Brusheezy January 30, 2007
I know what I ain’t good at: creating Photoshop brushes. That don’t mean I don’t love’em though. Brusheezy is a repository of free brushes that real artists contribute to (mostly).
Bio-Bear January 27, 2007
Toy Bear + Biohazard Bag = A weird desktop. Today is my birthday - I feel old 
Nike/Blacker January 26, 2007
Busted shoes reborn. Maybe another desktop somebody will like.
“This Video Is Brought To You By…” January 25, 2007
Everyone’s favorite tool for mass voyeurism - YouTube - is starting to get sucked into the Google vortex. Google Video search results will now include Youtube videos as well.
This was bound to happen, but what I think is interesting here is the following from today’s announcement:
Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted. (emphasis added)
Google’s mama didn’t raise no dummy. They know that while the destination is fun and all, it’s all about the billboards on the way. Google relies on the search highway as your preferred path to these destinations.
But videos are an odd destination. We don’t really wake up with a hankering to view a ridiculous local TV ad or some obscure Finnish dance video. Instead, we find out about them from others whether through emails or chats that fly around or through social sites like Digg. In other words, viral videos have us skipping the search highway altogether and going straight to the content.
On top of that, sites like Digg and blogs everywhere just display the videos themselves. It’s partly why Youtube took off like it did: the videos are portable. So how does Google monetize all those videos out there? It may display ads for a few seconds before the actual video. It may pass along ads around the video player skin.
As the web breaks out of the browser and ends up in the form of many smaller pieces in the form of gadgets and widgets, web video is clearly the ultimate widget. Videos don’t require any sort of installation (thanks to Flash), a link is usually enough, and they can be dropped virtually anywhere. We’re already starting to see videos end up on phones and portable devices. Ultimately, for search engines like Google and Yahoo it’s going to be about somehow blending that ad model with more modular, discrete experiences.
It really is becoming a bite-size web.
Framing Software January 23, 2007
Software is frighteningly powerful today. With all that power comes the ability to really hand over all sorts of knobs and switches to users. Hey we built it, we may as well give the end users all that power right?
Wrong.
I use 37 Signals’ great little Backpack tool for to-do list reminders that I get via SMS and email. It’s a great tool and actually not overly complicated. Yet still, end users are still required to do some work to make it useful for themselves. In fact, the final step is a tricky one: formulating a useful usage pattern for yourself as a user. Remember, most end-users aren’t tech savvy or even care to be creative with how to “hack” software tool for their own purposes. People want a problem-solver out of the box.
Imagine, takemymedicine.com, built atop the Backpack engine that serves a single, very narrow, but very common purpose: it lets you know when it’s time to take your medicine. You can achieve this capability on Backpack with almost zero additional effort. In fact, to achieve this goal, some functionality gets shut off (e.g. the need to specify an exact date for a reminder). This is a good thing.
By framing the software to fit a real problem, you lift the burden of completing the puzzle for users. By applying constraints to what the software can do and by clearly conveying why the software exists in the first place, the purpose and goal become clearer. A less cluttered experience and a clearer purpose lead to a broader audience. My 50 year old aunt wouldn’t know what to do with Backpack. She may know what to do with takemymedicine.com. Less is more.
iConcertCal January 22, 2007
I may be late to the party on this one, but iConcertCal is damn sweet. It probes your iTunes library, pulls out the artists and sends them off to Pollstar to see who’s on tour. Then it plots them on a calendar. You heard me right.
Waste & The Natural World
After discovering Your Gallery, Charles Saatchi’s online platform for artists, we are interested to see how this rapidly growing resource is being tapped for exhibitions. Last week a group show called “Waste & The Natural World” opened in central London, featuring four international artists who all address environmental issues in their work and were hand-picked from the Your Gallery site. Curated by Rebecca Wilson from the Saatchi Gallery and Isabella Macpherson, director of arts programming at Adventure Ecology, the show is being held at The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology HQ, which is part of a larger organization founded to build public awareness about the environment. (Adventure Ecology emerged last year with a video game designed as a fun educational tool.)
The work exhibited in Waste & The Natural World includes painting, sculpture, photography and video. American artist Randy Wray (pictured right) “uses the debris leftover from his sculptures, paintings and discarded drawings to create new collages that explore contradictory impulses and ideas.” Claire Morgan (pictured left), from Northern Ireland, says of her work, “I use materials that display signs of excess or decay, and find myself contemplating issues relating to the “residues” that we as a society leave on the earth.”
Further exhibitions at The Gallery will show work created by artists who are embarking on Adventure Ecology field missions to some of the world”s most “environmentally trashed regions.” The first mission, code name: Toxico, is in Ecuador where artist Gabriel Orozco, photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and film maker Dustin Lynn will record their findings.
Waste & The Natural World 19 January-1 March 2007 The Gallery @ Adventure Ecology 125 Charing Cross Road London WC2H OEW tel. +44 (0) 20 7758 4717
Original Article syndicated via RSS from Cool Hunting
BB housekeeping: auto-loading Flash in our RSS feed
Xeni Jardin: Some Bloglines and Google newsreader users have written to us in recent days to complain that any BoingBoing posts which linked to Flash content (not embedded, but linked) would auto-play that Flash content (sometimes with seriously obnoxious sound). For the “web zen: barnyard zen” post, this meant that innocent BB readers were terrorized by the shrieking cries of kung fu bunnies, causing much pants-soilage over fears that PCs had been taken over by weird virii. We did some digging, and found that our RSS feed was configured in such a way that linked-to Flash content would sometimes auto-play even when there was *no Flash embedded* in the post (in the bunny incident, a jpeg linked to the Flash file). We”ve fixed that, and we”re very sorry for the annoyance!
Original Article syndicated via RSS from Boing Boing
Mini-comic of Cory’s Printcrime
Cory Doctorow: 
I”ve just uploaded a DIY mini-comic of my story “Printcrime,” which appears in my new short story collection, Overclocked. The mini was designed and illustrated by the talented illustrator Martin Cendreda, a former South Park animator whose new works include Dang! from Top Shelf Comix — a bitter and fantastic comic. The mini is published by Secret Headquarters, the best comic shop in LA.
To assemble the mini, download and print the PDF, then follow the directions included to fold it into a no-staple origami 8-page mini-comic — it”s all under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license — share it, tweak it, remix it, just don”t sell it. 4MB PDF
Original Article syndicated via RSS from Boing Boing
Pre-screened traveller program a boon to terrorists
Cory Doctorow:
CLEAR is a newly expanded TSA/private sector initiative that lets you pay $100 for a background check — if you pass it, you get to go through security faster. Bruce Schneier points out that this is a cost-effective way for terrorists to figure out if they’re under FBI investigation:
The truth is that whenever you create two paths through security — a high-security path and a low-security path — you have to assume that the bad guys will find a way to exploit the low-security path. It may be counterintuitive, but we are all safer if the people chosen for more thorough screening are truly random and not based on an error-filled database or a cursory background check.
I think of Clear as a $100 service that tells terrorists if the F.B.I. is on to them or not. Why in the world would we provide terrorists with this ability?
We don’t have to. Clear cardholders are not scrutinized less when they go through checkpoints, they’re scrutinized more efficiently. So why not get rid of the background checks altogether? We should all be able to walk into the airport, pay $10, and use the Clear lanes when it’s worth it to us.
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