Category: web

World wide web. The Inter­nets. Interweb. 

Categories
san francisco the ancient past visual web

Living all over / Google-mapping my life

All over the place


So how come I just now learned that you can cre­ate your own Google Maps mark-up? As a lover of both maps and per­son­al doc­u­ments, the abil­i­ty to cus­tomize an online map has the poten­tial to have a Shabu-like effect on my life. The above map has all the places I've lived in the Bay Area. Check out the com­plete, inter­ac­tive thingy here. It has essen­tial, all-impor­tant com­men­tary on each place. Maps I want to make: killer runs in SF; fun night-time wan­der­ings in SF; lit­er­ary locales of SF (from fic­tion and from real life); TV/movie locales of SF; (this guy already made a cool music-relat­ed his­to­ry of SF); crazy work trav­el trips of the past few years; places I want to go; a bur­ri­to tour of the Mis­sion; the list GOES ON.

Categories
music web

Design / The Beatles & collaboration

A lot of col­lab­o­ra­tive work goes on at Coop­er (where I work). Design­ers team up to under­stand a prob­lem, or to envi­sion a bet­ter way of solv­ing it. Some­times, we col­lab­o­rate with clients to fig­ure out what's pos­si­ble and where pos­si­bil­i­ty and desir­abil­i­ty meet. In any case, it's hard to trace back any par­tic­u­lar idea to a par­tic­u­lar per­son or moment; once an idea is out in the world, it gets pushed, pulled, dis­as­sem­bled, reassem­bled, and so on by every­one until it fits. My friends and I used to argue over which Bea­t­le wrote a par­tic­u­lar song — John? Paul? George? In most cas­es, it seems pret­ty clear cut. Cheesy lyrics and a boun­cy rhythm? Paul. More com­pli­cat­ed, lay­ered lyrics with more straight-ahead rock? John. A sitar in the back­ground? George. In some cas­es, how­ev­er, it's much less clear. "With A Lit­tle Help From My Friends," for instance; or, "Got To Get You Into My Life." Both have rec­og­niz­able ear­marks of John and Paul.Are these easy cat­e­go­riza­tions valid in any way? Is there any way of ulti­mate­ly know­ing who wrote what? I didn't think so. Until I Googled "bea­t­les song­writ­ing" and found The Bea­t­les Song­writ­ing and Record­ing Data­base, an obses­sive­ly cat­e­go­rized col­lec­tion quotes about who wrote what, pulled from var­i­ous inter­views con­duct­ed over the last 40 years.For example:

With A Lit­tle Help From My FriendsJOHN 1970: "Paul had the line about 'a lit­tle help from my friends.' He had some kind of struc­ture for it, and we wrote it pret­ty well fifty-fifty from his orig­i­nal idea."JOHN 1980: "That's Paul, with a lit­tle help from me. 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine' is mine."PAUL cir­ca-1994: "This was writ­ten out at John's house in Wey­bridge for Ringo… I think that was prob­a­bly the best of our songs that we wrote for Ringo actu­al­ly. I remem­ber gig­gling with John as we wrote the lines, 'What do you see when you turn out the light/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine.' It could have been him play­ing with his willie under the cov­ers, or it could have been tak­en on a deep­er lev­el. This is what it meant but it was a nice way to say it– a very non-spe­cif­ic way to say it. I always liked that." 

Espe­cial­ly intrigu­ing: John wrote "And Your Bird Can Sing," which (to me) seems to be the most obvi­ous Paul song ever. Per­haps those ear­marks I dis­cussed ear­li­er are less applic­a­ble than one would expect.

Categories
ixd new york web

My New York Times? Not quite.

The NYT just rolled out a beta of some­thing they're call­ing MyTimes. As a dai­ly read­er of both the print and online edi­tions, I'm intrigued by new devel­op­ments and ideas at the NYT, and I've been pleased with their recent site redesign. MyTimes, how­ev­er, strikes me as some­what misguided.First off, the name MyTimes sounds like a por­tal, recall­ing the con­fused era when every com­pa­ny want­ed to make a my-pre­fixed ver­sion of their site. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also evokes the sub­se­quent real­iza­tion that what peo­ple real­ly want­ed was not con­trol over lay­out and con­tent, but greater sys­tem intel­li­gence — smarter defaults, recog­ni­tion of the things they nor­mal­ly do, a clever way of point­ing them toward relat­ed things. The por­tal-sound­ing name wouldn't even be so bad if MyTimes didn't look and act like por­tal. Alas, it's got all sorts of crap to add and move around and mod­i­fy, allow­ing the read­er to add RSS feeds from any­where on the web, view movie times, weath­er, Flickr images, what­ev­er. To me, the prob­lem is that the NYT isn't "what­ev­er." It's the author­i­ta­tive source. So why all the oth­er stuff?A bet­ter ques­tion: What prob­lem is MyTimes sup­posed to be solv­ing? What is the user goal is it address­ing? One would do research to answer these ques­tions, but — to be self-ref­er­en­tial — my own goals in read­ing the NYT: Get the author­i­ta­tive answer, enjoy great writ­ing, forum­late opin­ions on com­plex prob­lems. A major prob­lem of MyTimes is that the NYT is try­ing to be both the author­i­ta­tive source, and the deliv­ery mech­a­nism of any oth­er source you might want.So, my advice to the New York Times …

  • Bring relat­ed infor­ma­tion to me. Focus my atten­tion to the news of the day, but make it easy to nav­i­gate to relat­ed things. These things may be with­in the NYT, or out­side. Use what you know about me — from observ­ing my behav­ior — to point me toward relat­ed things. Think Ama­zon, not Google Home­page or MySpace. Ama­zon remem­bers what you like, points you toward relat­ed stuff, tells you what oth­er peo­ple have looked at, etc. It knows you; you don't HAVE to tell it anything.
  • Don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place that requires con­fig­u­ra­tion and expect that I will go there and wait for the infor­ma­tion to start rolling in. The estab­lished frame­work works: Start at the home­page, drill to the detail. Why cre­ate anoth­er start­ing place?
  • Inte­grate the good things from MyTimes — the jour­nal­ist pages, for instance, are a cool idea, and they are most appro­pri­ate­ly accessed with­in the exist­ing frame­work. Local­ized con­tent like weath­er and movie list­ings are fine, but I don't under­stand why this needs to be sep­a­rate from the exist­ing frame­work of the NYT pages. Basi­cal­ly: Inte­grate the read­er into the NYT, don't cre­ate a sep­a­rate place for him/her. Learn my zip code, remem­ber it, push rel­e­vant local con­tent to me. End of sto­ry. (And just because Flickr has an RSS feed doesn't mean it's wor­thy of your brand. You're the New York Times! You've got the best pho­to­jour­nal­ists in the world! Get rid of it!)

While I'm on the sub­ject, two addi­tion­al things I'd like to see … 

  • More expo­sure to the Times' excel­lent archival jour­nal­ism. Why not plumb the back cat­a­log, and expose some of it to the read­ers? Many arti­cles about cur­rent events refer to past events. Why not pro­vide a list of relat­ed links to pre­vi­ous arti­cles more often? Of course, I'd expect that this con­tent would be free — not only because I'm a cheap­skate — but because I would think it would pique people's inter­est in see­ing more of it, which would of course cost money.
  • More jour­nal­ist blogs and dis­cus­sion. The Pub­lic Editor's col­umn has become one of my favorite parts of the paper, and he blogs about inter­est­ing jour­nal­is­tic issues as well.Here's a great one about Nicholas Lemann's arti­cle about cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism in the New Yorker.

In any case, there are rough­ly one thou­sand web sites offer­ing up cus­tomiz­able info wid­gets, web-wide RSS feed aggre­ga­tion, and so forth. The NYT should con­tin­ue to focus on the con­tent, and leave the aggre­ga­tion to some­one else.