I love testing new social communities, as a way of seeing what features make such a network unique. I recently joined 3GB, the 1st Arabic social community network, and in it, you create a profile, smoothly upload a photo album, navigate through your friends albums within your profile, create a blog, join groups for discussions and so forth. What is unique so far is the possibility to chat within profiles, integrate your friends photo albums into your profile, and listen to a selection of music. The music player is great! The chat application is clean as it runs within the browser fast! It will be great to see this community grow.
A new social network is an opportunity. As someone interested in the web, and where applications on the web are going, when you join a network with 300 people on it, with interesting features and sort of a unique balance between the different features that separate it from the big current social networks, you’re diving into the emerging trends and possibilities of the online social world.
I have been asked to review this social network, but I will surely add it to my selection!
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Blog Jouons 
Saturday, April 12, 2008
A new social network!
Friday, April 11, 2008
A dystopian future for bloggers
I recently came across intense and surprising posts about friends-bloggers who got banned by Google for monetizing their site. Their electronic death is a disaster for them. Bloggers write digitally, they exist electronically, but their online creative efforts are real. I think Google should be more careful before shutting down a site. The ones who create a site are real, they are not computer algorithms, so a single algorithm should not be entitled to kill a human's joy! Anyhow, this made me think a little. Google search engine became pretty powerful.
Rumors say that selling/buying links ads (except the Google ads) ruins the natural ecosystem of the blogosphere and that Google penalizes users for doing so (by killing their internet existence). We all know advertisers only care for traffic and trend, but for some reason it indirectly increases their ranking as well and Google fights radically against this. As a blogger-publisher, Google does not warn you and just remove you from their index search as well as decrease drastically your pagerank up to zero. Because it has a almost-monopole on the internet, this resorts pretty much in the site's digital death. Surprisingly, I think Google does not measure the impact this can have on bloggers who actually care for their site/blog.
A useful analogy is to imagine that you worked hard to create a physical business that exists in the real world and that you communicate with some customers with Fedex and other customers with DHL. One day you wake up to find that your physical business has been relocated to Siberia and all because the Fedex guys found out that you use DHL to conduct business with some of your customers. The role of Google is as an intermediary that facilitates business as a service and intermediaries should not be involved with security and policy because of conflict of interest.
I kind of see the point of Google's need for better quality on the blogosphere. However should radical methods like electronic death be tolerated?
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Blog Jouons
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Gesture and shape define the state of an object
Switch by Radi Designers.
Gesture and shape both change the reading and functioning of the object; to cut the power one needs to break the object to interrupt the wire continuity on which it is integrated. It is the shape of the switch that makes sense as much as the sensation of breaking. The gesture is reversible and the switch takes two shapes: straight or bent to define the states: open or close -the usual schematic representations.
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Blog Jouons
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
DNA, this little monster
Following up on my post about the obsession for the future of human identification via DNA, interaction designers interrogate the influence of DNA analysis on dating. How will dating change when DNA analysis can reveal the presence of undesirable genes?
Doll Illustrations by Abake
Evidence Dolls, created by Fiona Raby, are hypothetical products sold in a fictional shopping mall called Bioland.
The Dolls were commissioned by the Pompidou Centre for the D-Day exhibition in 2005. The project consists of one hundred specially designed dolls used to provoke discussion amongst a group of young single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. The Dolls come in three versions based on penis size (small, medium and large). A black indelible marker allows women to note down interesting characteristics of their lover. Hair, toenail clippings, saliva, and sperm can be collected and stored in the penis drawer. Four single women told us about their lovers -- past, present and imagined, and speculated on the implications of DNA on dating in the future.
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure.............................................................................................
Blog Jouons
Blog Maison Blog Passion
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Helvetica has gone wild
Can Helvetica drop? Someone had to imagine it. Dropclock does it via a motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy helvetica dropping into water in slow motion. Thank you fat-man-collective!
Video
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Blog Jouons
Friday, April 04, 2008
Personal Genome Card
The future of human identification
Daniel Gross and Joris Maltha visualization designers at Catalog Tree conceived a personal genome card, a tribute to Gattaca where a genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one!
Design for a personal DNA card, commissioned by SEED magazine, New York. A fingerprint is generated from the 13 core loci as used by the FBI for human identification. In collaboration with Lutz Issler (line script).
Anticipating a future in which we can learn to read our genome like a book, Seed commissioned Catalogtree to design a Personal Genome Card: a place where an individual's genetic information could be easily referenced. To use Catalogtree's card, the bearer would speak into a small microphone and ask a yes-or-no question. The card would analyze the remotely stored genome to come up with an answer. It would then change color: Red signifies a pure "yes," yellow means "no," and colors in between show varying levels of uncertainty. As we get better at interpreting the human genome, Catalogtree notes, more questions will be answered with a higher degree of confidence.
The front of the card bears a unique visual pattern derived from the 13 chromosomal loci, or chromosomal positions, used in genetic profiling. The profiling process exploits short tandem repeats — variations in the number of times a short sequence of base pairs is repeated in a person's DNA. Two unrelated humans usually have a different number of repeats at a given locus. This structure is translated to a series of circles; different diameters are used for different bases. The circles are dropped into a container, and a line is drawn through their centers, creating an individualized drawing on every card.
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Body Mnemonics
Media Lab just had an Open House and my adviser offered me to present in the auditorium my latest research! I was so thrilled. I also demoed Picture This! during the Open House.
I had fascinating discussions with sponsors, very engaging, challenging and all of it relevant to our common explorations for new interactions design with current technologies. Researching on gesture interfaces, and new meaning for gesture interaction, i.e gestures that have a meaning to retrieve or interact with data, I regularly refer to Body Mnemonics project by Jussi Angesleva, who was researcher with me at the mythical Media Lab Europe in Ireland.
I realized I never blogged about this work; it is a really cool project, and pioneer in its vision.
Body mnemonics is a meta tool for portable devices that enhances their usability, shifts the interaction to the periphery of our concentration and makes them more responsive to our cultural background on the basis of three principles: proprioceptic sense, body image, and the "method of loci" mnemonic device.
Joelle Bitton (also MLE ex-fellow) showing her data storage locations!
Using inertial sensing a portable device's movements in 3D space can be tracked, analysed and referenced to the posture of the user. This enables a user to store and access information on his or her own body space. For example, online banking information could be accessed by moving the device to your back pocket. Similarly, your music archive could be located at your ear.
More on the web site !
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure.............................................................................................
Blog Jouons
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Whisper of eight turned on pistol grip megaphones.
Whisper by Miguel Monroy
The pistol grip megaphones are usually qualified by their "power". Loud and noisy, they are a sign of emergency. Here, Miguel Monroy renders them soft, almost whispering. They are located carefully, adjacent to one another so that the feedback of the same pistols homogenize the overall sound.
Listen to the piece ->here <-. Beautiful piece.
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Blog Jouons
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Absolut
Absolut Quartet ad, shot by Laurent Seroussi and designed by TBWA.
Jeff did it again. We followed his adventures right after he won the competition. Now he completed the proposal and currently exhibits his spectacular robotic work. Music and vodka works in pair and this time beautiful mechanics come into play. Jeff Liebermann and Dan Paluska worked together on Absolut Quartet.
Closeup of some of the 100 custom electronics boards fabricated, one for every note.
Absolut Quartet, a commission for the Absolut Visionaries project, is a music making machine like no other. The audience becomes part of the performance, while watching something that appears impossible. You can log in to ABSOLUTMACHINES.COM for a chance to interact with the machine. You will enter a 4-8 second theme, and the machine will generate, in real-time, a unique musical piece based on the input melody you have provided.
The marimba shooting mechanisms and closeup of the wine players. Photo by Sesse Lind.
You will see this melody played by three instruments. The main instrument is a ballistic marimba, which launches rubber balls roughly 2m into the air, precisely aimed to bounce off of 42 chromatic wooden keys. The second instrument is an array of 35 custom-tuned wine glasses, played by robotic fingers. Finally, an array of 9 ethnic percussion instruments rounds out the ensemble.
Video
Untitled Sound Objects (Installations 2005-2008) by Pe Lang + Zimoun from Pe Lang + Zimoun on Vimeo.
Don't forget to check the sound machines by Pe Lang and Zimoun, and by Festo.
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Blog Jouons
April fool, the USB pregnancy Test
Jonah sent me this April fool! So happy first of April to you all!!! I'd love hanging tiny fishes in your back, but because we are on a blog here, I will just propose this very nice High Tech Pregnancy Test! What can the digital do with my no-tech data? Like a little fish in the water, this pregnancy test can be plug in to your ipod. Wait, no. Your iChat! so you can update your friends instantly about your status. Be careful to select the right end of the test, other than that it is pretty straightforward.
The power from your USB port starts the electrospray ionization process, creating a spectrograph of the various masses for your analysis (...) The mass spectrometry software on the device comes with several sequenced hormones, including hCG (human Chorionic Gonadotropin), hCG-H (hyperglycosylated hCG - for detection before your first missed period), and LH (luteinizing hormone - for detection of your most fertile days). We like the fact that it does all three (...) While most home tests can detect a level of 15-50 mIU/mL of hCG, the enhanced methodology of the USB Pregnancy Test Kit can detect 5-50 mIU/mL, and will show you the exact concentration via its friendly onscreen interface. In addition, the LCD display on the device itself will light up and show you the symbol of a baby, no baby, or multiples and your Estimated Delivery Date based on the concentration of hCG, hCG-H, and LH in your urine - ThinkGeek
Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure.............................................................................................
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