Well, ok probably not, but its local and might be a good piss-up: The UK Webloggers Xmas Party is round the corner on Saturday. And of course we can discuss who will win the Guardian blog prizes. Yeah, right. But I did enter under best designed, so you never know your luck eh? I wonder if I should also vie for worst behaved blogger? Hehehe…
Update: Didn’t make it. Too worn out form the previous 24 hours of bad behaviour. One isn’t as young or rich as one used to be…
Discussing with a friend about creating lists, cataloguing collections of objects and codifying we came up with an interesting idea. When it comes to lists of visual ‘things’, the winners of largest and most abstract could surely be Pantone. How about we go about turning that giant abstract list into a resource on the semantic web. What happens when you describe the emotional response of colours in a machine readable form? You get FOAC – Feel Of A Colour, amongst other things. Lets explore them here.
If we had a mechanism that a designer could use to add emotional and conceptual metadata to visual content we could begin to use this content in new and interesting ways.
The first example would be to ensure the brand and feeling of website imagery become a constant and calibrated transmission, direct from designer to viewer. How do we do this? Doesn’t everyone see colour slightly differently? Is this purely based on physical differences such as colour-blindness, or are there additional factors? Does the light in the place you grew up affect your perception of colour? Could it be that the subdued light of the North give a heightened sense of colour where there is only subtle shades? Does growing up in the brilliant, bright light of Sydney or California affect how you see, react and apply meaning to colour?
If we can begin to answer questions like that we can start to create a more individual set of codes to balance the viewing of content. This could just be an extension to a users profile or description (a FOAF file, for example) and local electronic data such as ambient light, white balance, monitor calibration could be picked up from the receiver.
When we combine this with the Emotone (the company Pantone really should be thinking about becoming after all) set of emotional data attached to the content, along with specific designer coded notes, we can try and alter our image slightly to ensure the emotional response of the user matches the original intention.
I’ll go further in a future post and describe how this Feel Of A Colour data can be used in all sorts of useful ways.
Now this completely surprised me today – essentially CNET has aquired MP3.com. This would be reasonable and logical were it to be as that reads. But in reality CNET is only buying the MP3.com name, I assume some staff and tech, and ditching the thriving musical community which currently makes up the site.
Ever since MP3.com tried (cleverly I thought) to get around old world legal boundaries and introduce their space-shifting distributed CD collection they have been looking at some wway to leverage their brand. The space-shifting got legally stomped on, but undeterred they made a brilliant move for unsigned and hobby musicians. The wide ranging (and varying quality) of this has got to be seen as a ‘good thing’ and some musicians (including a friend of mine) actually made some money off this.
Considering this is all ending, to be replaced with Yet Another DRM’d music service astonishes me. Does CNET not have the nouse to build an online music store? Of course they do. Do they really need the MP3.com brand name? Hardly – they aren’t even going to be shifting MP3′s. This rush by so many players to grab the non-existent prize of the ultimate music store is looking like Yet Another DotCom Mirage from here, with the opportunity to lose an awful lot of cash. While P2P works, evolves and grows and I can still rip a CD (even old school audio out to audio in) there will be music trading. Like I’ve said since 1997, “deal with it, build a model around it or die”.
Links: [MP3.com] [the reg] [slashdot]
I went to the Michel Gondry retrospective tonight, as part of theResfest festival at the NFT. It was great (obviously) to see his stuff in such a complete and cronological presentation.
Especially nice was the inclusion of a few tests and experiments which really helped reveal some of the creative process. With Gondry’s work so much of the execution relies on taking risks and trying out new techniques. Looking forward to the DVD set by Res, with Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham too. Hopefully these have even more of these bits and pieces, along with interviews. Amazon wishlist where are you?
I mean really, how much of a sad git do you have to be to go to the length of complaining about a typically advertising claim such as Apple’s Power Mac G5 claimed to be “the world’s fastest, most powerful personal computer”. Well duh, it’s advertising. Do you thing new Fritz really washes your clothes whiter than old Blutz?
A whopping 8 viewers complained, Billy Gates fan boys each one. I assume Jack Schofield at the Guardian was one?
Television Advertising Complaints Report
Shouldn’t these guys be doing more about blatant sexism and ageist stereotypes in advertising? No? Oh…
After a bit of a premature opening, I’ve spent the past couple of days mired in CSS cross-browser and OS fiddling about and the bunker is now open. “What’s different?” you may ask – well you would if you looked at it on a mac. Discovered to my horror it looked pretty pants on windows. Bah! And it broke down *very* ungracefully in older, less well behaved browsers (I’m looking at you, Netscape).
All fixed now though (well 99%) and really having mixed feelings about this CSS business. In theory fantastic, but the support is so flakey in parts that you end up doing the usual dodge and shuffle making changes and testing all the time. Wasn’t this supposed to be a bright new dawn where we didn’t have to use sneaky tricks and hacks? Bah! Still, I’m trying to stick to the spirit of the new republic, but it’s hard giving up your TD tags.
Don’t miss the spacer.gif’s though – they were always a pain in the ass.
update: still wonky in win/ie5. arrrrrgh!
So i got mildly slashdotted jones-dotted today, which is nice. Would have been nice to finish the site first mind, but whatever. I still have an awful lot to do on this site yet, most of it browser support and CSS control freakery tweakery. Oh, and I guess some testing on windows wouldn’t go amiss. To Do: other templates, the accessibility thang down there, top level nav.
Ah, another thing to put on the list of OSX “must never do that”: changing the size of partitons when you’ve got data *in them*. I remember doing it a long time ago in the days of SCSI and 2Gb drives, but this was hairier. I was getting my 1Gb Swapfile partiton completely full at times (driving it hard, but even so…) so decided to give it a bit more elbowroom. A dash of imaging and moving about and all sorted again, with that potentially heartstopping moment of resizing passing with ease.
This helped: FWB Partition Toolkit but will only reduce partion sizes, so not perfect.
This struck me as a really nice example of something I haven’t seen done properly yet. Create your mix (from a great set of mutlitrack audio), save it and then proceed to see and listen to many other peoples mixes from around the world. Fabulous.
Must remember to revisit the old razorfish soundlab source files and see if i have anything suitable to try this out with. If not, its a nice excuse to play with reason.
Link: Host presents a nice thing from Limone to promote Liberated Theatre
