Monday, April 08, 2002

Two interesting font resources to file away from WebDesign-L. WhatTheFont - "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!" Identifont - "Welcome to Identifont®, the unique font identifier that enables you to identify a font from a sample by answering a series of simple questions. It is ideal if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication." [The Shifted Librarian] 5:55:59 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

This is a test of the new feature for Radio 8.   "It only works well, if you set it up just right!" 12:10:15 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

IPod: Music to Hackers' Ears "Jean-Olivier Lanctôt-David is a 14-year-old hacker who has figured out a way to display online news headlines on Apple's iPod digital music player. Lanctôt-David, who has been using Macs since he was 4 and programming since he was 11, was given an iPod for Christmas and immediately wanted to make it do more than just play music. So he whipped up PodNews, a program that fetches headlines from the Web in XML format and displays them on the iPod's small screen. In the last few months, hackers have figured out clever ways to store not only names and addresses on the iPod but calendar items, song lyrics and even phrases in foreign languages. The iPod, which must be the hottest gadget on the planet, has also been made to work with Windows. It's supposed to be Mac-only, but EphPod is a free program that allows iPods to connect to Windows machines; Mediafour's Xplay, currently in beta, is a commercial program that does the same thing.... Michael Zapp, an instructor at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has created a pair of AppleScript applications that take data from Microsoft's Entourage (the Macintosh version of Outlook) and transforms it into vCard file format, which can be displayed using the iPod's new contacts feature." [Wired News] This is the kind of impact the NetGens will have on our culture in the future. If you think we're recycling old ideas and morphing them into something new now (hip hop, the movie Moulin Rouge, any animated Disney movie), then just wait. These kids are much more computer-literate and they're much more prone to interact directly with their environment. Everything is two-way for them, whereas most of us are still stuck in one-way. For them television, radio, the internet, books, music - they're all something from which to get entertainment or information, but they also expect to give back to them, too. Sometimes this is in the form of filtering what is coming out (digital video recorders, recommendation engines), sometimes it's global discussions (online discussions, instant messaging instead of email), and sometimes it's creating new distribution channels from old ones in order to do what they want to do (Apple iPod, Gameboys with ebooks on them). Whatever you give or sell them, they're going to expect to make it do what they want. Letting them go to town on iPods is an excellent strategy by Apple, although this isn't anything new for them. Apple understands these kids extremely well. They could try to put a halt to all of this hacking using the DMCA and other laws, but by letting folks hack it instead, they're letting the community take the iPod to new heights. This is the point the entertainment industry is missing. Instead of realizing the vast potential of customers who would interact directly with their product to do even more with it (all the while paying for this privilege), they want to lock out the very people that will innovate them to new levels. I also wanted to highlight this article because I still want to figure out how to automatically generate vCards for events in the SLS Calendar. If you come across anyone doing this (especially if they're using Oracle or Microsoft Access), please let me know! [The Shifted Librarian] 11:25:40 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Social capital, bonding, and bridging. I attended a talk tonight by Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, a study of the sharp decline of social capital over the last 30 years. The decline is measured as a loss of connectedness: people less willing to join organizations, to be civically involved, even to entertain friends at home. When I read the book some months back, I wondered whether Putnam believes online community can help reverse the trend. Yes and no, it turns out. Although he doesn't seem deeply wired into online community, he made some interesting points about the Internet and social connectedness. Face-to-face contact. Putnam's research shows that joining just one organization cuts your risk of dying, within the next year, by as much as quitting smoking. Social isolation is a huge health risk. Online community, for all its benefits and pleasures, is a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction. I greatly enjoy virtual society, but it doesn't do much for my blood chemistry. To what degree will telepresence make online social life feel more like mammalian social life? It will be fascinating to watch this unfold as storage, bandwidth, and CPU proceed on their current trajectories. Bonding vs. bridging. The Internet clearly does support lots of group formation. To the extent that it enables like minds to gather, the kind of social capital thus created is what Putnam calls bonding social capital. This is useful and important, but can be insular. Cross-fertilization may not occur. Groups may turn inward, recycling memes that don't evolve. The countervailing influence is bridging social capital which connects dissimilar groups. This stuff is harder to create, but also more valuable. These terms provide another way to understand the function of what I call human supernodes and what Malcolm Gladwell calls Connectors (people like Lois Weisberg). These people belong to many different groups, and they bridge among them. Tim O'Reilly is that kind of person. His conference in February brought together hackers, lawyers, politicians, biologists, and soldiers, and created lots of bridging social capital. We have yet to see blogspace reach its full bridging potential. Radio Community Server will be part of the story. RSS is even more important, as a way of bridging among many kinds of tools and cultures. I've watched the channelroll propagate to a number of Radio sites now. The subscription lists I see on other sites are, for the most part, very like mine. This tells me that there is more bonding than bridging going on at the moment. And it focuses my attention on the lists that are most different from mine. These, by definition, are bridges. There are, of course, some promising bridging projects underway. At first, these mainly interconnect tech tribes. It gets really interesting when the bridges lead to other tribes -- of librarians, of academics, and I hope many others. [Jon's Radio] 11:18:26 AM    trackback []     Articulate []