Posterous: CMS for simple web publishing via email

"Posterous is the easy way to get content online using e-mail. You can e-mail content of just about any type (such as rich text, photos, music, video, Word/Powerpoint/Excel/PDF documents, and zip archives) to us. We will post it online in the most web-friendly format, then reply with a public URL that can be forwarded or shared with friends. Account creation is never required, but if a user does create an account, posts from your various e-mail addresses (work, home, and mobile phone) can all be integrated into one blog."

(Posterous, Inc.)

Fig.1 Susie Blackmon's Posterous weblog [available at: http://susieblackmon.com/].

1

Microlearning: learning from microcontent

"We understand microlearning primarily as learning from microcontent - from "small pieces, loosely joined" (Weinberger, 2002).

Microlearning as a term reflects the emerging reality of the everincreasing fragmentation of both information sources and information units used for learning, especially in fast-moving areas which see rapid development and a constantly high degree of change.

While in the past a single authoritative work (or even a single authoritative teacher) may have been all that was necessary to sufficiently acquaint oneself with a given topic of interest, this is increasingly untrue, especially as the necessity to (quickly) learn (a lot) extends into almost everyone’s work life.

Books, magazine articles, a multitude of web resources (like online books, tutorials, encyclopedias, forum and weblog postings, emails and comprehensive teaching material collections as produced by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project or the Connexions effort hosted at Rice University) form essential ingredients of the source mix of almost any non-institutionalized learning effort - and, increasingly, of many institutionalized efforts as well.

Fragmentation of sources has both positive and negative aspects. From a producer’s standpoint, information fragments are much easier to create than larger works. Furthermore, disaggregated content - theoretically - can be re-aggregated to optimally suit an individual learner’s preferences (instead of the needs of an idealized common denominator). The other side of the coin is that a significant fraction of the consolidation and organization effort is shifted towards the learner.

It will increasingly be the task of microlearning management systems to assist the learner (or group of learners) to consolidate information gleaned from such disparate sources into a coherent whole. We see personal knowledge mapping as enabled by combined wiki/weblog software as a first step in that direction."

(Christian Langreiter, Andreas Bolka, 2005)

Weinberger, D.: 2002, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Perseus Books.

[2] Langreiter, C. and A. Bolka (2005). Snips & Spaces: Managing Microlearning. Microlearning Conference. Innsbruck, Austria.

1

2

Martin Klasch: Weblog of vintage design ephemera

1

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling'. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the 'feeling' expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."

(Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, May 2006)

1

Body>Data>Space: Canary Wharf Waterfall

"Building Design Magazine (BD) has published an article by Elaine Knutt discussing the potential for telematic experiences to be constructed in public spaces by the use of interactive architectural surfaces. Telematics (tele-communication and informatics) broadly explores how communication has transformed our experience of social connectivity and new emergining patterns of communication and power structures.

Thanks to this article I was pleased to find out about a new group of artists and architects called bodydataspace ( b>d>s) created by Ghislaine Boddington and Armand Terruli who are exploring 'the integration of interactive and body-intuitive interfaces into public sites. Bodydataspace have proposed that Canary Wharf, London's tallest building 235m, have a giant projected waterfall cascading down its facade. The waterfall would not be a computer generated animation but a real-time projection of Angel Falls in Venezuela. the world's highest free-falling waterfall at 979m."
(Ruairi Glynn, Interactive Architecture dot Org)

1