If you never managed to get an invite to Ffffound!, then try I ? IT which is open to all. I haven’t played with it much but it appears to be much the same, even with a lot of the same graphics and ladies, although it brings in tagging and more of a social networking aspect. I’m not sure if I like that, I felt quite liberated by Ffffound!, not having to slavishly tag everything, but at least with I ? IT you’ve got a half decent chance of finding something again in the future…

Yes that’s right, the rumours have been proved true, Flickr now does video. At the moment it’s for Pro users only but someone at Flickr has obviously decided they can give YouTube a run for their money. Let’s hope the quality stays high and it becomes a source of interesting footage rather than Jackass style japes and high school student miming…

Check out the Flickr blog for more info and check out the group to watch some.

Download the PicLens plugin for Firefox and take your image searching full screen. A small button gets added to your browser bar and when you click it you get a beautiful fullscreen wall of the images on that page. You can even image search directly from PicLens by typing in the search field. The results get added to the wall as they download, making an ever growing scrolling display which is fun to play with even if it doesn’t return what you’re after…

I just found out about the Web2DNA Art Project, which will analyse any website and create an image of it’s ‘DNA’:

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.

H1 is brighter than H2, which is brighter than H3.
TABLE is brighter than TR, which is brighter than TD tags.
Images and flash elements appear as 70% white.
New HTML tags like STRONG and EM is brighter than older ones like B and I
UL, OL and DL is brighter than their LI, DT, DD
DIV layout is brighter than table layout

Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

The image above is of this site, but you can try it with any URL. For some reason though, it doesn’t work in Firefox…

Thanks to Martin for the link…

I just saw this over at Wired. It’s a great explanation of the complexities of the web, and how blogs work for the slightly less technical minded such as myself. It shows just how far your words can go and just how extensive the data machine behind the web really is. It’s presented in a nice way too.

I also checked out Matthew Hurst’s own site, where there are some lovely visualisations of the ‘blogosphere’ making the intangible tangible. Well, in an intangible kind of way…

Found this great visual trace tool on Uneasysilence. It lets you see how the data which makes up your website actually gets to the viewer, through various servers and gateways. It uses Google Maps to show you, so you can zoom around and look at it as a map or a satellite image as usual.

The image here shows the route for holster.co.uk

OK, so you can’t actually find out exactly who is furtively flicking through your holiday pictures, but you can now find out a whole lot more about where your Flickr hits are coming from.

The site just added a stats page for pro users, go ahead and activate it here on your account…

This is a great piece of graphic visualisation and typography, a live representation of the latest news headlines. It used the Google news aggregator, check it out…

marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

We’re having a series of discussions at work under the title Love & Hate. Basically people bring in, or just talk about something they love and something they hate. It doesn’t have to be design, although most of it is, given the audience.

Anyway, I chose to talk about the differences between MySpace and Facebook. I said that I loved Facebook because of it’s structured nature and sound design, whereas I hated MySpace because of it’s counter-intuitive nature and the regularity with which users break their pages with unreadable text and horrific animations. I guess love and hate is a bit strong, but the difference between these two sites which basically do the same thing is stark.

Is the freedom that MySpace offers users to customise their profiles unwise? Does this mean users shouldn’t be trusted, or that Facebook unfairly constrains self expression? Does it really matter?

I’m reminded of the horrible ways in which people often customise their Windows PC environment, with custom colour schemes and backgrounds etc, probably involving Comic Sans. Users of Mac OSX don’t have the same options, they can’t change the system font for example, but the tightness of Apple’s GUI is a strong selling point because of it. I guess because I’m a graphic designer I want to enforce consistency on things like this, perhaps I need to go for a walk instead…

Then of course, Facebook is undeniably better built than MySpace. The geek in me can really see the difference, and Facebook’s support of 3rd party applications elevates it almost to the status of a platform in it’s own right.

So I’m safely in the Facebook camp, but then again, I’m not a 15 year old emo band member…

Just discovered a great new website, boxedup.com which allows users to make a wish list of anything from the web. I’ve used Amazon’s wish lists for some time now but always thought there had to be some way of collecting together the random things I find from time to time on the net. Now there is!

The site is only 3 weeks old, so there aren’t many users on there yet, and it does have a few bugs, but it is sure to grow and be developed. It does after all have a nice isometric cube as it’s logo, so obviously I’m already a big fan. Finding out what other people are wishing for and browsing through tags is surprisingly interesting and there are lots of lovely design goodies on there. Chris at the site is all ears for your suggestions and feedback…

For the curious, my own list is here: www.boxedup.com/holster