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 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 ..
Posts by Sean Flannagan
Opening Search
29 Sep 2009
A few weeks ago we had a “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 ..
Playing Favorites
04 Aug 2009
There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.
Find a shop you like? Check out the shop owner’s favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop owner’s favorites. Repeat until you realize three hours have gone by and you have 26 ..
The Freebase Parallax View
28 Jun 2009
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 ..
Sketchbook Secrets
15 Apr 2009
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 ..
The Player
14 Apr 2009
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,” ..
Finding Yourself Through Your Favorites
03 Apr 2009
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();
We just need better ..
Datamob Updated, Mr. President
26 Jan 2009
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 ..
