Technologists have identified the moment of conception, the instant life begins… for WordPress, that is.
Mike Little pinpoints this 2003-01-24 Matt Mullenweg blog-post as WP’s birth — Matt later updated it with: “This became WordPress.” More…
CycleStreets: UK-wide Cycle Journey Planner and Photomap is a feature-rich route-planner for pedalers. Lotsa info and options, including a choice between the Fastest or Quietest route (or blend of both), an elevation map, an export in GPS format, and turn-by-turn directions w/ type of road (Quiet St, Cycle Track, Busy Rd, etc.).
They just released an iPhone app. Their web version’s in beta, and built on the OpenStreetMap project.
CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists.
Say you were pedaling from Wolverhampton and Nottingham (hey, I don’t name these places), here’s some of what CycleStreets tells you about your route:
The House Gates Built is not normally known as a fountain of innovation. But MS’s LiveLabs has really delivered the future in the form of Pivot. It’a web application — “don’t call it a browser”:
getting lasix
“Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?”
ativan online
We’re navigating the web for the first time as if it’s actually a web, not page to page, but at a higher level of abstraction… So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then, instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there’s wisdom to be found.
—Gary Flake, Technical Fellow, Microsoft; founder/director, Live Labs
Also check the TED talk for LiveLabs Photosynth — another Seadragon derivative.
The revus are in…
“Hitler responds to the iPad”
I thot f’sure Obama was gonna tell us last night that “Everyone gets and iPad.” A jobs and edu stimulus all in one.
Major update release of The Levelator® (free: mac, win & lin) from The Conversations Network:
It’s software that runs on Windows, OS X universal binary, or Linux Ubuntu that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.
Weird Al lays out the history and science of Auto-Tune, from the Know Your Meme series (tube):
HV did a radio intervu with the Gregory Bros on their Auto-Tuned News.
And here’s a playlist with most of the movies mentioned in above Auto-Tune explainer:
via Alix Blair.
xkcd on iPhone vs Droid vs Life:
The life cycle of a software, from “How the customer explained it” to “How the project leader understood it” to “What marketing advertised” to “What the customer really needed.”
Software Development Life Cycle [SDLC]
Illustrations: Project Cartoon (adapted by Mina Isaac)
Video: Iman Louis
Music (“Technologic”): Daft Punk
Make your own Project Cartoon.
Draw some lines and feel the ping: BallDroppings is a geometric music maker.
It’s built with the open-source Processing java software, “a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts.” Check this other Processing production: Bicycle Built for 2000 with “over 2000 human voices recorded via the Internet, assembled to sing” a song. (Interview w/ programmer.)
via lissenup.
REAPER is a small filesize (4M win, 7M mac) multi-track audio DAW, “a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment.” Free trial; if you use it,tell us how it’s working for you.
The Knight Digital Media Center (UC-Berk J Skool) offers a suite of Tutorials. Among them: Macintosh OS X—Getting Started, FTP Made Simple, and lots more in their Audio category.
Aviary’s Myna is a new web tool for editing-layering-mixing audio, all via their website; ie, you don’t need an application, you just need a web browser. Fellow radio producer Brad Linder reviews it at Download Squad:
Aviary launched an online audio editing application called Myna, and its all kinds of awesome. Dont get me wrong, its not exactly Pro Tools or Adobe Audition and it doesnt come with all the audio effects you would expect from those applications. But heres what it does and does well: It lets you create and edit multitrack audio recordings using a Flash-based web interface thats so natural to use you would swear it was a desktop application.
—“Aviary Myna: The best web-based audio editor yet”
Edward Tufte’s praise and crit of iPhone rez, w/ phrases like: “computer administrative debris”, “chartoon”, “content/information is interface”, “in a land of cluncky cellphone interfaces”. Had to transcribe this GUI gem:
“To clarify, add detail. Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information; instead, fix the design.”
iPhone Resolution by Edward Tufte
His improved weather visualizations at end of vid are exceptional; see discussion at The 404 Blog Getting Tough on Tufte. More E.T. at: iPhone interface design.
Edward Tufte: site | tube | sparklines | wavefields
TechCrunch reports:
healthBase is a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites… [with] some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,†one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.†Really.
The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments†for Jews, “Drugs And Medications†for Jews and “Complications†for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol†and “coarse salt†are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew?
[So] is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine?
—TechCrunch “NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt “
We want to thank the following companies which provide us with excellent in-kind services thru their discount and donation programs for non-profit organizations. So thanks to:
Google Grants: In-kind advertising
VerticalResponse: Non-Profits Email FREE
Dreamhost: Non-profit Webhosting
TechSoup: The Technology Place for Nonprofits
If you’re with an NPO, you really should check out the above opportunities.
The Silicon Valley correspondent for The Economist looks back on “Six years in the Valley:”
Jaron Lanier, a Valley pioneer, saw behind the Web 2.0 totem of “collective intelligence†an insidious “digital Maoism†that suppressed individuality. Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, observed an unhealthy trend towards “continuous partial attentionâ€, as people spent less time focusing on a single thing or person because they were constantly scanning so many other things—from Facebook to e-mail and their phones—for fear of missing out on some social opportunity.
Perhaps most dangerously, Web 2.0 still had only one business model, advertising, and the Valley was refusing to admit that only one company (Google) with only one of its products (search advertising) had proved that the model really worked.
Add to that, from the same issue, “Internet companies: The end of the free lunch—again:”
Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. The number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising turns out to be much smaller than many people thought.
I, for one, hope to never hear the word “monetize” again.
via Tech360.
Transom Tools‘ audio-tech wiz, Jeff Towne, has writ a clear, comprehensive guide to Pro Tools Shortcuts. All kindsa tips and tools to select, navigate, group, fade and bounce sound in PT. All these shortcuts are good to know, some will change your working life.
NYT data sets and multimedia design team up with IBM “Many Eyes” technology to bring you the Visualization Lab, where you can create your own “visual representations of data and information,” such as:
A/V- Simple Sound/Slide Shows will be an audio-visual web widget for the masses, a tool which synchronizes sound and images online, built for the needs of small public radio stations and independent producers.
It’s just in planning/possibility stage right now, but this player is our proposal to the Knight News Challenge; read it, rate it, review it.
