Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman is an interesting little Web 2.x tool that trolls public pages to look for you—or who you might be—and collates the available information into a pretty colored grid. Unless your name is truly unique, chances are there are lots of people out there who share it, and Personas includes them all. The results may be interesting…
There’s a certain amusing coincidence to the fact that this is post #404 on my blog so far…
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.
BBC – dot.Maggie: Google Buzz: A mea culpa.
Whether users will forgive this stumble is another thing. It will certainly take a while to live down and will continue to serve as a warning to all within the company when pushing products out the door.
New York Magazine’s Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? is an interesting tour of a new-ish and probably soon to be popular-ish Web site that engages visitors in anonymous instant webcam-based chatting—sort of like Skype on random dial, as it were.
The service sounds interesting and scary at the same time. As the author points out, the demographic is predictably young and hypersexualised (thanks, Tiger Woods) and graphic. Rejection stems from whatever the viewer’s prejudice or fetish drives. You can have “serious” conversations, but they’re quite rare.
You really need to see it to appreciate it: wordle.net.
Here’s an example from a post here on the Ministry of Cats:
“More than half of the 1.6 billion people who use the internet [sic] speak languages with non-Latin scripts.” Given the diversity of languages used around the world and on the Internet, it’s good that the domain name system is about to change.
My question is, will we see a proliferation of look-alike names now? Will there be an AOL.com where the first two letters are in Greek? It could be a phisher’s paradise, as well as the source of much grumbling from the microscopic minority who browse the Internet from the terminal screen only.
