American Madness

Josh posted about the excellent Ikea website set up right now with slow motion shots that allow you to travel through the frame a little while ago. Well, now we bring you a one-off from that.

Outside the US in, let’s say Sweden (just a guess from the test), they have another great site that allows you to go into “frozen rooms” and look around them… then travel through them, through an Ikea ‘portal’ into another “frozen” room.

Yes, we are aware that we are just propagating Ikea advertisements, but there is some clever advertising and marketing out there that deserves more attention. I would much rather bring your attention to good/clever work on the web rather then most of the other junk you see around the net.

WeFeelFine is a project I learned about at the Beautiful/Decay: Vis/Ed event last week.

To learn more about Jonathan Harris, the mind behind WeFeelFine you can watch a video of him talking about this project and his new project, Universe on CoolHunting. Anyway…

WeFeelFine is a project that… Well, actually, they have a really good description of what they are doing, so let’s let them say it in their own words:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

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Do you have awful neighbors? Maybe a slum lord managing your building? Feel like you have no recourse about the problems you are dealing with in your current situation? Well, that really kind of sucks. And this isn’t going to make things too much better for you, but it will help others from falling into the same situation you are in.

RottenNeighbors is a site that let’s you locate your apartment on a Google map, label it and write your problems with where you are, allowing other visitors to learn about the pitfalls of that seemingly perfect building they were considering renting in.

Gripes go from the paper thin walls and loud neighbors next-door to stolen grill components, homeless sleeping on the stoops and collapsing roofs. It even says on the site: “we are here to help you find and discover bad neighbors no matter where you are thinking about relocating.”

Of course it only works if you take part as well, the more people who write their stories on the site, the more neighborhoods are covered. There is even a blog that discusses different ways to deal with bad neighbors and advice on how to resolve problems with neighbors. Pretty interesting, well at least until your apartment is highlighted as an undesirable neighbor… So preempt that, go on their and write yourself up as being an excellent, caring neighbor, as oppossed to all those other bastards who live in your building.

Remember when I wrote about the armed robots patrolling the streets in Iraq? Well, it might be time to start worrying about those machines.

Here’s the deal: “Many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger.” Well, one of these robots, owned and operated by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), didn’t quite wait for a human to pull the trigger and started blasting away on its own.

During a shooting exercise, where they were using live ammo, an Oerlikon GDF-005, designed to take down airplanes and other small, low-flying air crafts, went out of control, firing “hundreds of high-explosive 0,5kg 35mm cannon shells” which killed 9 and injured 14 others.

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The human-controlled robot dances and interacts.

From http://beatbots.org:

Human social behavior shares much in common with dance. Our speech, as well as the movement of our body, head, and hands, is periodic and rhythmic. The goal of the BeatBots project is to develop robots that can interact with people by synchronizing with these social rhythms. We believe that rhythmic synchrony is as important for establishing engagement, rapport, and comfort between a robot and a person as it is between people.

My cousin recently sent me a link to geni.com, and I became addicted. It’s an interactive virtual family tree, and it rocks. The interface is extremely simple to use: you set up a profile, click on the pink or blue arrows to add parents, siblings, spouses, etc. And then you keep going.

So far my family tree has my dad’s entire family and most of my mom’s, from great-grand-parents and second cousins. I’m trying to branch out (hehe, branch) to my cousins’ families now, to see where we all end up.

The more people who join, the more chances we have of finding out that we’re all related. And as creepy a thought as that may be, I kind of want to see it.

I have a friend who, prior to getting his BlackBerry, was a huge fan of Jott.

We’d be out and I’d mention an event to him or something coming up and he would call Jott and have an email sent to himself to remind him about it.

Jott is like that personal assistant you wish you had. Basically you call the service, tell them who you want to Jott (you, of course, register all of this infoirmation oline before hand) and then just speak your message into the phone. Your message is then transcribed and emailed to which ever account you have registered. Jott yourself and when you get back home or back to work and check your email you have a message telling you to remember to pick up your Dry Cleaning today (well, if that is the message you sent yourself in the first place at least).

If you feel like you are always forgetting things and don’t have an assistant to keep you on the ball or a PDA well then Jott might just be a great idea for you. If you do have an assistant and are still forgetting hose important things, well then maybe it is time to start looking for a new assistant. Oh, did I mention that it is also currently free?

Ok, I came across this site and thought it was kind of neat*

Postcrossing is a project set up by some one who clearly likes to collect postcards from exotic locations without the hassle of actually traveling to them. Over 500,000 postcards have been sent so far, basically once you register you get a random address and ID number, you put the ID number on the postcard and then send it off to your addressee, in the meanwhile you will get a postcard as well. To keep it all good and make sure that everyone is sending and receiving the ID is entered into the database and identifies each postcard.

In a world were online social networking has become such a big deal and you haven’t actually met half the people on your Facebook page, it is kind of nice to get an actual piece of mail from a stranger. Also, it is probably nice to receive something in the mail other then a bill or a catalog, I can only assume as that is all I ever receive.

There is also that whole personalization aspect in that someone has taken the time to buy or print or otherwise create a postcard for you, at the least you can add some new artwork to your cubicle. I think I am going to go and sign up now.

*Yes, I use the word neat

I’ve been meaning to write a post about graffiti. It is one of those perennial hot topics. Give it some time and something will turn up about it (and usually New York City Councilman Peter Vallone will have something to say about it). Well, I actually have had two things pop up, neither one really worthy of a full post on its own, but combined…

Anyway, first up we have a class being taught at Parsons New School called “Geek Graffiti” it adds a high-tech slant to the old art form, turning your typical piece into a neon light show as it projects the tagging onto massive structures, in the end leaving no permanent marking or damage. Of course in typical fashion Peter Vallone had this to say “They want to study what the motivation is behind graffiti writers,” [he] fumed. “It’s vandalism, notoriety and gang communication. That is the motivation behind graffiti. No one needs a course to study it. This fascination with graffiti really needs to end.”

I know it is wishful thinking, but Vallone really needs to re-analyze his stance on graffiti. He needs to move beyond what graffiti was in the early 80s and realize it has a far deeper cultural relevance that goes beyond just notoriety and gang communication — that it has become a form of subservient protest and political expression that reaches beyond just gang culture. Of course it is also vandalism…

Oh and the project that was written about in the New York Post also earned the student an A, as the professor said that anyone who garnered media attention would automatically get one. The article is here.

Moving on-
Los Angeles has started a new initiative in their war on graffiti. In the past it has all been about painting over and covering up graffiti as soon as possible, but now they are using a system to track writers. Taking photos of their work using GPS cameras that track the date and time that the piece that is then loaded into a database allowing the police to have a listing of an artist’s work and file charges accordingly. Using this new system, the police busted two teens caught writing and fined them $22,000. So, if you are writing in LA, watch your back (The article from Reuters is here)

Next time I need to create an interactive web-based ad I am contacting 10mg.

Check their self promotional ad out and see if you can save Fred the Bunny