This idea suddenly occurred to me the other day. Instead of building marshmallow “people” from scratch, these halloween marshmallow peeps seemed to be a perfect fit.

I used blue food coloring to make a “blue collar” on the very white (Delaware?) ghost for Joe Binden.

The jack-o-lanterns with a little dark food coloring for square eyeglasses seemed a natural fit for Palin with the rumors of her tanning bed, and perhaps a little empty-headed.

This course surveys Knowledge Management systems that enable the access and coordination of knowledge assets. Technologies reviewed will include intranets, groupware, weblogs, instant messaging, content management systems and email in both individual and organizational contexts. Students will use these KM technologies, review case studies, research methods of knowledge organization and analyze and design KM processes and systems.

The course is chock full of fun topics including:

• Knowledge Management
• Collaborative Work
• Email
• Personal Information Management
• Personal Knowledge Management (if there is such a thing)
• Intranets, Portals and Organizational Knowledge
• Networked, Dynamic Collaboration
• Collaborative Filtering & Recommender Systems
• WiFi, UbiComp & Smart Mobs

Of course, we have a class blog too: Knowledge Management Systems @UTexas

This course approaches understanding Semantic Web technologies from three perspectives:

• Top-down, theoretical approaches to organizing semantic information including ontologies, taxonomies, knowledge representation and software agents.
• Bottom-up approaches, sometimes called “emergent semantics” or “the lower case ‘S’ semantic web”, for understanding and creating networked information including XML-based solutions including RDF, XPath and RSS. Also included are smaller, informal systems for organizing Web information including tagging (social bookmarking), microformats and other specific markup and distribution systems.
• Application approaches focusing on Web Services or “Web 2.0″ functionality including distributed (client and server) application design, syndication, Application Programming Interfaces, remote databases and “mash-ups”.

Of course, we have a class blog too: Semantic Web Technologies Blog.

Crayon Physics Deluxe
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a sequel to the popular freeware game Crayon Physics. Or you can think of it as the game I would have created if I would have had more than 7 days to do it. Way more than 7 days. More like 7 months or 17 months.

Anyway Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

Watch the video:

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

(Ah, SQL92, you’ve been so good to us with your dynamic query execs.)

The Information Architecture Summit is the premier gathering place for those interested in information architecture. The 2007 IA Summit attracted over 570 attendees, including beginners, experienced IAs, and people from a range of related fields.

The 2008 theme of “Experiencing Information” shifts the focus back to users. A user experience exists only to allow people to “do things” (in the broadest sense … buying books, sharing photos with friends, looking something up on wikipedia, etc).

Call for Proposals

The summit is a great opportunity to share your experience and thoughts on a topic you feel passionate about - and for the first time - presenters will receive complimentary registration! (to keep costs manageable one complimentary registration will be given to each regular session slot and panel moderator/organizer).

Proposals for the following are due October 31, 2007:

• Presentations
• Panels
• Posters
• Management Track
• Pre-conference workshops

Submissions of peer-reviewed Research Papers are due November 30, 2007.

(Note that I’m a member of the IAI Advisory Board and will be a reviewer for Proposal and Research Papers. If you have any questions about the proposal process, the IA Summit or the Information Architecture Institute just ask.)

The Information Architecture Institute (IAI) will award two USD $1,000 Progress Grants for 2007. The purpose of the program is twofold:

• to encourage researchers and practitioners to investigate IA-specific issues
• to publicize useful work that furthers the information architecture body of knowledge

Applications should propose work that will forward the theory and practice of information architecture. This can include original research, a synthesis of important existing research, or the development of an innovative new technique.

The IAI Progress Grant Committee will review the proposals and select those with the highest potential to benefit the information architecture field. Half of the grant amount will be awarded when the grant recipients are announced and half when the work is completed. Progress grants will only be awarded to proposals of sufficient quality, clarity, and originality.

Work supported through this program will be published on the iainstitute.org website, but it should have relevance beyond the Tools and Library collections. For instance, the work could inform future IAI workshop curricula, tie in with potential Institute publishing projects, be responsive to issues raised by members in the email discussion list, or support other Institute activities, such as Local Groups and International initiatives.

The application deadline for applying is October 15, 2007

Applications should be 2,000 words or fewer and must contain:

• Description of the problem or hypothesis
• Methodology to be used
• Explanation of how the resulting work will forward the theory or practice of IA
• Conditions under which others can use the results (e.g. Creative Commons license)

(Note that I’m on the Awards Jury Committee for this grant.)

Learn more about the Information Architecture 2007 Progress Grants now.

PowerPoint prototypes are a great way to show someone how the flow of an interaction might work and even better, you can send them the .ppt file to view before or after your demo, not to mention ensuring that almost everyone you work with could (if you want them to) contribute to the PowerPoint deck since the application is nearly ubiquitous.

As an aside, I’m always a bit impressed with the ingenuity of people who live in one application for everything, and PP certainly can let you do that. I’ve known many people that use PP for note taking, article reviewing (guilty!) and of course outlining (it’s better than Microsoft Word). However, this is nothing compared to the people who used to live in Lotus 123 including writing memos and even formatting floppies. (Ah, floppy disks.)

Weird bit: some of the antennas are still analog. Oh my.

Well, to me.

Here’s the abstract for the paper:

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

I’m also making it available to download: Turnbull, Don (2007) Rating, Voting & Ranking: Designing for Collaboration & Consensus. Works-in-Progress Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference. San Jose, CA. May 2, 2007.

What’s your guess?

Update: Since there are 7,704 photos with the chi2006 tag, I may be underestimating.

Update on the Update: As of May 29, there are 3,341 photos with the chi2007 tag.

Here’s the blurb from the project’s Web page:

“What would 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound and look like?”… Listening Post analyzes all the text—typed just moments ago—by tens of thousands of people in Internet chat rooms around the world. It presents them as six different “movements,” combining musical tones, sound effects, synthesized voice, and scrolling text. For example, in the first movement, Listening Post monitors and displays a randomly typed text beginning with “I am.” It then searches the Internet for related phrases, creating a simultaneously funny, sad, nonsensical, pathetic, yearning, quotidian, and ultimately mesmerizing tonal poem of identity in the Internet age.

For centuries, the soaring buttresses, vaulted ceilings, and luminous stained glass of cathedrals, along with hymns and chants, have transmitted that which is beyond expression. Using algorithms, software, and data mining, Listening Post generates a similar experience around what sometimes seems beyond comprehension.

It’s quite an experience with seven “movements” that range from ideas like Wave Cycle, Topic Cluster and I Am (I Like/I Love) where text from the messages floats, drifts or cycles across the many small LED screens in sync with some Philip Glass-like music.

The exhibit runs Saturday, June 3, 2006 through Sunday, May 20, 2007, so hurry up and take a look while it’s still there.

All those questions (and more) can now be (mostly) answered by the man himself, Red Wassenich, who did in fact come up with the saying as an offhand remark when he called in to a local radio station.

Now Red has a book chock full of Austin and Weirdness: Keep Austin Weird: A Guide to the Odd Side of Town, by Schiffer Publishing.

Some friends had a signing party for Red’s book and I got to attend. Here’s a picture of Red in action:

Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification upon which all subsequent natural history has been built. This Nature web focus brings together a range of material celebrating the tercentenary of his birth in 1707, including features on how the explosion of genetic data changes the way we look at taxonomy, and the conflict between professionals and amateurs when naming species. There are also commentaries by leading taxonomists on the future of their field, articles on Linnaeus’s global network of contacts and even his lost and lamented pet raccoon, original research on the origin of flowering plants and a review on speciation - the first of several such articles to be published this year, which will be added to the web focus over time along with other coverage.

The issue is behind a paywall. How would Linnaeus classify that?

As you may remember, I was at the kick-off reception for the video game archive a while back and think it holds great promise for insights into the history of video game development, design methods for future designers and possibly some fun too.

SI MSI Degree: Social Computing Graduate Program:

Social Computing (SC) Specialization

Social computing, including online communities, social networking, and user contributed content, has been the darling of Silicon Valley for the past several years. It has also gained currency in library circles, as venues such as library Web sites incorporate blogging features and sites such as LibraryThing bring recommender technologies to personal book collections.

SI faculty have been leaders in inventing and analyzing many of the underlying techniques that have powered the rise of social computing:

• Recommender systems
• Reputation systems
• Prediction markets
• Social network analysis
• Online communities
• Computer-supported cooperative work

Students pursuing a specialization in Social Computing learn to analyze online social interactions, both in online communities and in more diffuse social networks. They learn about features of social computing technologies so they can recognize opportunities to put them to use in new settings and make good choices about alternative implementations.

Technorati Tags: internet

Goodbye Spotlight?

Don is a favorite writer-director-actor from Toronto. You’re a fool if you don’t watch some his work including:

• The Red Violin: tracking a violin’s path through history with Samuel L. Jackson (but no snakes or planes), a child prodigy, a Chinese musician in the era of Cultural Revolution and a love-triangle including the violin itself.
• Last Night: an unusual “end of the world” movie with a small role by David Cronenberg as a dedicated power company employee dealing with the destruction of the planet in the only way he knows how - by thanking all of his customers (how Canadian)
• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould : wonderful and insightful and you get to learn what Glenn Gould might eat for lunch.
• Twitch City: which recently came out on DVD and captures slacker Toronto, in the Kingston Market area perfectly. Watch this now.

• South by SouthWest Interactive (sxswi) = Velma
• South by SouthWest Film = Fred
• South by SouthWest Music = Shaggy

You’re welcome.

Sell SBUX now?

Well, it’s that time of year again, the annual Austin area Information Architects and UT ASIS&T chapter pre-pre-SXSWi Meetup and Happy Hour(s) tonight, Thursday March 8th. If you’re a Web geek, blogger, designer or just about anything else you’re welcome to join us.

We’ll be there tonight from 5-7 at the Cedar Door, which is at 201 Brazos Street. (Map to the Cedar Door ) Lots of Austinites will be there to happily advise out-of-towners on all things SXSWi, Austin, BBQ and so on. (Lots of Austinites will be arguing amongst themselves about SXSWi, Austin and BBQ too.)

Come on by!

http://upcoming.org/event/157945/

Put two fingers on your trackpad, keep them there and click the trackpad button. This emulates a “right-click” and opens the contextual menu in most applications that have one.

Technorati Tags: mac

As you might imagine, getting about 50 freewheeling game designers together can be pretty entertaining but Bill Bottorff (from Austin Business Computers, Inc.) and Don Carleton (from the Center for American History) kept the event going.

One issue discussed was the preservation of video game ephemera and digital assets related to the history of the game industry. Richard Garriott (pictured below) talked about his history in video games and even brought a few items for show and tell.

Among some of the items for show and tell are one of Garriott’s original Apple computers that he used to develop many games (he has a running one in his office to this day) and the roll of paper tape on top of the Apple is a working copy of his first game Dungeons and Dragons I.

George Sanger also spoke, played some recorded music and was very entertaining, if not a bit surreal.

George passed around some his personal keepsakes, including this test cartridge from the Son of M.U.L.E. game. (I fondly remember M.U.L.E. myself, it’s probably one of the best games I ever played.)

It’s hoped that this is the first of many initiatives between UT Austin and the the video game community, look for more information in the future.

Can the Internet Save Democracy?

Here’s his blurb:

We’ve been through a few election cycles in which the Internet played an important part. What have we learned? Beyond being a fund-raising tool, has the Internet changed anything important about elections, politics or governance? Will it? Does the connectedness of the Net promise an invigorated democracy? Or more of the same? Or a polarized electorate? David Weinberger of the Berkman Center will present a discussion opener on this topic, to be followed by an invigorating—or polarizing?—discussion.

David says: “ I’ll probably open the discussion trying to stay as far away from facts and reality as I can”, so with that in mind I’ll provide my quip:

The internet IS democracy.

The internet is an open-ended discussion, where anyone (with access) can participate on almost equal footing and the best ideas (usually) win out. (You vote with your clicks?) Sure, it’s not perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill said “the internet is the worst form of government except for all the others”.

Technorati Tags: internet

Almost everyone I know in Austin is logged on to AOL Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk and Microsoft Messenger.

Ah, internet people, weather does affect us.

(I predict a winter-related rise in Austin blogging today.)

Technorati Tags: austin, blogging

From the Austinist: Scenes from a Snuff(leupagus) Film

Oh, please - someone develop a special strain of Ebola for Elmo only next.