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Sunday, August 24, 2003 |
 What would be killer is a desktop map viewer from a company like Avenza that could plug into existing Web 2.0 desktop apps for overlay data. Wow. With all the geotracking info (from IP mapping to geopositioning satellite chips) this could be an excellent desktop service to offer Web 2.0 developers (imagine this on the desktop at its peak resolution with clickable overlays). Examples: where are my sites visitors coming from graphically, what's the geo map by thread of my discussion group, where is my trucking fleet, etc.
9:14:35 AM 
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Have you ever used Adobe's SVG viewer plug-in (it's been around for a while but you don't see it often)? Here is a mapping link that will get it for you (it is also a great example of interactive online mapping). Demos.
9:09:47 AM
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Here is a simple round-up of HDTV resolutions and scan rates. Here is my question. I recently played the Windows Media example clips (both Terminator examples at 720p and 1080p) with my ATI Radeon 9800 card on my 21" screen and it looked much better than DVD playback. I didn't see any difference between the 720p and 1080p clips however. What is the limitation of DVD playback? What are the work arounds? Should I have seen a difference in the playback between 720p and 1080p playbacks?
8:57:39 AM
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One of the best ideas I have culled from McCluhan (no link I can find easily) is the idea that in a world of many minds, there are some that can solve some of the most difficult problems easily.
They don't see it as a problem. The reason they haven't solved the problem is that they have never been asked the question: how do you solve xyz?
One of the best ways I can think of to kick off the Weblog Network is to build a collaborate set of weblogs that address key problem areas for global development: water, food, energy, fabrication, eduction, communication, policital empowerment, environment, cooling/heating, and work. The key would be to ask the correct questions in each of these areas and focus on the identification of low cost enabling technologies that make the solutions possible (granted, technological solutions are my bias, but I am a tool-using animal).
ThinkCycle is an example of this type of network (although in a very clunky style) that is leveraging minds at MIT and across the globe to solve specific problems. For example: they are working on a low-cost water storage system for developing countries.
8:38:04 AM
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"The future of the book is the blurb" Marshall McLuhan. Sums up weblogs.
8:21:19 AM
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The three critiques I have of Tufte are (and this is due perhaps that I can't find his views on the topics, so if you know of a resource on this, let me know):
- Most of his high density data depictions are works of art and not practical for rapid or real-time analysis. The reader has to actually learn to read the chart as an unique object before higher insight is gained. Simple cuts of data against known environments (timelines, $$ amounts, etc.), like those you see in the charting tools available from Yahoo Finance, can be much easier and beneficial (of course, computers make this much easier to do).
- His data is typically mired in flat 2-D depictions for paper display. I have a computer and I demand dynamic data. The ability to embed data for viewing (mouse-overs, etc), enable interactivity (scale adjustments, etc.), and provide 3-D viewing is not addressed. Part of this problem may be that tools for this (both creating and viewing data in this way) are not readily available. Given the high-end displays available today, this is a shame.
- His complex data depictions don't necessarily provide enlightenment. This can be due to three factors (beyond the potential for malicious action and corrupt data), either a) there isn't any hidden truth in the data, b) the designer has focused on the wrong data sets or has chosen to reveal the wrong aspect of the truth, or c) there is a hidden truth but a depiction of the raw data is insufficient to reveal it without additional synthesis.
8:15:44 AM
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Ask ET. An excellent forum where designers can as Edward Tufte questions. He provides lots of great insight. Given the lack of a permalink to a post he made, here is an excellent bit of insight on how to build an effective digital dashboard for executive management (although he doesn't like the term).
7:58:33 AM
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PCMag. Nice list of files that you run into when running firewalls (like ZoneAlarm).
7:46:47 AM
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Adobe's Photoshop Picture Album has many of the great features of Apple's iphoto plus an innovative timeline/calendar-based organizational system (click on the walk-through video to see it in action). If connected to a personal publishing system (weblog tool), it would make building high quality online picture albums a breeze (so much easier than it could ever be through a Web browser). It would be interesting to see how much of this tool's functionality (sort, search, etc.) could be published with a click of a button to an interactive CMS-driven weblog. So, if I organize my photos in a certain way, my readers can quickly leverage my organizational system using interactive features to get a full experience.
Also, I see a trend here. People are typically going to publish a main text-driven weblog, but in parallel they are likely to publish weblogs for pictures and video (the highlights of the parallel media weblogs will be published to the main weblog).
7:34:32 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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