the JOHN LAUDUN experiment

It’s done all in Javascript, using the canvas element. Simply amazing. And you can save your drawings as PNGs!

As long as I am revealing my conspiracy theory side, the Hungry Beast has a great rendition of all the things Google is up to:

THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.

Like patent trolls themselves, someone has not only come up with an idea but patented it. In this case, however, the idea is patent trolling, and so, given the USPTO’s history so far, Clive Menesez could soon be in a position to claim that he holds a patent on patent trolling and all patent trolls would have to license their method from him.

Oh, irony, how sweet thou are.

Link to patent onUSPTO website.

A lot of people I know use Facebook. It’s true that the site is amazingly good at connecting or re-connecting people. The problem is that people then stay within the confines of Facebook for these connections, corresponding with each other, commenting on each other’s photographs, and setting up events and holding larger conversations.

And that’s all well and good. That was and is the promise of the internet. The problem is that it’s not the internet: it’s Facebook. It’s a private internet. It’s AOL reborn. It promises privacy. It gives you the illusion of privacy, but in the background Facebook is relentlessly grinding statistics about you and selling this profile of you and your relationships to advertisers. And if you haven’t updated your privacy settings since Facebook changed its Terms of Use, it is also exposing you and all your friends to the larger internet, which may or may not be a much darker and scarier place.

And just in case you thought Facebook was a safe kindergarden, it turns out that the guy running the show has been peering into your e-mails. Zuckerberg, and allies like the guy who founded Zynga, are willing to pry themselves as far into users’ lives as users will let them. (The Zynga link is to a Youtube video featuring Mark Pincus where he reveals, in NSFW language, how willing he was to screw users — sorry, that’s the most polite word I could come up with.)

And that’s why I mostly post to Facebook from my Twitter account. Twitter has not, so far at least, locked my data up. More importantly, a number of my Twitter posts act merely as selective feeds to this site. This site is not as full and complete as I would like it, but finishing it is entirely within my control.

One of the reasons why I picked up an iPhone 3GS was for its GPS functionality.¹ I had been thinking about getting a separate GPS unit, and in fact had asked for one Christmas 2008, but it turns out the delay worked to my benefit. At this point in time, I don’t want turn-by-turn directions, all I want is to be able to note my location coordinates and then tag my notes and my photographs with that information so that future researchers will have that information available to them.

However, getting those coordinates from somewhere on my phone to all those images is not as easy as it should be. This may have something to do, from what I can tell, with the iPhone’s SDK, which up until now has made it hard for apps to save data in a place or in a form that could be used elsewhere. This may all change with the iPad, which obviously needs to make something like a file system available to apps for storage of information. (Again, I could be talking out of my hat here — it’s a lovely IU baseball cap, and so I look quite good talking out of it.)

I have downloaded a few GPS apps, but none of them have done what I want. “Geo logging” wasn’t quite the right search. I should have been using “geotagging.” (It’s often one word these days.) And so I have turned up a number of applications that promise to make this pretty effortless:

• GeoTag for iPhone is inexpensive at $1.99 and offers to track your location for you. You then use a desktop application to tag your photos.
• GeoLogTag is more expensive at $4.99 but it doesn’t require that you install any software on your Mac. Instead, you connect your phone to your wireless network and then tell GeoLogTag to tag your photos. (How exactly this works isn’t clear.)

Frustratingly neither of these apps, and a few others at which I looked, mentions specific use cases with Lightroom. They mention iPhoto, Aperture, and Flickr, but not Lightroom.

All these apps also discuss tagging your photos within a given time window — five minutes or such. Since I tend to be at a given location to document something, I would prefer to capture that data, manually even, and then be able to drag and drop it onto a given set of images — rather like one tags with keywords in both iPhoto and Lightroom. Both of these apps, and others, assume a kind of automation which is very nice but doesn’t exactly fit with my own workflow.

I only tweet occasionally. Not as many people follow me on Twitter as read this blog. I’m okay with that. And, for the record, I only check my Facebook page once every two weeks. I am completely not okay with the fact that Facebook not only makes it impossible for me to get back out anything I put in, but that they are using whatever I put in to sell me stuff. Others are okay with that, but the promise of the web, to me, was that it would not only be a read-write experience but that we would own our own writing. Facebook is easy and convenient, but it’s not democratic.

But back to Twitter. There’s a guy who tweets things his dad says. Apparently he got a deal to write a pilot for television. (I’m not making that up: you’ll have to look it up on TechCrunch, though — I already closed the page.) This is kind of cool. It means people can experiment with content and it might just end up paying the bills. For the record, his dad, be he fictional or real, says mostly expletive-laden things that occasionally make you smile. Only one made me laugh out loud:

“No, I’m not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain’t shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist.”

This is the first of what may very well be quite a few notes, as re-blogs, about iPad application design. I think humanist and content creators of all stripes need to be paying close attention to this.

In this case, Matt Gemmell has some initial thoughts that are worth a quick read.

For those who have asked, this site runs on a total of 7 PHP pages. Index, search, and single serve the blog portion. Page, archives, and notes are special purpose pages. (Yes, that’s six pages and I said seven at the outset. One page is purely for my own in-house use, and I don’t want to give it away.)

archives.php
index.php
notes.php
page.php
search.php
single.php

To reduce server load and to increase load times into browsers, I have opted not to use separate footer and header php files. The design of the site doesn’t change enough to warrant keeping them as separate files.

My goal in this site is always to keep the infrastructure, and the data structures, as simple as possible.

Two quick notes this morning — in part to continue to hammer home the idea that the humanities continue to need to reframe our thinking in terms of the user experience:

The first is to point out that there is running, all this year, “52 weeks of UX.” Subscribe and you get an e-mail once a week.

The second is that the Y Combinator has just released its latest request for proposals and it’s all about the iPad:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things). Programmers may never want a computer they don’t control, but ordinary people just want something cheap that works. And that’s how the iPad will seem to them. Many will never make a conscious decision to switch. They’ll get an iPad as well, then find they use their Windows machine less and less. When it dies they won’t replace it.

Will this future happen? It could. And if it does it will bring big changes. There will need to be iPad alternatives for all the things people now do on PCs. That could mean more than just replacing all the desktop software, because there may be things PC users now do with web apps that might be better done with native iPad apps.

Plus like any new platform the iPad will allow new types of applications that don’t have any present day analogues. And no one knows now what most of them will be. Only people who become iPad developers will even think of these ideas, just as only microcomputer developers were in a position to think of the spreadsheet. Education and games may be areas where there are a lot of new ideas.

One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They’ll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn’t really count as a computer and thus can’t be vetoed by the IT department. Don’t worry about this; it’s just a little tablet computer.

All of us owe a huge debt of gratitude to Maida Owens and the Louisiana Folklife Program. She has single-handedly persevered in getting almost all the contents, at least the tables of such if not the content itself, of the entire run of the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany online. Later issues, like the two issues I edited on Cultural Catholicism and In the Wake of the Storms also have the articles available. (The contents are in chronological order with the oldest first, so those issues are toward the bottom of the page.)