natecooper.net

I downloaded Chrome some time last week and have so far been happy with the results. Very fast browser. I know it’s still new and all but I have run in to a few problems.

The following one I find a little bit hilarious:

April Fools from Google the normal little block man that is a stand in for the POV of the camera in street view is today replaced with a block panda.

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Update
Apparently this is part of the larger gag running throughout Google today. CADIE is the panda’s name and here are her favorite places in google maps. She even has a blogger page (warning: obnoxious music will start playing)

My Roommate’s Facebook Statuses gives ongoing coverage of the authors (now ex) roommate’s Facebook status. I would say it’s stalky but here I am reposting a link to the repost of it.

Holy god! This picture is so freakin’ amazing!

(via lost.net)

Dan Meth has a pretty interesting and spot on visual interpretation of movie trilogies.

It’s been a couple weeks since I finished Steven Johnson’s 1997 book, “Interface.” Though I’d like to say that I’ve been stirred by it’s profoundity enough to be stewing on my own thoughts for a post, the truth is that I haven’t been entirely changed. That isn’t to say that the book is that much out of touch or contains bad ideas. But frankly, it was written 10 years too early. Many of the complaints and questions aroused by the book’s content have been settled or decidedly answered in the decade since it’s first publication.

Though it mentions blogging off-handedly, the book seems to focus a lot on news websites failing to take into account the striking influence and change brought about by community-centered news-sharing. Not to mention the inability to foresee (who could?) the rise of social-centric/web 2.0 news aggregation (read: Digg, Reddit). Of course, it’s hard to fault Johnson. Instead it may have been his musings and insistent resurrection of Mcluhan-like observation that sparked many of the social-tech innovations and cognitive queries seen in the ensuing years.

What’s hard to work through, from my perspective today, is the laborious overtures on long-dead technologies. Microsoft’s Bob is discussed at length over several chapters, though mostly in the context in how its metaphors ultimately fail. Johnson devotes nearly an entire chapter to frames in web-pages. In some ways it’s nice to think we’ve moved so far away from these technologies that to see them discussed in such a serious context is nearly laughable. This of course also begs the question of what will seem old-hat and silly a decade from today?

Johnson writes about The Palace as an example of the coming possibilities (remember ‘97) of a graphical chat-like forum. It was fun in this instance to reminisce. I remember bouncing around in The Palace and thinking what a wonderfully, grand experience it was back then when I would have been in High School. What’s sad reading about it now is, of course, how close Johnson was to seeing such a drastic reorganizing of graphical, social networks. I would have loved to read his take on exploring World of Warcraft and Second Life as social-information spaces. Even the explosion of Facebook in recent years seems like a great example of rearranging information space within a social, graphical environment.

In short, while I really enjoy Johnson’s work and his excellent channeling of Mcluhan to critique a medium– even going so far as to adamantly suggest interface should be understood as an artistic medium– it’s timeliness falls short. Such is the problem with writing about technology and culture. A critique written two minutes ago is immediately out of date. Here’s to reading this blog post ten years from now and reminiscing and laughing about how out of date it is. So it goes.

I find myself at a loss whenever confronted with the task of having to define Twitter. It’s one of those things that’s everywhere and nowhere. I am never really shocked when someone knows about it. Nor does it surprise me when I find out a friend from high school tweets every single aspect of their day (e.g. “showering now”).

As hard to define as it is for me, Urban Dictionary seems to be equally– shall we say twitter-pated?

While the first definition on Urban Dictionary seems straightforwardly banal, almost as if it were lifted directly from the Twitter Website. Immediately following are some pretty bizarre and hilarious definitions ala number 2:

My personal favorite is Number 7:

“A favorite pillow that lacks definition and firmness. Any pillow that is limp, or has feathers flying out of it.”

I’m curious as to whether these alternative definitions came before the micro-blogging service or after. Taken as commentary they can be a little biting. I know, when I lie in bed for my last tweet of the night, I always think of Twitter as a one of my favorite pillows, though when I awake in the morning, it’s given me a headache.

Been doing a fair amount of offline reading so haven’t had as much to write about. Read Everything Bad Is Good for You and was pretty impressed. The book starts as almost a defense of video games as a complex medium, despite it’s being maligned at best as overly simplistic and at worst as degrading society. Steven Johnson’s assertions in the first half of the book as he traces the intricacy in popular culture through television, film and gaming are a great summation but no surprise to anyone familiar with Marshal Macluhan.

Where the meat of the book lies is in the second half when he supports his argument that not only is popular culture more complex than it was 30 years ago but it actually is making society smarter. He uses sociological studies to prove his points and in doing so goes one further in opening up the debate about the effects media has on our minds — even to the point of increasing IQs.

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While in California (my two week trip was also a reason for my lack of posts) I had a few conversations about Blogging, both writing and reading. Most I’ve spoken with seem to express having too little time to spend pouring over blogs and even less to write their own content. It’s interesting because those same contacts would likely agree with Johnson’s argument about the complexity of television with multithreading.

In the same span of time friends, would tell me they didn’t have the time to read blogs or write about their own interests they would extol the virtues of decoding an episode of Lost. I have many friends- smart friends mind you- here in NYC that spend hours on World of Warcraft. I don’t doubt that my acquaintances would feel vindicated by reading Johnson’s tome. In fact, reading it myself I’ve been somewhat inspired to pay more attention to T.V. and look into video gaming as a practice of sharpening my mind.

Johnson himself doesn’t touch much on Blogging and the internet. Sure he mentions how it opens new avenues for viewers and players to critique and dissect T.V. and video games. He also mentions the benefit of all that reading that’s going on since he is quick to note the virtues of rich narrative over the cognitive gains of video games and visual media.

What I wonder, however, is a deeper elaboration on how Blogging and the internet affect society and the central nervous system the same way Macluhan remarks about T.V. and its effects.

This isn’t so much of a criticism of the book, in fact, I was very taken by its arguments and the questions it raised. I’m a huge defender of popular culture as a valid and important discourse. I guess I’m just looking for Blogging to be considered in the same light.

A couple days ago I installed Helvetireader a script for firefox that gives Google Reader a spiffed-up interface centered around a cleaner look.

I hadn’t really even used it enough to weigh in my two cents on the subject when Google itself released an update to their standard interface:

It not only cleans up the look with a plainer font but addresses some organizational issues by allowing you to collapse some of the side bars. This is a design issue I’ve been looking for for some time since if you have a healthy (insane?) amount of feeds the sidebar can quickly become difficult to maneuver. Here’s hoping this marks the beginning of more improvements for the interface. Or perhaps someone will have to prod Google into making a move with yet another hack.

Where are the Gmail like themes?

A recent skirmish with net neutrality led me to actually use a Yahoo proxy to access Google. Apparently “I’m feeling lucky” doesn’t translate very well into Chinese and then back to English.