Daniel Miller is an artist, writer, musician and designer.
The content on this page comes from
Livejournal,
Nonlinear,
Johnny Citizen,
Delicious,
Twitter and
Google Reader.
(And a very specific Flickr request.) I can also be found at
Sugarfilled,
LinkedIn,
Flickr,
Vimeo,
YouTube,
Facebook,
Last.fm and
Amazon.
“This isn’t software, this is madness!” -me, quoting Penn, imitating me, in a bedtime game too complex to describe in 140 characters. 3 hours ago Product Beta: labs.laan releases Summize Air App Rather than using the Twitter API, they use the Summize API, which allows you to create a much more customized dashboard than Twitter would. generatedata.com An Article About Startups That Wasn't Written By A Pretentious Asshole I didn’t go off on my own hoping for riches. I did it so I wouldn’t have to take shit from anybody. And you know what? I still take plenty of shit. From investors, the illegitimate tech media, from bloggers, from users, everybody. Small talk with a designer John Lennon interview infographic movie a beautiful "infographically" animated movie that illustrates a 1969 interview of John Lennon by a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan. armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, Jerry snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto & convinced him to do an interview about peace. using the original interview recording as the sole soundtrack CForm v1.0 (Apologies for all the Flex stuff but might want to get used to it.) This is, from apperances, a really slick component that dynamically builds Flex components from an XML configuration file. Form generation abstraction: GOOD thing. If you can get it to work w/in your environment. The Horizontal Way a horizontal showcase for horizontal scrolling websites 20+ Free And Fresh Icon Sets (Smashing Magazine) A few more I might use. Still bummed I missed the deadline Smashing's article contest. Sivers/Ferriss interview that will make you think Advice Fail Apparently my ex is doing an advice column—with the same communications skills as always! Remember When An API Actually Meant Something? Twitter’s API is practically useless. Digg’s is OK. I feel ashamed for knowing this. Downgrade to Win: Increasing Results by Lowering Expectations So go ahead, upgrade if you must. But just remember: when you upgrade, anything that’s not a win is a loss. And when you downgrade, even a loss is a win.Using an iPod was “frustrating”. Seriously. OK, the first one was DOA, but my father returned it to the Apple Store without incident. But because he didn’t have a music collection, he relied on me to fill his iPod with new music every so often. The first time he went to recharge it, he plugged it into his Mac and iTunes “helpfully” wiped it and refilled it with the few songs that were in his iTunes library. Of course he didn’t realize what had actually happened until he went to the gym the next day and had virtually no music (and certainly no good exercise music). His next thought was that I should refill it, and then he would just copy the music from the iPod to his iTunes library. This led to a long discussion of why iTunes wouldn’t let you do that, and how this was technically different from me letting him borrow one of my CDs, and how if he really wanted to do that there were utilities but not from Apple, and so on and so forth. So yeah, my parents switched to Linux because — among other reasons — it was easier to use with their iPod. That’s how badly Apple has lost the plot.2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop (…but it didn’t last)
Pirates of the Caribbean actor Orlando Bloom has announced plans to co-produce and appear in a film about the siege of Sarajevo of the early 1990s.Shortly before leaving for Sarajevo I got an email from a friend of Bill Carter, and about one day before departing got an email from Bill himself. They had found me via a blog post I had written about his film, Miss Sarajevo (if permalinks were working on my old blog I could point to the relevant posts…I think I blogged about the email as well). Because I was a musician, he cautiously gave me contact information for his best friend in Sarajevo, a blues musician who was featured in the film. Like as with most of the Bosnians I met there, I was welcomed with weary smiles, drinks, and smokes. It was the perfect introduction, however, and allowed me instant access to the music scene there. Sarajevo is such a small town, it is easy to meet people and nearly impossible to understand them or get them to open up. Old habits, especially those developed during wartime, are hard to overcome.
Speaking in the city earlier this week, the 31-year-old said he hoped the film would be made in the Bosnian capital.
The film will be based on Fools Rush In, US writer Bill Carter’s memoir of living in the city during the siege.
“I read the script and the very human story at the very core of this film spoke to me very clearly,” said Bloom.
The actor, who made his West End debut in the play In Celebration last year, will not be playing Carter in the proposed drama.
It was discovered that a woman who paid a South Korean company to create five clones of her pitbull Booger was Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who escaped British authorities in 1977 after abducting a Mormon missionary, securing him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs, and raping him three times.via @jbenton
There were at times several hundred people on the huge open-air stage (the audience sit inside, under cover, but the stage area is open to the sky, the elements and the changing light of evening): there was fire, rain, camels, sheep and horses, a 50 piece orchestra of local players and a 100 person choir of local singers…. all to a totally professional standard. There was nothing ‘local’ about the quality of any of the performances.
Luckily I’d brought along a little monocular, and that proved invaluable. I was intrigued by the faces - normal faces, normal children (picking their noses, being distracted), not ‘actory’ types. I kept returning to this thought: what would it do to a community to have a tradition as long and as defining as that, to know from an early age that you were, probably throughout your life, going to be woven into this incredibly rich tapestry of time, spirituality, art and craft?
It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.
They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.
…An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.
The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.
Our snails are equipped with a miniaturised electronic circuit and antenna that enables them to be assigned messages from hardware located within their enclosure. The moment you click ‘send’ your message will travel at the speed of light to our snail server where it will await collection by a snail agent.The worlds first webmail service using real snails from boredomresearch. There’s even a blog.
Once associated with the tiny electronic chip on the snails shell your message will be carried around until the snail chances by the drop off point. Hardware located at this point collects the message from the snail and forwards it to its final destination.
Writing headlines that get dugg vs Writing headlines that get rememberedWhile this blog is initially about novel interfaces, primarily for narrative delivery, it is also about how we interface with life and allow novelty to change the way we do so. Much of that ability has to do with an intellectual flexibility that is highlighted in Amy’s list of distinctions. Hers is often excellent writing on these very topics, so if you haven’t already, head over to slash7 and read…
Mastery of video game controllers vs Mastery of video game / problem-solving concepts
Convincing people to pay for your stuff vs Creating stuff people can’t live without
Google ability vs Research ability
Being able to survive in a given business vs Being able to survive in any situation
Knowing how to blog vs Knowing how to write
Knowing how to prepare a lesson plan vs Knowing how to educate
Knowing how to speak properly vs Knowing how to weave a compelling 45-minute narrative
Being a CSS ninja vs Being good at learning multifaceted rule sets
Writing good Java code vs Understanding programming theory
Making pretty with Photoshop vs Analyzing the world to come up with impactful new things
Twitter is unreliable, even as a service to humans. It’s been all over the internet for the last month or two, as their site has gone down as much as it’s been up recently, due to higher use. In terms of application development using Twitter as a platform, they recently throttled the API limit form 70 to 30 calls an hour, and apparently (The problem with having an API in the first place is having to support the API from then on. And if Rails is really the reason for performance issues, it is an interesting paradox, because I wonder if there would even be an API if Rails hadn’t made it so simple to implement…and then I wonder if the service would be as popular as it is without the many API clients out there.I haven’t had a chance to get caught up on it, but am hoping to today), changed a bunch of the API calls themselves.
All of this is fine if one understands that Twitter is a young service built by people with no sense on how to make their offering scale. “Send updates through Twitter” already has different expectations attached to it than “Send updates from your cell phone”…
I’m still really interested in Twitter and developing Twitter apps, but I’m in it from a higher level. I’m not worried about business requirements just yet.
Still, if one wants a quick-and-dirty mobile interface to their application, it still can’t be beat…
Successful product design manages to reveal useful functionality beyond its appealing form. No matter how excellent a design looks like, most customers aren’t likely to spend money on something they won’t be able to use. On the other hand, most people are likely to buy something useful despite the design it has.I have to find some time to check these out in more detail myself, but some very interesting interfaces here…
Yet the key to a truly successful product design lies in designer’s ability to combine both beautiful design and functionality making it obvious to the customers how the product can be used and which benefits it delivers. However, one can combine the beauty of design with the utility it is supposed to provide.
Most products fail to pass this test and never reach the production stage; some products do manage to get to the stores. In the overview below you’ll find an overview of some beautiful and original product designs which will hopefully make the cut and will be available in the next years. Some of them are already available today.
So I spent the last few days knocking this together. It works on three principles: first, that anyone who wants to can have their vote counted; second, that things people find interesting are more important than people who find things interesting; and third, that by any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks – unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about – must and shall be filtered out of view.
There’s some fancy albeit inchoate weighting logic going on under the surface, and I’ve got a few vaguely neato features in the works, though it is as they say very beta. It will I hope grow, and, as more people are added to the voting ranks, be a reliable source for funny, weird, obnoxious, entertaining, inspiring, webcock-less, tiny little fragments of life.
The act of one human being choosing to follow another is a big deal. As long as nefarious intent is not in play, the connection creates what the social science nerds like to call an affinity map; by drawing a line between you and me, we can infer that we’re somehow connected. How are we connected? Who knows? Maybe you like nerd culture? How about gel pens? We’re not really going to know until we test that link by asking a question.
…I’m eagerly watching Twitter evolve and organize itself. I’m dazzled as third parties are giving Twitter memory and context. But what I care about, and what has value to me, is the tribe of people in my ecosystem. Twitter is the best social network out there;, it’s a great social search engine;, and it’s a short strategic hop from being a terrific next generation address book.
My tribe is not your tribe because you’re not using Twitter how I do. You wrote an Academy Award winning screenplay, only follow a few people, but have thousands following you. You sell shoes and follow each of the thousands of people who follow you. You are a major airline, but sound surprisingly human.
Twitter’s value has nothing to do with the technology.
News of a possible explosion rippled through the popular online service Twitter on Tuesday, in a preview of what’s to come in the realm of breaking news and citizen journalism. Twitter is a so-called microblogging site that allows users to send and receive short messages.Breaking news, Twitter style
At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: “Explosion in Falls Church, VA?”
