Enhanced Editions found via James Hogwood

Intrigued by this. A multimedia iphone ebook app that lets you switch between text, audio and video without losing your place. It all looks beautifully seamless.

Despite the fact that I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks, I’m seriously tempted to give this a go.

But although I completely appreciate the amount of work that must go into producing this,  it still feels a bit pricey at £15. I’d pay that much for a hardback. But whenever there’s ever a book that I want so much that I buy the hardback, then I want the actual physical hardback rather than a digital version (if that makes any sense?).

If it were £9.99 I’d be playing with it now rather than writing about it. But then, as I say, I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks.

Saying that, Nick Cave is a brilliant one to launch with because…because it’s Nick Cave for chrissake. If there’s anyone I’m going to watch reading a novel, it’s him. Sod it, I’m going to do it.

Tags:   books · iphone · linkedin · Literature · technologyNo Comments.

http://noticin.gs/

A friend and his friend invented a game when they were young. I never played the game but I remember it involving a tennis ball (or a number of tennis balls), an oversized rag doll, and a series of spaces. I think you had to somehow manoeuvre  one or all of the balls to the doll.

There was a strict set of rules defining how the game should be played. Well, actually, the set of rules wasn’t very strict at all. Whenever a player did something that wasn’t in the rules, a new rule would be defined, named and added to the rulebook. Over the years the game evolved, becoming more and more complicated as the rulebook became larger.  By the time I discovered the game, only my friend and his friend knew the rules well enough to be able to play, but that didn’t really matter.

Which is to say that inventing games is good. And noticings is a good, simple  game, concocted by Tom Armitage and Tom Taylor.

All you have to do is take pictures of things you’ve noticed, geo-tag them and upload them to flickr tagged ‘noticings’. And that’s it. You get points for each noticing and bonus points  for noticing something near another player’s noticing. You now also get bonus points for being the first noticing in a particular neighbourhood. The game is evolving as the Toms get a feel for how the players are using it.

And of course it’s extra nice when your noticing gets noticed…

Tags:   flickr · games · linkedin · maps · photographyNo Comments.

• Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » John Moe: I Did Not Read Infinite Jest This Summer
  Just beautiful. Under the Delicious 'Recommended Tags' field below where I'm typing write now it just says, in lower case blue letters, 'life'.
  (tags: davidfosterwallace life)

Tags: No Comments.

• I'll take ideas for a thousand, Alex. – alexbogusky's posterous
  "When I look at this phenomenon and the qual ity of ideas that we’ve gotten from the crowd it’s a bit shocking, and, in some ways, scary. But any time something scares me it compels me to lean further into it."
  (tags: advertising crowdsourcing ideas)
• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful
  vg and true.
  (tags: visualization socialmedia technology twitter iphone)

Tags: No Comments.

• reMap
  stunning compendium of work from visualcomplexity.com via @bbhlabs
  (tags: visualization infographics design)
• Loopt Launches First Always-On, Location-Aware iPhone App – Hopefully Others Will Follow Soon
  (tags: iphone gps apps augmentedreality)

Tags: No Comments.

• Faltjahr 2010 – Ein Jahr. 12 Pop-ups.
  Just lovely. A pop-up calendar. I can't remember the last time I opened something that made me go 'oooh' that wasn't "designed by Apple in California". I think I'm craving physicality.
  (tags: design calendar popup visualization)
• noticings
  looks like fun
  (tags: flickr game photography)
• in Bb 2.0 – a collaborative music/spoken word project
  beautiful, beautiful, beauiful. via crackunit
  (tags: music youtube video art)

Tags: No Comments.

I love this.

A youtube-based homage of sorts to Terry Riley’s ‘In C‘.

The format is superb – multiple youtube movies as a multi-track mixer. And B flat is such a lovely maudlin scale.

Just don’t play it in the presence  of alligators.

I was thinking about doing a little musical thing using videos of the drawdio, various iphone apps and things, but foolishly I was going to edit them properly. This is so much more fun. So often someone does something brilliant online and you think: “I really wish I’d thought of that”, but it’s too late. It’s been done. Something like this is more like a platform that leaves plenty of scope to make other beautiful things in the same format…right?

(found via Crack Unit – and props to Iain for the youtube band idea)

Tags:   music · youtubeNo Comments.

• Visual Think Map – Exploring creative innovative modes of visual communication of information
  Wow. It's almost too rich a dish.
  (tags: visualization design infographics)

Tags: No Comments.

I’ve started a new tumblr thing which will be a home for all the social media and web futures links that have been filling up the blog on a daily basis.

I do this slightly wary of coming across as “another self proclaimed ‘social media expert’ twat“, but there you go. The shifting ways in which we communicate, how we can combine and recombine data to tell stories, and how we integrate online into the real world are all things I find interesting. And I want to keep all of the things I’ve read on those subjects in one place.

I’m aware that it’s very easy to think that your own online experience is a universal truth, which is why there’s a bit of suspicion when it comes to Social Media Expert Twats, and also why there are so many of them (um…us). Spend a bit of time on twitter and it’s easy to think that you ‘understand’ it and that you’re in a position explain it to everyone else.

Hopefully all the stuff collected on meltingman futures* will help to give a wider viewpoint.

*Crap name – liable to change without notice.

Tags:   future · meltingman · metablog · socialmedia · tumblrNo Comments.

• city one minutes
  via @brainpicker
  (tags: video culture travel cities film)

Tags: No Comments.