social status and fanclubs

How do u become somebody from nobody?

well u land a plane safely in a airport says one of the tweets that i just saw.

Now if it was the pre-social media age and this person wud have got as much attention on the traditional media. But in the age of social media, you get to know how popular this guy is among the general pubic, one of he ways cud be this:

A face book page on the person and you see that within a day you have about 255,022 fans in the world of just facebook. but in real world could be more.

here is the fabook page.

the social media turns a hero into a celebrity.

Ideas : geo-tagging e-mail

Now this idea is around the hypothesis that there are are these sect of global people who are on the move, traveling to atleast two locations globally within one week. and the other user group being the mobile email users.

and so when they are accessing email when on the move, they make this metal note of the context they are in when they are reading that email. so if there is an automatic geo-tagging of the mail that happens one can start searching mail based on locations and contexts.

this is just a thought and my hypothesis cud very well be wrong

archives in long time: Atoms vs. Bits

originally posted on iSchool, i202 course blog

In ‘everything is miscellaneous’, David Weinberger’ argues the benefits of Bits over Atoms. He points out that bits can be duplicated without effort and that they can be re-organized instantaneously to conform to our immediate contexts.

Apart from pointing at this inherent mutability of bits, he refers to the fact that digital information is easier to preserve. This is, in a certain marginal sense contradicted by a very interesting project to preserve a snapshot of all human languages. The Rosetta Project, run by The Long Now Foundation and The National Science Foundation is a collaborative effort to create a record of all human languages from 02000 to 12000.

This near permanent record, apart from being an online archive is a physical artifact designed for long term storage. The design of their Rosetta Stone is very intriguing. It is not digital, and is designed to be read without the need for any specific devices. The Stone is human readable, and has inscribed on one side, in many languages - “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

It is interesting to note of the design considerations and concerns change when designing for Long time. Kevin Kelly, a participant designer (and founder of Wired) points to some of the issues on his blog. Good quality, properly stored paper can easily last for 2000 years. Moreover we can be quite sure, that it will be understandable and accessible after that time. On the other hand

“Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone. Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.”

Mentioned by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 paper, the most appropriate technology for long term storage is still micro-etched film. The composition (and cost) of the film obviously changes based on how important the data is. The Long Now Rosetta Stone contains 350,000 pages of text written in 1000 languages, designed by linguists are inscribed onto a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. It comes with a built in magnifying glass. They came up with this design as part of the discussions on Managing Time Continuity. Following the archiving principle of LOCKS (Lots of copies, Keep ‘em Safe) the project is distributing copies of the disk globally. They have also placed one in space - on the Rosetta Space Probe, that will sometime in the future land on a comet, leaving the disk to circle around the sun for many many years to come.

Obviously this is not the first attempt to preserve human language and culture for posterity. Other interesting projects are namely the Crypt of Civilization, placed in a underground bunker in Atlanta, Georgia; The Westinghouse Time Capsules and the popular (but short-timed) Yahoo! Time Capsule designed by Jonathan Harris.

Relevant Lectures: ISSUES AND CONTEXTS (9/3), ORGANIZATION {AND,OR,VS} RETRIEVAL (9/8), INFORMATION INTEGRATION & INTEROPERABILITY (10/6)

Jobs meets Calvin and Hobbes

Thermo

Thermo, slated for release in 2009, will let designers build rich internet applications (functional components) directly from artwork created in Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks etc. Check it out!

40 Demotivational Posters

a nice article...though not a great deal take home from them

Innovative land irrigation system...

refer the picture...I found it in California Countryside... simple use of wheel technology to device a mechanism for watering large patches of agricultural land...wish this method is taken up in India would definitely be pollution free and a lot more convenient.

History's 5 Best Interface Designs

Modern interface designers hate you. With few exceptions, the modern gadget is as impossible to navigate as were the seas before the sextant and the marine chronometer. The reason? The internal functions bear no relationship to anything we might encounter in the real world, so arbitrary abstractions are needed to bridge the gap between microchip and brain. Add to this the fact that the UI is often an afterthought in most devices and you end up with something like the RAZR, hated far and wide for its labyrinthine control layout.

It wasn’t always this way. Perhaps if today’s designers payed a little attention to the past they might come up with something a little easier to love, and a little less frustrating to use.

Knol: A unit of knowledge

Taken on as Wikipedia's competitor, Google has opened up Knol, which puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and encourages users to start different knols for the same subject.

The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, and related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.

Everyone knows something. See what people are writing about, then tell the world what you know: http://knol.google.com/