The RFID photo booth by Touch
We built the booth in three days, with many design iterations, and ended up with a large white box with a picnic-themed grassy interior that allowed up to about 10 people to have their photo taken at once.
Inside there was an RFID reader, a camera and a screen that would show what was being recorded, as well as showing a countdown for picture taking. Outside a large LCD screen showed recent and random pictures from the booth, encouraging participation. By touching your tag to a reader outside, you could see pictures of yourself.
Over the course of the three-day event the photo-booth was extremely popular and resulted in literally thousands of pictures and social connections.
→ Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? @O'Reilly Radar
At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.
This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).
via Daring Fireball
→ Rot 'n' Roll: How to start composting @Grist
Composting is a lot like sex. It’s a healthy, natural process involving fertility, tumbling around, and – when it’s going right – steaminess. On top of that, some people call it dirty.
→ The Framework Age @Adactio
On the web, we’re making the same transition from classical to jazz. We’re improvising. We’ve moved from a hard-coded system of building pages to an open system of creating participatory environments.
I am not sure the “classical to jazz” analogy works, but I am definitely into the idea of building participatory environments. I have been thinking a lot about fostering this sort of incidental & relational participation with the new Artlog (re-launching next week – in one form or another).
Cortical homunculus
A cortical homunculus is a physical representation of the primary motor cortex, i.e., the portion of the human brain directly responsible for the movement and exchange of sense and motor information (namely touch: sensitivity, cold, heat, pain etc.) of the rest of the body.
via project.ioni.st
Summer streets yesterday morning
Park Avenue closed to cars as part of Summer Streets here in New York.
"He's chimping during the national anthem"
Dean Allen found the name for it – Chimping. I got a kick out of this video describing chimping.
Chimping is a term used in digital photography (especially when using a digital single-lens reflex camera) to describe the habit of checking every photo on the on-camera display (LCD) immediately after capture.
From Wikipedia
→ Le Gun sells out but are they cut out for mainstream publishing success? @Eye
Perhaps more significantly, the collective has signed a deal with Mark Batty Publisher, which (they hope), will secure the long-term future of their occasional publication, also called Le Gun, with its rolling, seamless (and ad-free) montage of images and texts.
That’s (potentially) great news. I really dig the journal/publication/occasional thing Le Gun publishes. I am looking forward to future editions.
→ "Photography as a Weapon" by Errol Morris @NYTimes
But doctored photographs are the least of our worries. If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don’t need Photoshop. You don’t need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don’t need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
In the photographers' pit @All Points West
It seems that checking the LCD screen in between photographs on your digital camera has become a reflex. You could possibly blame technology for an atrophied reliance on instinct, but I am not going to make that blanket statement.
Nearly everybody – whether professional or not – does do it though.
QR code for iamstillalive.net
QR Code encoded through the Google Charts API. Pretty cool.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=400×400&chl=http://iamstillalive.net&choe=UTF-8
I am using Barcode (app store) on a 3G iPhone to read the codes; it works as advertised.