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 [...]
Author Archives: Sean Flannagan
Reading List
February 16 10
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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:
new EtsyNameSpace.Mini(6043418, ‘favorites’,'thumbnail’,5,4).renderIframe();
Here’s an XL view courtesy of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]