Loosely Assembled

Start Archiving Your Platial Maps Today

fekaylius — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:07:13 +0000

Cross post from the Platial Blog:

Now is your chance to beat the imminent rush and export your full archive quality KMZ maps from Platial. We are in the last stages of testing 2 new export tools and would appreciate your participation and feedback.

The 2 new tools are a full KMZ exporter with all uploaded images embedded (any images that were added to the map via the flickr tool or as a web based image link will continue to link out) as well as a newly formatted KML version with image hosting provided by GeoCommons.com.

To enable the 2 new export modes, simply append ?export=1 to the end of any map url. This should work for visitor maps (/mapv/) as well as normal ones (/map/).
http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095 becomes http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095?export=1

Note: this will enable a new KMZ and KML link in the map header area

These export tools are applicable to any map on platial.com, so if you appreciate someone else’s map, feel free to grab a copy (with the exception of a user places map (the map of all your places), in which case, it will only be available to that logged in user.

Feedback is welcome as commentary here on the blog, on the getsatisfaction page, or via the Platial feedback page.

Known Issues you can avoid commenting on:

With very large maps, anything over 2000 points, using the KMZ version sometimes comes out with an empty file despite taking a really long time to process
some date ranges on geocommons hosted images are missing

Thanks,

Jason

Also, You can expect a few more announcements in the next few hours and/or days about Platial. Might want to start following @platialmaps for breaking news :)

Fixie Doubles

fekaylius — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:50:38 +0000

Mad bike skills!

Into Something Formless

fekaylius — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:13:40 +0000

Leon Botha talks about identity, vibrations, and formlessness.

I came across this guy researching Die Antwoord

Dripping with Sound

fekaylius — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:40:04 +0000

The sound of a water droplet, pure and quiet, resonating from your iPhone at random times throughout the day or night. Bzzt Drip creates an aura of contemplation and focus around you. Honor yourself with this gentle and humble Audio Perfume.

Bzzt Audio Perfumes are the latest must-have identity accessory. With an ever growing selection of free and premium offerings, Bzzt acts like an always on application as it sprinkles you with sound no matter what applications you’re running, even while your phone is in standby mode.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Wrap Yourself in the Reassuring Sounds of the Tactile

fekaylius — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:21:25 +0000

Punctuate your singularity flavored lifestyle with the reassuring sounds of the tactile.

Thump is a new Audio Perfume that will season your physical presence with the sounds of closing doors, moving objects, and similar analog friction and impact based sounds by enabling your iPhone to play these sounds at random times.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Audio Fragrance for Your Inner Celebrity

fekaylius — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:00:12 +0000

The latest Audio Fragrance from 0009.org, Bzzt Paparazzi, endows you with the glamorous sounds of photographers snapping your picture at random times of the day and night. Just like real paparazzi, these sounds may interrupt your dinner, your work, even your precious beauty sleep, but that’s just the price you pay for being a star.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Audio Perfume for The Sonic Elite

fekaylius — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:16:42 +0000

Have you ever heard something that other people can’t hear? I’m not talking about voices, I’m talking about sonic frequencies.

Some people are naturally more sensitive than others when it comes to sound, but our sonic range also decreases with age. This creates an interesting situation where many young people can hear tones that older people generally can’t. Some kids have used these sounds as secret ring tones and message alerts, so they can stay connected in class. The teen-averse have flipped it around, cranking up the volume and blasting this ’silent’ tone in their stores to keep unwanted kids away.

This idea that the airwaves are teeming with invisible data that certain people (and animals) have privileged access to, while the rest of us stumble through life with virtual earmuffs on, is at the heart of the latest Audio Fragrance from 0009.
Bzzt Silent punctuates your complex audio aura with a handful of tones that live above the threshold of common human adult hearing. Whether you are part of the sonic elite or not, rocking this audio accessory will mark you as one of the few brave souls willing to live on the cutting edge of this mostly uncharted territory.

Like all Bzzt Audio Perfumes, Bzzt Silent plays audio clips on your iPhone at random times throughout the day and night. The sounds will play no matter what other applications you have open, even when your iPhone is asleep in your pocket. Some days you may get a handful of sounds, other days nothing, Bzzt will certainly keep you guessing. You can mix and match different Bzzt apps to create your own customized blend.

Audio Perfume for Today’s Futurist

fekaylius — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:43 +0000

The Italian art masochists known as the Futurists embraced the loud, chaotic and violent nature of the newly emerging world of pre-WWI Europe. They strove to represent this universal dynamism in their artwork.

The newest Audio Fragrance from 0009.org, Bzzt Digital, is inspired by these aggro individuals who lived life with the throttle wide open. Bzzt Digital offers an updated twist on their aesthetic, with corrupted and distressed sounds from the deep subconscious of the digital age. These clips are fast, loud and jarring, the perfect audio soundtrack for today’s Futurist.

Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.

Portland’s Non-Profit Incubator Future

fekaylius — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:22:08 +0000

Portland, OR has done a great job getting itself noticed on the global stage of cities to watch. We’ve got green cred, bike cred, creativity cred, willingness to change, social justice, activism, sustainability, livability, diy, small business, self organizing cred, etc etc etc. We can learn to take bigger steps though, to really put a stake in the ground for Portland’s future as a hub for organizations that want to make the world a better place.

Portland’s Memorial Coliseum is the ideal facility for the nation’s (world’s) premiere incubator for, and center of, critical non profit activity. Think of it as Sand Hill Road for the 501c3 set. Offices, workshops, symposiums, conferences, events, rallies, classes, and more will take place in this global center for change. Interaction with the general public on a daily basis, as well as with business and movement frontiers-people will stimulate the city of Portland like nothing else.

Incubators will get a lot of attention in the coming decade as we all search and strive and hope for new ideas and new solutions for the future. New models for business focused incubators are already in the works in places like SF. Let’s take the next big step and innovate in social entrepreneurship, and not for profit work.

Bzzt – Ambient Social Game or Audio Perfume

fekaylius — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:45:16 +0000

The experiments continue around here with the introduction of another Bzzt iPhone app, the Bzzt Insect. Let your pockets drip with the sounds of musical bugs.

The Ambient Social Game element is that you are inviting a tiny amount of public spectacle into your life, the eventual need to explain the noises to someone, and the hopeful possibility that you will encounter new people in the world who also have the same taste for quirky fun.

There is also something about this series of apps that could be thought of as Audio Perfume, defining oneself by the subtle sensory experiences you offer out to the people around you.

As you can see on the redesigned Bzzt site, there are more versions are in the pipeline, and as always, I’m open to collaboration or custom development if you have a specific need.

So check out Bzzt, and let the sounds start dripping.

Geography of Longevity

fekaylius — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:08:58 +0000

This video actually has very little to do with geography, but I do find it interesting that there are specific places, micro regions, where longevity is dramatically higher than the global average. In this TED Talk, National Geographic writer Dan Buettner discusses some interesting common denominators of these long lived, healthy and happy clusters of humans.

There isn’t actually anything very surprising in terms of specific details, but where I see the value of these findings being transformative is in various scenarios such as urban planning, architecture, community development, families, tradition making, suburbia 2.0, retirement, economic development, health care reform, and more.

China is building handfuls of cities from scratch, I wonder how many, if any, of these common denominators have a chance at being intentionally incorporated. When new cities are being designed, is there a “creative brief”?

(via open culture blog)

Calma Village

fekaylius — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:57:43 +0000

The most ambitious and engaged graffiti so far. It almost needs a new term coined just to differentiate it from everything else.

(Via @lucatoledo .)

graff printer

Plugging in with Fingers and Eyes

fekaylius — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:29:50 +0000

Jim Stogdill writes very well about a compelling theme in his article entitled Skinner Box? There’s an App for That. I would have to sum it up as being about the nature of distraction in today’s networked world, and our role in its continuation.

There are a few tantalizing snippets that I just have to share hoping to lure you into reading the whole thing, if you can focus long enough.

A self licking ice cream cone of the mind
We’re pre-implant so I plug into the Skinner Borg with fingers and eyes
The very technology that makes our collective integration possible also distracts us from advancing it

(Via @timoreilly.)

Swimming Through Architecture

fekaylius — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:05:04 +0000

This cool video of Jeff Williams cruising around the space station brings up the obvious but perhaps underappreciated fact that in space, you don’t really need floors.

(Via
YouTube
- In This Orbital Outpost…We Are the Experiment
.)

Guerrilla Crosswalk

fekaylius — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:04:06 +0000

This mystery crosswalk on E. Burnside at NE 8th seems to be working.
(Photo: Doug Klotz)

(Via Bike Portland.)

Robots Mimicking Humans Mimicking Robots

fekaylius — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:15:38 +0000

‘Tis hard to say which is a more compelling, or more primary, interpretation of the notion of “Robots Mimicking Humans Mimicking Robots”, the reversible Palingram or the infinitely extended Möbius loop.

They both tell a different story about our fascination with, and relationship to, simulated humanity, machine intelligence, creator and creation. As a proposed next step, I’d personally like to see another robot manning the remote controls of this robot, perhaps creating some kind of command based feedback loop, susceptible to minute changes, enabling a kind of machine evolution of culture.

Enjoy

The Radiated Library and The Televised Book

fekaylius — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:57:24 +0000

How have people organized information over the centuries, and millennia? Are we predisposed toward more ‘linear’ or more ‘digital’ forms? How long have we been trying to cope with the problem of information overload? Are hierarchical trees a fundamental paradigm rooted in our own reproduction? How many times has the internet already been invented? How can we reinvent it again? How can we get enough distance from it to see it clearly?

In the 1890s and 1900s Paul Otlet designed and built a network where organized data could be explored, via “links” and a “web”.

via information architect and writer Alex Wright during a particularly good SALT lecture.

Neural Voice API

fekaylius — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:40:03 +0000

New Scientist has an interesting article about computer aided speech.

Ramsey, who suffered a brain-stem stroke at the age of 16, has an electrode implanted into a brain area that plans the movements of the vocal cords and tongue that underlie speech.

These sensors end up driving a vocal simulator, allowing Ramsey to make sounds with his mind.

I like this approach of tapping into the vocal control regions instead of the fantastical notion that you could simply tap into the “thoughts”. You could still have private thoughts, and express externally by intentionally “speaking”. It seems important to remember that computer brain interfaces will almost always have to read the signals naturally intended for output, and that a mind reading machine is still quite unlikely.

You could also hypothetically send those signals elsewhere, having them drive another device besides your own vocal simulator, you could have them broadcast around the world, sent to a voice to text translator, or simply stored as raw data on a backup drive of everything you have ever said.

Read the Neural Voice API article.

Shantytown Labyrinths of Abandoned Online Identity Shadows

fekaylius — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:02:30 +0000

Physical industries have already started to think about cradle to grave design, but we in the digital design world also need to realize there are consequences and costs to the community at large if we continue to delude ourselves with myths of immortal software.

While building out the final export tools for the retiring online guest map service Frappr.com, it quickly became clear that there is something fundamentally broken about online identity. Normally we include author attribution for the various bits of information submitted by the members. These attributions are valuable inside the service as well as beyond its walls. When Google indexes our data, it’s important that the original author not only gets visible textual credit by name, but also that their profile page is linked so that viewers may discover other content this author has created or even may be able to get in touch with the author. This works pretty well if the web service remains alive. As soon as a domain vanishes, those attributions lose a lot of their value.

Most online identity is trapped within the walls of the single domain. The only identity data we have on the frappr members is their display name, a frappr.com based member profile page url and an external email address. Attributing content to these is either completely unstructured, obsolete or a breach of privacy. The only thing we could go with was the unlinked and unstructured display name, if it existed.

This dissociation shatters the community into millions of shards with little recourse for reconnection. I’ll suggest that we aren’t well equipped, metaphorically or psychologically, for this kind of disintegrating experience, as humans. If a factory town loses the factory it does disintegrate in many ways, but the low level identities of the members of that community do actually persist. While many communication and interaction channels are gone, the citizens can still gather together and work on the problem as a team. Even if many move on to other locations, they still have a tangible forwarding address that they can optionally leave behind, there are at least some options.

There have though been historical events that do effectively shatter communities into irreconcilable bits, and these do have a devastating and lasting impact. Diasporas leave the remnants without options.

The dissolution of a web based community is a kind of digital diaspora. But we can mitigate the effects of shattered communities if digital identity is organized differently, anchored outside the borders of these rapidly shifting social software domains. The communities, after all, were created by and owned by the members, not by the service. The ownership of these communities, these affiliations, these connections, should not be left to ruin just because a website can’t pay their bandwidth bills.

How can we organize digital identity differently? There are several interesting initiatives and activists currently working on this very issue from many perspectives, and in fact I’m not really qualified to try and list them here (drop some names in the comments if you think what they are doing is relevant, i’d love to follow up on related work). What seem to be the common threads amongst projects I have seen are universal login, portable social networks and personal preferences for content selection. But what this whole experience has got me interested in is more along the lines of, “where is the canonical reference point of an individual?”. Based on this question I’m going to pour some half baked ideas of my own out into the light of scrutiny to see if anything might have a chance to congeal. These ideas are presented only from a design perspective and not from a technical perspective.

Nearly everyone already has a globally unique phone number, and with mobile web access rapidly becoming the global standard, a mobile network identity may make sense for the future. Mobile network identity would require portability, just like the mobile number portability that came to the US a few years ago (moving your number from one carrier to another). A mobile network foundation also starts to make more sense if it ever develops some kind of DNS system, where your identity isn’t a number anymore, but structured text with an ordained set of namespaces. Actually the existence of a mobile DNS removes the requirement of number portability, since the DNS records could just be updated. 3G enabled netbooks are bringing mobile networks into computers, and building an identity link between your phone and your laptop could be as simple a a process as pairing a bluetooth phone to a headset.

Email addresses are also already unique and ubiquitous. They would actually be a pretty great way to standardize and decentralize, as long as there were better ways to filter/block message sending rights to email addresses. The Twitter model is compelling for it’s limitations on incoming messages (only people you follow can dm you), but it’s still a single service that may dissolve or change someday. I think the email model is interesting, but I think the email infrastructure couldn’t handle the task.

Another idea for perpetual online identity management would be something like the imdb or archive.org or wikipedia but just for people. In terms of my original problem with content authorship attribution, this model would work quite well if the archiving organization were highly stable. I doubt anyone has noticed, but in the KML exports for Frappr i do link to the most recent archive.org cached version of the website instead of the website itself.

This almost just comes down to a simple question, “When you mention a person’s name online, what do you link to?”. I would have thought that as the web evolved, it would become more and more decentralized, with most people operating their own domains. While some people do maintain their own domains, many links wrapped around someone’s name leads to a profile page of one webservice or another. Facebook’s recent support of profile page shortcuts underscores how many people use twitter, as a kind of accidental identity server. Many of you reading this will know that @fekaylius means http://twitter.com/feyalius. The domain almost becomes invisible, or synonymous with “my public online identity”.

Another idea is an identity DNS system that could track, aggregate and reroute requests to all the various services that may come and go. Think of this like one part traditional DNS and one part call forwarding. Imagine for a moment if you could enter @fekaylius into a browser address bar and it would route you to my personal blog. Then I could update my routing preferences and it would reroute to my CV. Perhaps you might even be able to send an email, SMS, or any type of IM to that identity alias, and depending on the protocol (and our relationship?) it would find it’s way to my work inbox, my desktop IM client or even as a push notification on my mobile. Google Voice seems like it may be going in this direction. The @ namespace isn’t right for this, but it’s an example using something people already understand. I also wonder if people outside of twitter have adopted this tag format? Will it be able to migrate beyond one service, it was, as you know, not a construct of the twitter service, but a construct that emerged out of the community, a grass roots vernacular. It could very well spring up again and again.

Back to the mobile phone network for a moment. There is also a possible paradigm where we carry our identity servers around with us everywhere we go, in our phones. Maybe there is no need to go this far, but the notion of really having control over your digital identity, over the routing and filtering and watching the requests with the flick of a finger is pretty compelling to me. Tying in uniquely mobile services to this idea makes it a killer app, ubiquitous location and calendar awareness, one snap mugshot updating, foaf services based on your local address book, nearby offers and people.

The last idea might be one huge database of every person in the world, past present and future. It would hold just enough data about the person to disambiguate. When mentioning someone anywhere online their id could be embedded in an identity tag. All these references would be aggregated and you could see what people were saying about this particular person. Imagine a kind of facebook, but where it’s not at all up to you what gets shared. Letting the bots take over.

In closing, perhaps the shanty town labyrinths of abandoned online identity shadows we have today will survive for another decade, but I doubt it. Things are changing, hopefully we will all be able to have a say in how our digital identities are organized in the future.

Veins of Gold in the Streets of Milan

fekaylius — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:30:37 +0000

I love subtle, nearly invisible art like this.

The site I found this on, unurth, has tons of other great street art (although most of it not subtle at all).