up of Quartz composer and photoshop, geared towards creating broadcast graphics on a budget. The app is still in beta, feature incomplete and a bit buggy, but it is interesting to see the diversity of work that QC is being used for.

• Exhibition Website: The MFA Boston has an Edward Hopper show going on now and the website is rather well done, if a bit slim on exhibition info. The design is very clean and lets the iconic work of Hopper speak for itself. Allowing visitors to download images as wallpaper is also pretty nifty. Coudal noted: The ’sketchbook’ feature is more than a bit clumsy but it’s well worth fumbling around to get at the goods. Why are big museums so consistently stupid about presenting things online? The sketchbook doesn’t seem too bad to me, and I like that I can zoom in and move around. It is a bit slow and small, but the idea is a good one. It seems google maps has set the new standard for image zooming/panning, and that is a tall technical tree to climb.