Shaping Things…

Footnote: “Access” Millions of Original Documents

This is a fascinating idea with a dark cloud. These guys have made a deal with the National Archives to provide online access to some 4.5 million primary source documents with a Flash/AJAX-based image browser/annotator. If it ended there it would be interesting, but they’ve added the ability for people to flag certain parts of documents and annotate them for transcription, names of people, dates, and locations. These annotations can be searched and become context to the document, forming an invisible army of annotators and transcribers. The problem is money. Aside from a couple of documents, all the images I was looking for were “premium content” and cost $9.99 per month. Granted, the Archives are open to this access from anyone, but I feel funny about paying for government resources, twice.
http://www.footnote.com/

S3 Browser

An open-source browser to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) has been released. The Mac-based browser makes is easy to upload, download, and browse “buckets” of information stored. Amazon S3 is a service provided by Amazon designed to provide high performance, easy to use and low-cost database online storage. They charge no upfront fees and charge by the amount of data stored ($0.15/GM per month and $0.20/GM of data transferred). Data is accessed through REST and SOAP web service protocols.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3

Microsoft’s Grava Educational Software SDK/Toolset

Microsoft will release a platform this coming fall that will supposedly make it easier for non-programmers to develop educational software. Grava was jointly developed with ETS will enable media-rich interactive programs in Windows, and smells suspiciously like a “Flash-killer.” It is based on the new GUI maker embedded in the new Vista programming SDK and in .NET that is miles beyond Microsoft’s traditional application development tools in terms of ease of use.
https://connect.microsoft.com/Grava
www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6816

The Ad Generator

For his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design, Alexis Lloyd confirmed my suspicion that advertisers pull most advertising concepts from their derrières. His Ad Generator remixes and randomizes real corporate slogans into seemingly meaningful new slogans coupled with images pulled automatically from Flickr. Very entertaining. The show is different each time you view it.
http://www.theadgenerator.org/

Zoho Notebook

The maker of a whole suite of online office-like tools, Zoho, has previewed an interesting new member to their ensemble. Zoho Notebook is kinda like Google Notebook meets Microsoft OneNote, an interactive online scrapbook to store and share with people. It stores a variety of different media types (audio, video, text, RSS, links, etc.) and promises to use RSS in interesting ways to collaborate. The Zoho suite is pretty good, mainly free, and worth looking into.
www.zoho.com/notebook

Harvard Business Review 2007 Breakthrough Ideas

Harvard Business Review has an interesting article containing essays by technoratis Clay Shirky, Duncan Watts, Michael Schrage, Linda Stone, Dave Weineberger, and Eric von Hippel. They pontificate about emerging ideas in a variety of fields. The article is free until Feb 6th.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0702/article/R0702A.jhtml;jsessionid=0JB2ELYCIQCKWAKRGWDSELQBKE0YIISW?type=F#section20

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Audio of the Week

The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More

. Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz gives an engaging talk about his book that questions the American value that the more choices we have, the better off and happier we are. The book is great too.
54 minute Presentation at the 2004 Pop!Tech Conference
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail252.html
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom (book)

Book of the Week

Shaping Things (2006) by Bruce Sterling. A thoughtful little book about design and the nature of human-created objects in our world, Shaping Things looks at the roles of objects, their makers, and their impact on the world. www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262693267/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill