Deeplinking

Reading List

February 16 10

Books follow me around and accumulate in stacks: by my desks, bed, coffee table, couch. Sometimes they get in the way but I like having them around. If I could have the current active lot organized into a single stack based on pages viewed, notes taken and ideas generated, it would probably look like this:

1.
A few months ago I started acquiring various books on architecture, urban planning and social psychology and reading them with software design in mind. Christopher Alexander’s 1977 classic A Pattern Language towers above the others in sheer richness and hasn’t left my bedside. If you’re familiar with the use of design patterns in software development and the classic book on them, the format of A Pattern Language will be familiar: it was its inspiration. Jon Udell and Erin Malone have both written recently on the relevance of A Pattern Language to software design.

2.
Also been sifting through books, papers and presentations on neuroscience while thinking about software design. Neuro Web Design distills many of the key lessons from the field into one thin volume. It’s quite basic but not a waste of time. Topics include the power of social validation, building reciprocity and concession, invoking scarcity, using similarity, mass interpersonal persuasion (MIP!) and the power of storytelling.

3.
Douglas Rushkoff spoke recently at Etsy on the creation of value and how to exchange it directly with others. His book, Life Inc., has been very much on my mind since the fall, and helped kickstart a line of inquiry I’m still following regarding the nature of currency. Watch Life Inc. the Movie for an excellent introduction. Stacey Brook also wrote up a nice recap of the Etsy event.

4.
If you’re familiar with the Yahoo Design Pattern Library you’ll be familiar with much of this book: Christian Crumlish is the curator of both. I have it open quite a bit, though in some ways I prefer Joshua Porter’s older Designing for the Social Web. See 5 Steps to Building Social Experiences from co-author Erin Malone and the Social Patterns wiki for more.

5.
Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is an Etsy Book Club selection. It’s a lucid book suggesting the need to explore new economic ideas and create more localized economies. The main idea is that localization is the only way to achieve economic resilience, and Bill articulates it convincingly.

6.
I’ve been reading up on games and game mechanics for a while (see Amy Jo Kim and my favorite category on Wikipedia), and teaching myself Go, but was unaware of how great Games magazine was (is?) until I came across some early issues circa 1977 and ‘78 at an antiques market. In between scholarly articles on ancient African games and the like there are pages of logic puzzles, unusual crossword variants and ads for ’70s classics like Mastermind and Othello—plus the magazine itself is a game, with hidden contests in every issue. New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz was an early contributor.

7.
This was a birthday gift from a few years ago, but there’s so much in it it’s still speaking. An extended abstract philosophical discussion amidst dense imaginary landscapes illustrated with obsessive detail, Kevin Hooyman’s The Language Change is one of the books that’s never left the active stack because I’m still getting my head around it. In “Chapter One: The Animals Speak Amongst Themselves,” a bird asks, “Are numbers real?” A bearded dog answers, “They are useful but they are not real.” And so on.

8.
My Piece of the Pie by Donald Brown. This is my grandfather’s autobiography, which I’ve been editing and designing. Family review copies have been circulating and I’m now trying to track down his patents to include them as an appendix. It will be available on Amazon eventually via Lulu.

9.
Beautiful Data is a collection of the stories behind elegant data solutions. Almost a book version of the kinds of things I was thinking about when I started working on Datamob, with many of the same players discussing different approaches to tackling the challenges of working with data. Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, whose 2009 Flea Market Mapping presentation still gets me excited, comes through with a detailed chapter on the process of freeing and beautifying urban data. There’s also a great chapter from Jeff Hammerbacher tracing the history of Facebook’s data team and the evolution of the tools used for information processing at that scale.

10.
I spotted a pile of back issues of Evergreen Review circa 1970 and ‘71 at the Beat Museum in San Francisco and found them irresistible. I had seen issues from the ’60s but in the ’70s things apparently got a lot sexier. Writing from counterculture greats, beautiful photography plus fascinating ads for underground book clubs and defunct concerns like Truth and Soul Fashions. So much style.

And a new stack is forming now with The Pragmatic Programmer, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Coders at Work, and whatever I can manage to score from the Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World.

Posted in Books, Curiosities, Lists | Comments (3)

The Providence Curse

December 14 09

The European Street Team, an Etsy Team, asked for a photo tour of a favorite place. You’ll never guess which place I chose.

Posted in Etsy, Providence | Comments (0)

Consciousness, Pleasure and Website Addiction

December 11 09

From Thorpe and Fabre-Thorpe, 2001
I was first alerted to the work of Irving Biederman, professor of neuroscience at USC, via this WSJ article on the nature of addictive websites. I’ve been a fan ever since. His experiments are fascinating, probing everything from the neural basis of shape recognition—with members of remote African tribes with no exposure to uniform, manufactured objects as test subjects—to whether or not people are able to recognize faces in the form of pigmented “3D blobs” that look like teeth. But his work on the evolutionary factors behind scene preference is of particular interest to web people.

Biederman found test subjects preferred scenes like this,

Over scenes like this:

And more than that, preferred scenes were accompanied by high levels of neural activity in the association areas of the brain. Greater neural activity increases production of opioid neurotransmitters; the greater the rate of opioid release, the more pleasurable the experience. The association areas of the brain happen to have a high density of opioid receptors—neural activity there is pleasurable, and addictive.

The big pile of bricks above is what Biederman calls an “uninterpretable input.” It’s a random-appearing mass. “Novel inputs” like the garden scene above result in extensive interpretation and association and release a pleasurable flood of opioid hits. Repetition of novel inputs though result in rapidly diminishing opioid returns.

What makes a scene richly interpretable from an evolutionary perspective? A few key things according to Biederman: mystery (”How likely is it that something new might happen or that you would obtain different information from changes in your vantage point?”), vista (”How extensive is the view? Good reconnaissance?”), refuge (”Is there a position in the scene where you can achieve a good vantage point without being seen?”) and whether the scene is natural or urban (”Does it afford food or water?”).

To illustrate that pleasure is generated in that moment of novel interpretation, Biederman turns to Droodles. Droodles are doodle-riddles.

Have a look at this droodle, pre-caption:

Then have a look at it again with a caption:

Looking at a giraffe through a second story window.

Better, right? Biederman opted not to use lolcats in his study, to the internet’s dismay.

We’re forever seeking new and richly interpretable information. It’s how you got here, actually (and if you arrived via Twitter, you can consider yourself a junkie). Addictive websites and web apps happen to offer a constant stream of new information ripe for interpretation and association. Nowadays, with our basic needs for survival met, we spend much of our waking lives attempting to satisfy this drive. Some of us have learned that the internet is a great place to try and do this, over and over again.

In the evolutionary old days, new and richly interpretable information was relatively scarce. Now we’re swimming in it, and getting it on our phones to alleviate the opioid deprivation of waiting in line. But we still act like it’s scarce, and seek out that next hit, because we can’t help ourselves; it’s how we’re built. Scarcity is a powerful motivator. Biederman calls us infovores.

I had read about this study from secondhand sources but seeing actual presentation materials from Biederman is 100x more fun. You can download the slides from his Central European University lectures here. You can also download the images used in the Scene Preference Study there—flipping through them is sort of like a real-life version of The Parallax View montage.

Posted in Curiosities | Comments (1)

Opening Search

September 29 09

Image by nateduval

A few weeks ago we had an internal Handmade Code hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within your web browser. Using the OpenSearch format, these things are wonderfully easy to bring to life. Here’s how.

The add-on was approved by Mozilla for public status and distribution today, just in time for a significant improvement to Etsy search: the ability to filter search results by category. Within a few hours of this update, I had hit a personal record in Etsy spending and paused to think about the larger economic implications to come when we really start unleashing discovery.

Posted in Etsy | Comments (0)

Playing Favorites

August 4 09

Image by pleasebestill, also used here

There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have 60 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to that shop’s favorites, and enter an endless loop. Below are some hearters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their hearting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy as well.

Tip: If you find yourself past page 10 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed.

corduroy’s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy’s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic’s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

Posted in Etsy, Ideas, Lists | Comments (1)

The Freebase Parallax View

June 28 09

I listened to a Jon Udell podcast with David Huynh regarding Huynh’s Freebase Parallax project a while back but it’s something you really have to see in action to appreciate. I just saw it in action and now I appreciate.

Freebase Parallax is an interface for browsing related sets of data on Freebase, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation. Parallax uses faceted navigation to make it easy to jump from one set of data to another related set of data and see the underlying connections.

David’s demo gets the idea across best:

I spent some time using Parallax to explore the influence node on Freebase, which attempts to capture the influences of notable people (and has led to some fun apps). Here are some of James Joyce’s biggest influences, mapped by place of birth:

Anyone who’s spent time puzzling over Finnegans Wake knows that Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher/historian/rhetorician/etymologist/jurist whom Joyce said made his imagination grow. But who influenced Vico? Here’s a timeline of those responsible:

There’s more to explore where that came from.

Posted in Curiosities, Data | Comments (1)

Sketchbook Secrets

April 15 09

Julia Rothman regularly showcases fascinating book objects on Book By Its Cover but the sketchbook category is especially special. Look at what she’s talked people into sharing:

Jim Stoten’s madly detailed secret drawings.

Andrés Sandoval’s accordion fold-out sticker collages.

Reka Kiraly’s thick bold lines.

Calef Brown’s characters.

Etsy seller Iris Schwarz’s delicate line drawings.

The handmade category is worth extensive clicking as well.

Posted in Curiosities, Lists | Comments (0)

The Player

April 14 09

Excerpt from the text I created by clicking around Whitney Trettien’s combinatorial thesis on seventeenth-century digital poetry:

Harsdörffer used pieces of wood to make anagrams, designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations, and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem’s hidden values, earning him the title Der Spielende, or “the Player,” in the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Each of these games uses language not as an abstraction, the purely rational product of the mind, but as quite literally a material object to be manipulated and moved, cut-up and combined.

The Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or the Five-fold Thought-ring of the German Language, is a database of the German language composed of five predicate variables: prefixes (forty-eight values), initial letters or diphthongs (fifty values), medial letters (twelve values), final letters of diphthongs (120 values) and suffixes (twenty-four values). Instead of using a table structure, however, each variable is inscribed along the edge of a disc and nested with each of the other discs, forming a simple combinatory mechanism that can generate any information stored in the database.

This “alphabet of human thoughts” remained an undercurrent in Leibniz’s philosophy throughout his life, manifesting itself in a number of different plans: his dream for a networked encyclopedia in which, through linking, every entry was a microcosm of the human macrocosm (see Selcer 29); his lingua characteristica, or notation system for concepts “whose signs or characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers” (Leibniz 222); even his notion of “monads—discrete, irreducible primitives that nonetheless reflect the infinity of the spiritual cosmos. More specifically, Leibniz develops his “alphabet” through account of a mathesis universalis, a universal system for storing and generating knowledge.

“The verbal and visual tropes that surround the alphabet cloak the fact that the unit of textual meaning—the letter—lacks meaning itself.”

Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Finding Yourself Through Your Favorites

April 3 09

Japanese Tumblr users are “addicted to reblogging,” ffffolks on FFFFOUND are defining themselves by the images they find, and Etsians are hearting more items than ever. I’m discovering more about myself as I build up my Etsy Favorites, namely that I’m fond of hand-drawn pattern and complexity:

Here’s an XL view courtesy of the Etsy API.

We just need better ways of sharing, organizing, displaying and discovering these things (working on it!).

Posted in Effects, Etsy | Comments (0)

Datamob Updated, Mr. President

January 26 09

With President Obama firing off memos and executive orders on open government, FOIA obedience and Executive Branch ethics, now feels like a good time to make sure Datamob is up to date. Notable additions:

Capitol Words visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record and does so in more useful ways than those Wordle word clouds we see all too often. They have a blessedly simple API as well.

ReadTheStimulus.org has made the full text of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (House Stimulus Bill) searchable with comments for each page enabled. Actual dollar appropriations from the bill have been parsed out by volunteers and entered into a Google spreadsheet. Their tagline says it all: “$850 Billion, 941 pages, and counting… somebody needs to read it!”

The Legislative Lookup API from Mobile Commons is a database that matches latitude and longtitude with the U.S. congressional and state legislators for that location. Could be put to good use in your pet mapping application. They even made it available as a standalone Rails app.

Represent from The New York Times is the kind of application you could use the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API for. It’s a nice way for New Yorkers to find their elected representatives and see what they’re up to.

The New York Times Congress API is what actually powers Represent (Represent!). The great thing about it is that it was built to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can use it with the seven-character code used to identify members of Congress in the official Biographical Directory, or the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack to individual member responses.

DC Bikes is another example of a good local application, mapping bike routes, bike thefts and bike-related Craiglist postings for Washington, D.C. bikers. It uses the same Mapnik toolkit EveryBlock uses to get their nice maps. Built by Development Seed for the D.C. Data Catalog’s Apps for Democracy competition.

iLive.at also came out of Apps for Democracy. Enter a Washington, D.C. address and receive information tailored to that location and organized into categories like Errands, Emergencies, Recently Reported Crimes, People, Transportation and “Did You Know?” I would love to see a New York version.

You can keep up with all the action in this space on the Open Government, PoliParse and Sunlight Labs Google Groups.

Posted in Data, Lists | Comments (0)

GPOYBSS

January 25 09

(Gratuitous Picture of Your Book Shelf Sunday)

Annotated on Flickr.

Posted in Curiosities, New York | Comments (0)

Data Hunt: Entrepreneurship Around the Planet

December 14 08

Bubble chart of nations sized according to new business density. Source: 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey.

Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different economies at different stages of development have different definitions for these things. The 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey comes close, “striving to define a unit of measurement, source of information, and concept of entrepreneurship applicable and available among the diverse countries surveyed.” This limits it to the “formal sector”—small companies registered with their governments—as opposed to the informal sector, like most sellers on Etsy. Still, it’s of some interest. Above, a screenshot of the Many Eyes bubble chart version of some of the data, with nations sized according to “new business density,” or the density of new registered companies per 1,000 citizens. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands round out the top five. See the same data on a map here.

Posted in Business, Data, Etsy | Comments (0)

Giving Well

November 30 08

With the economy getting scarier and people getting trampled or worse on Black Friday, there’s a lot of disillusionment floating around and a lot of talk of bypassing traditional shopping this holiday season. I’ll be joining the growing chorus of people like Smiling Mama who are skipping the big retail stores and doing all their gift-getting on Etsy and places like Craftland—not because I work for Etsy and not just because of the brilliant, one-of-a-kind items you can find on there, but because I can’t help but feel that the way out of this larger economic dead-end lies less in government bailouts than in supporting small business and the people around you and around the world making things. I get a lot out of the purchases I make on Etsy. It’s the most meaningful shopping experience I know of. If you want your gifts to be unique and have meaning, Etsy’s an ideal place to start.

Where to start on Etsy? Time Machine² and Pounce are good ways to get a broad overview of site activity and Shop Local is the way to find makers of items around you, but my current favorite way to shop is via this Tag Fractal (beta) by Jared Tarbell, one of many rewarding and elegant applications developed by Jared at his lab deep in the New Mexican desert. Combine and mix tags and scroll through an infinite gallery of associated items:

When you’re done there, you might be ready to pledge to buy handmade this year.

Posted in Curiosities, Etsy, Ideas | Comments (2)

Five Centuries of Board Games

November 20 08

BibliOdyssey’s board-game roundup had me at “Filosofia cortesana de Alonso de Barros.” More can be found via a search for “game-board” on the British Museum’s Prints Database.

Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Net Art Update

October 27 08

Last weekend in Providence I ended up checking out bits and pieces of Interrupt 2008, a festival co-hosted by Brown and RISD on “language-driven digital art,” and seeing a lot of old familiar faces. I actually find it comforting that the genre hasn’t changed much in the last ten years, and the low-tech aesthetic embraced by self-conscious net artists in the ’90s seems even more fitting today.

Christiane Paul, who introduced me to this scene back then, introduced concrete poet Marko Niemi at one event. His work reminds me of this quote from Kenneth Goldsmith about the web being the perfect medium for concrete poetry. He even runs a sort of Finnish Ubuweb called Nokturno.

Screenshot from one of Niemi’s concrete stir fry poems.
See also hybrid letters.

Seoul-based Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries were the stars of the festival however. If you’re not familar with their animated Monaco-font text narratives set to jazz, I recommend Cunnilingus in North Korea (which Harper’s once tried to republish) and Beckett’s Bounce. They take a Warhol-like stance on the endeavor, saying they have no thoughts whatsoever on net art and no idea why they do what they do. Regardless, they’re huge now, exhibiting in museums around the world and enjoying a high-roller art-star lifestyle.

Young-hae Chang's Cunnilingus in North Korea

Both Niemi and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries started out as translators. They produce work in a number of languages with Young-hae Chang focused on English as a global dialect that is “up for grabs these days.” In an interview posted the other day on Nettime, they call English “a powerful political and cultural tool for people around the world.” In another interview: “Distance, homelessness, anonymity and insignificance are all part of the internet literary voice, and we welcome them.”

Posted in Curiosities, Providence | Comments (2)