details of a global brain
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Stanford on iTunes
This is really great: While others are still resisting the idea to webcast course content online Stanford moves along by integrating (at least some of) their educational content with the iTunes Music Store. Can you see the iTunes Educational Shop coming up? One-click shopping for lectures and files that use the same DRM protection like…
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Rosa Parks
There are certain topics I never covered much in this weblog. Human Rights is one of them. Today news tells us that Rosa Parks died and she will probably remain in history forever reminding us that one moment of courage can change so much.
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The rise and fall of frameworks
I think the next 6-12 month we will see an incredible buzz about web application frameworks – some on the server side and some on the side of the client: OpenLazlo is competing with Macromedia Flex. for the so called “Rich” Internet Application market. I am somewhat sceptical about thie RIA-approaches. If you can establish…
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News (in desperate times?)
Mark Bernstein about the ignorance of US mainstream media to world events: The CNN front page headlines include, among the top 6 stories:“Jennifer Aniston photographed kissing Vince Vaughn”I don’t follow the news much. Is there some reason Jennifer Aniston shouldn’t be kissing Mr. Vaughn? This simply made my day 😉
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Getting Things Done tools
The book »Getting Things Done« by David Allen is a bestseller. It offers a strategy of how to prioritize things you have to do. It is a combination of a tracking device (like a box of notes) and a routine of how to use that device. I am running my own Tinderbox tool to keep…
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Design Sites
I just want to raise the attention to these invaluable sites (some of which have been in my Blogroll for years): A list apart Boxes and Arrows Column Two Corporate Identity Portal (german) Digital-Web Functioning form Future Feeder Guuui.com IDblog IAslash.org/blog IAwiki Information aesthetics Informationdesign.org Jeffrey Veen OK/Cancel Signal vs. Noise xBlog I recommend theses…
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Need more time for work? Sleep less!
Interestingly there is a whole armada of things keeping us under pressure: you got to be more productive, faster, better organized, and so on. The computer has not only enhanced our productivity: ubiquitous computing also means there will be no excuse to be unproductive (except when you »deserved« a break)? There are already many people…
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Continuity
Today I started the Continuity seminar weblog (RSS). There is also a special tag-pair on del.icio.us (RSS) for that seminar as well (unfortunatly the URLs will change soon). The topic of that seminar is still evolving, but the task is to understand the psychological and cognitive aspects of flow and its relation to design (mainly…
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How weird the job of an character animator can be
So, you’d think that the job of an computer graphics animator would involve nothing but sitting in front of a screen and clicking little icons and buttons all day long? Well, looking at these folks I think the curricula may need some tweaking for the required skill sets… 😉
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3rd International Design Research Conference in Brazil
Next week there’ll be another conference on Design Research in Rio De Janeiro. Unfortunatly the conference website is extremely lousy. I can’t even remember a conference website with so superficial and useless information. Obviously the organizers don’t want to get too international. First of all I was suprised to read “3rd international conference” in the…
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Flock screenshots
I am eager to test Flock. Someone posted some screenshots on Flickr.com. As far as I know it is based on Firefox and it is going to work with del.icio.us for Bookmarks and flickr.com for images. It will also a sepcial interface for bloggers where creating blog posts is a matter of drag & drop…
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The Patchwork Portal
Ton Zijlstra suggests a portal concept for work groups to cllaborate and exchange. His idea utilizes two weblgs, a wiki with an internal area and a discussion board. Ton patches together several tools for this (a Wikka Wiki, two WordPress blogs and a Simple Machines forum). That’s a way to go with almost no server…
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AJAX-based editing online
I had a chance to briefly check out these collaborative editors based on AJAX: writely.com, backpackit.com & writeboard.com, jotspotlive.com. It is pretty amazing what developers are trying to achieve now. Backpackit is aimed to be some kind of simple groupware. Writely.com and Jotspot Live are aimed at collaborative writing. I personally found the visual feedback…
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The Longhorn crisis
Well, I am personally tired of debating why to choose Macs over PCs. In every respect there are just two types of computer users: those who once lost their data and those who will loose their data. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac or a PC where your data was on… But if you…
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Podcasts from thePreparedMind.com
Christopher Gee is running a weblog subtitled »a blog about the graphic design industry«. He is doing interviews with people from the design profession about various topics. It is very helpful that Christopher listed some issues raised within each interview. So you get an overview before listening to the audio. I quote from an interview…
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ArsElectronica presentation as audio
ArsElectronica 2005 (1st-6th September) titled »Hybrid — living in paradox« has published most presentations as audio. There is a link »Webcasts« in the navigation, but it doesn’t contain any content yet. ArsElectronica has now a history since 1979. I’ve been to it in 1995 and it was quite an inspiring festival. I really think it…
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Innovation in Organizations
Interview with Dr. Bettina von Stamm: »If you view design as outcome you are likely to have a different perspective on design than if you view design as a process and set of skills. With the former the contribution of design and designers is almost exclusively limited to tangible products. If you take the latter…
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Density, Simplicity and Continuity
I am currently working on defining three seminars that lay out a foundation for design education. These courses are not oriented towards the formal and technological aspects of media, but rather focus on the psychological and cognitive questions involved with almost any design work. This is what I came up with: Density: Designing for effectiveness…
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Privacy at stake…?
Bruce Schneier in Wired discusses the challenge that surveillance technology raise for constitutional rights: Sometime in the near future, a young man is walking around the Washington Monument for 30 minutes. Cameras capture his face, which yields an identity. That identity is queried in a series of commercial databases, producing his travel records, his magazine…
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Ecolanguage.net
Ecolanguage.net uses visual animations to explain economical and ecological processes. The animations are planned for a common visual code to represent all issues involved with economy and ecology. They have just three types of transaction: yellow represent energy, red represents money and black represents information. It comes pretty close to what I intended with the…
Got any book recommendations?