ambient

I know YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site on the web, but I’ve always liked the aesthetics, quality of content and privacy options found on Vimeo much better (beautiful site re-design, btw).

Anyways, I found this video today of music set to a magnetic ink print processing. The effect is out of this world.

Note: Vimeo - please fix your embedding functionality. It completely torqued my site.

If you’re into data visualization at all, and you’re not familiar with Information Architect’s continuing work on visualizing current web trends as a subway map, I highly recommend checking it out.  Beautiful is the word.

Boompaste is live.

I’ve been inspired by quite a few different takes on RSS and the best way for people to follow the buzz on the web.

Boompaste is designed to make it easy to do so. I’ve got a lot more planned for the site, and it’s barely finished started (with bugs and all) but I wanted to at least get it out there for my friends to see and use. I’m not heavily marketing it right now, because I’d like to see how it grows on its own.

If you think there are ways to make it better / more usable, just let me know.

Through a friend, my wife discovered Etsy. I’m sure it’s been around for awhile, but we just found it and we think it’s fantastic.

It lets artists / craftspeople market and sell their products without having to create their own website and figure out how to handle transactions, etc. The look and feel is clean and simple, and it’s a great way to start getting immediate traffic.

The site favors new users / listings so it enourages the prolific.

My wife, Kaoru, has had her own jewerly store online for a long but Etsy makes life so much easier that she is going to switch all of her operations over to Etsy. If you’re an artist, or you know one, there is tremendous potential here.

I watched a small protest march take place today in Mira Mesa. Mira Mesa is a suburban / office park wasteland. As I watched, I thought “how pointless.” There is no there there at which to protest.

This prompted three questions:

1. Do protests work anymore? Protests depend on disruption, and you need centrality (eg. a town square) in order to disrupt. Suburbs, by definition, are the opposite of centrality. I wonder if this is by design.

2. I sometimes wonder if the planners for the war in iraq actually counted on the insurgency to use as a training field for putting down urban protests. Without having been to Iraq, it’s hard to say. But my experience in other third-world countries does seem to support this hypothesis from an urban design perspective. Third world countries with no central infrastructure / town square are remarkably like the suburbs we live in today. Again, by design?

3. Does protest work in a country with lots of people, or does it all get lost in the static of every day life?

Not surprisingly, I’m nowhere near the first person to ask these questions. MIT has on their OpenCourseWare site a course entitled “Urban Design Politics.” In 2004, Jonathan Korman actually asked the exact same questions, and there is at least one book on the topic.