randomosity

• Wel­ling­ton Grey
  (tags: blog charts chart comic com­ics web­log humour)
• ELECTRONIC RESEARCHER: INTRO
  (tags: research elec­tronic cam­era tech­nique)
• Dana Atch­ley | Next Exit | Digital Storytelling
  (tags: digital-storytelling storytelling digital Digit­al­Storytelling digital_storytelling)
• Baekdal.com — The Goal is Pretty Simple
  (tags: blog design usab­il­ity web­design web AJAX inspir­a­tion)

Rus­sos at Live­Journal pos­ted an abso­lutely exquis­ite set of pho­to­graphs (many HDR) of the deep under­ground in Moscow. Many relate to sub­way con­struc­tion, repair and aban­don­ment. Oth­ers seem to have deep sub­ter­ranean nat­ural cav­erns. Abso­lutely amaz­ing views of things we never see. Thanks for Eng­lishRus­sia for catch­ing these and doing some trans­la­tion so Eng­lish read­ers can appre­ci­ate what it is we are see­ing. By the way, unless you read Rus­sian (I will admit to not) use the Eng­lish Rus­sia link as it gives the full set as well. I am sure that they are avail­able on the Rus­sos site, but I can­not nav­ig­ate the Cyril­lic. There’s another set of pho­tos at Rus­sos which I don’t have trans­la­tion for and sense it might even be an aban­doned sta­tion. Inter­est­ing con­trast to the aban­doned TTC one that is expec­ted to draw crowds.

Read the com­plete article… »

• Fro­g­Pubs — Eng­lish Pubs in Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux
  (tags: paris Frog pub)
• News in Eng­lish, liv­ing in, mov­ing to, work­ing in Europe — Bel­gium, France, Ger­many, Neth­er­lands, Spain
  (tags: expat travel europe News Bel­gium France Ref­er­ence)

In my research into nine­teenth cen­tury Cana­dian drink­ing habits, I very quickly learned that the tem­per­ance folks had a spe­cial enmity for the cus­tom of treat­ing. The cru­sade against this spe­cial social prac­tise informed much of the pamph­let­eer­ing and peti­tion­ing of legis­lat­ive bod­ies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the mem­bers of group want to main­tain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on com­ing. It was often the exuber­ant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the aver­age Cana­dian. The warm sur­rounds of the tav­ern, the good com­pany of friends and the intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing influ­ence of alco­hol. The tem­per­ance folks figured that they might be able to some­how beat this cus­tom out of Cana­dian bar beha­viour. There are how­ever some cus­toms that simply do per­petu­ate and cer­tainly treat­ing is one of them.

So lets take that into the inter­net age…not con­strained by the need to be phys­ic­ally present, the Frog Pub chain has intro­duced TextToP­int. You can now pur­chase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your bud­dies and they can redeem it from their ‘gen­ial host.’ Bril­liant. Good for the pub. What will the tem­per­ance folks say???

• The Sound of Crick­ets Chirp­ing » Blog Archive » Timeline Archive View For Word­Press
  (tags: Word­Press timeline Plu­gin ajax javas­cript web doc­u­ment­a­tion)
• SUBWAY MAPS
  (tags: travel maps visu­al­iz­a­tion metro map sub­way ref­er­ence)
• Amadeus.net – the power behind your travel agency is now at your fin­ger­tips
  (tags: travel amadeus ticket air­line guide flights flight)
• Card­stacker Gal­lery
  (tags: Art cool cards fun archi­tec­ture gal­lery Pho­to­graphy)

I observed my first Smack­Shop­ping live inter­net game show today. Build­ing on the last minute bid­ding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of com­mit­ted pur­chasers, Jelly­Fish offers an intriguing experience.

As a semi-standard demand con­sol­id­ator, Jelly­Fish has agree­ments with a wide range of nor­mal retail­ers who con­tract to provide X amount of dis­count for bulk orders facil­it­ated by Jelly­Fish. Pur­chases earn the dis­count with is split 50/50 with the Jelly­Fish buyer. So there is a buy­ing incent­ive through Jelly­Fish. But what makes this fun???

Well, for peri­ods through­out the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Play­ers’ (any Jelly­Fish user) vote on par­tic­u­lar products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product dis­count increases until the fixed num­ber of units are sold. The game involves try­ing to be the last buyer in and there­fore get the highest dis­count before the deal is done. The top play­ers are then ranked and points are awar­ded based on the top ten fin­ish­ers. In addi­tion, observ­ers can guess at what the final dis­cout will be and get a chance to spin a vir­tual roul­ette wheel to win an addi­tional prize.

In the game that I observed, buy­ers were after a Play­Sta­tion 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% dis­count. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but pos­sible prizes ranged from a Wii, to vari­ous other elec­tronic doodads in the $250–500 range.

Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addict­ive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shop­ping. The idea of con­sol­id­at­ing demand and get­ting retail­ers to bid for your busi­ness has been explored using the net by a vari­ety of star­tups over the past few years. The inter­est­ing thing about Smack Shop­ping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pin­points that which makes the eBay exper­i­ence excit­ing and fun. The other aggreg­at­ors made their inten­tion to deliver shop­ping value clear, but per­haps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.

Lucky for me, Cana­dians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They prom­ise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many mer­chants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Cana­dians can use nor­mal Jelly Fish shop­ping, and determ­ine whether indi­vidual mer­chants will ship to Canada.

I have men­tioned the Exhibit pro­ject out of the Semantic Inter­op­er­ab­il­ity of Metadata and Inform­a­tion in unLike Envir­o­ments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline pro­ject was one that I imme­di­ately was inter­ested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and cre­ates a graph­ical anim­ated chro­no­lo­gical timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napo­leon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the res­ults. A couple months back they intro­duced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and effi­ciently dis­play a JSON data­set in a vari­ety of flex­ible formats includ­ing search­able tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:

Exhibit is a light­weight struc­tured data pub­lish­ing frame­work that lets you cre­ate web pages with sup­port for sort­ing, fil­ter­ing, and rich visu­al­iz­a­tions by writ­ing only HTML and option­ally some CSS and Javas­cript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for struc­tured data nor­mally pub­lished through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essen­tially removes the need for a data­base or a server side web applic­a­tion. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for every­one who has a little bit of know­ledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people eas­ily inter­act with them.

The beauty of this scheme is that it is a cli­ent side frame­work and approach­able by any­one wish­ing to share their data and requires little know­ledge of javas­cript or the like. Its quite robust and extens­ible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scat­ter­charts to the mix and the frame­work con­tin­ues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soli­cit­ing com­ments on users needs for future devel­op­ment. There’s a very act­ive devel­op­ment com­munity grow­ing around this product.

• Inter­act­ive Weather Map
  (tags: weather satel­lite mov­ing)

• File­Maker Pro 8.0 — File­Maker Pro Online Com­munity
  (tags: file­maker devel­op­ment)
• Census Resources
  (tags: census canada ccri)
• Home — Queen Street Com­mons
  A cool concept in world of social engin­eer­ing. Does it work? Ask Josh.
  (tags: com­munity com­mons local canada pei)
• The Core Club
  Cool as above, but in a dif­fer­ent way…beware elit­ism
  (tags: archi­tec­ture cre­at­ive soci­ety social net­work)

Ok. Who’s really tap­ping the reason why we fight?
Eng­lish Rus­sia, a per­en­nial source of high qual­ity com­ment­ary, pos­ted a Ukrain­ian Army recruit­ment ad. As I watched I was struck by the latest Cana­dian Armed Forces ad designed to pre­sum­ably accom­plish the same end. With a long dry period between recruit­ing ads, they’ve been show­ing up on Cana­dian TV with greater fre­quency as of late. They have taken a very ‘Cana­dian’ high brow approach: look how Cana­dian men and women are work­ing around the world to make it a bet­ter place. How well does this sell? At least the Ukrain­i­ans have found a blunt but hon­est approach: chicks dig men in a uni­form and very chic APC. Mind you the res­cued lass with the blanket wrapped around her is look­ing rather lov­ingly at her hero…