{ 2002.09.21 } Look, here is a weblogger who makes me laugh! Note: this is rare. Not You, The Other One has a list of all-too-believable dating schemes that don't work and, even better, Ten Reasons Why I Am Better Than Your Man. In a word, lol.

Two tangents. One: I've been doing my best to say "lol" recently instead of actually laughing out loud. It hasn't made me many friends. Two: The name of that weblog and other UK weblogs only serve to strengthen my theory that weblog names are the real-life equivalents of Culture ship names [see also, A Few Notes on the Culture by the author of the sci-fi series, Iain M Banks].

{ } The Best Jokes Are Dangerous, An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut parts one, two and three. I don't know how he does it, because he's reckless, deliberately so, but what he says is poetic, moving, and he realises it. Fantastic author.

{ 09.20 } Wicked: Colossal Cave Adventure page [via MeFi]. The game that changed the way we viewed narrative. Just imagine how much the idea of a text adventure has influenced things. I'm happily surprised to find out that the game is based on a real cave. Also from that MetaFilter thread is Zork as a 404 page. Oh. My. God.

{ } Awesome essay on Helvetica, Univers and Palatino [via robotwisdom]. (Rathering surprisingly, it's by James 'Kibo' Parry [why Kibo is a legend].)

{ 09.19 } Ah now, I like this (well, kind of). Logitech's new 'io' digital pen captures everything you write with it (on Anoto digital paper), all downloadable to your computer when you drop the pen in a cradle. The special paper doesn't bother me so much. Anoto is such a neat idea and usable in so many other ways that this is just a way of getting the pens out there; one day the pens will be used for checking active checkboxes in magazines (read Wired about Anoto). No, paper is fine. But the tricks they missed: The pen is Windows only. It downloads as special .PEN files which have to be exported to images. Why? Image capture is a generic device for USB -- why bother tightly binding the pen to the computer? Let it download images to any computer, present and future, and enable other people to easily write application making use of the pen. Logitech don't need to force the software on people to make them remember the brand, they're carrying the damn thing around in a pocket! Text seems to me to be the half of it, sketches are where it's at. Sell decent sketchbooks full of digital paper, high quality ink in the pens. That's the market. (But the cool feature the pen does have: the software files your notes based on which checkbox you tick on the special paper. That's neat.)

Other one of the products released at DemoMobile is the Canesta Keyboard Perception Chipset. Basically it's a piece of hardware that can recognise gestures. Coupled with the projection unit and a lightsource, the chip recognises fingers over a picture of a keyboard projected on a surface: a virtual keyboard. And these three are being sold for use in other gadgets -- phones, PDAs. Wicked.

{ } Dan cityofsound posts more about the rules of GTA3 changing as the game moves on. Now how this relates to rules and what they are I'm not sure, but GTA3 feels to me to be at a different position on the game-spectrum than, say, chess. Closer to the real-life end. Which is why I particularly like the term "social topography". Nice.

{ } From the bots list, some nice ideas for tech support IM bots making use of domain specific bot identities. But far cuter are stooge bots: one, two, three.

Sort-of-related is the story of the IM networks wanting to get paid. Maybe the problem is the relatively small number of networks -- there seems to be a level where competition doesn't effectively lower prices, and the competitors feel they're within reach of a monopoly so either make cartels or play hardball. Compare this to when there are hundreds of players in a market: the mobile phone situation in Finland is brilliant (just look at Nokia); the internet itself is treated as a shared common-land rather than large pipes joined only by tollbooths.

{ 09.18 } In this interview with Peter Morville he gives a nice definition of Information Architecture, part of which reads "An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape".

When I walked into the Waterstones bookshop on Piccadilly with Phil a few weeks ago, directly inside the front door I found myself in a small lobby. Made of glass, the lobby sat as a bubble inside the grand entrance to the shop and could be exited (into the bookshop itself) by two doors on the right and left. Standing facing forward: the glass encouraged me to look directly into the bookshop, the view obscured by posters. Now my attention was directly ahead, the lobby doors were just outside my peripheral vision. After looking around and leaving the lobby, I was pointed at the corner of the room, no longer at the grand shop that was ahead of me. Naturally, I thought this was ridiculous. A website would never be constructed like this, I said. My gaze was being drawn away from the navigation options, the posters ahead of me (in prime real estate) weren't targetted or the most important thing I should see, and obscured the main proposition. Going deeper I was left directed away from the shop floorplan (site map) and a confused user. Why don't they learn how to use geography and location like Information Architects learn how to use the www?, I said, Information Architects know how to move people around a site, how to design it for comfort and familiarity. Designers in the real world could learn a lot from websites.

It was a full ten minutes before it occurred to me that the designers of the shop were in fact architects, and that the term Information Architecture was a derivation from that.

{ } Think of the Children: "We want the law changed to make it illegal to murder children and bury them in woodland" [via As Above].

{ 09.15 } Okay, games again. I'm intrigued about what rules actually are. In a nomic, where you take turns in generating new rules, are you actually generating rules, or some other kind of thing? Is it instead the case that a nomic is just the extreme of having very few rules, and rules are (by definition) immutable, unbreakable things? If rules are just things that can be done, like roads on a roadmap, then the second level of rules are just like directions. And all of them depend on the geography. But I don't like these metaphors: geography, rules, the things that grow from rules... they interact in all kinds of ways, change each other, feel like different parts of the same spectrum. Thinking.

{ } cityofsound points to some beautiful short plays about London. Tiny Plays.

{ } (I'm back from Knoydart, remotest Scotland. The autoblogger will continue posting for a day while I catch my breath (and a thousand emails), but normal service will be resumed shortly.)