Short Blocks
It has become popular of late to cultivate analogies between blogging and urban dynamics, and Jason Kottke and Steven Johnson make some interesting observations about the length of city blocks. Here's Jason's post and Steven's follow-up.
If you're not familiar with the gridded layout of Manhattan, take a look at Kottke's small diagram. Manhattan has long blocks running east-west (the "streets"), and short blocks running north-south (the "avenues").
Neither post seems to really get into why short blocks are more vibrant though. Is it simply because short blocks have more intersections, and businesses prefer to locate at intersections? That sounds like circular logic: "there are more people on short blocks because that's where businesses are, businesses are on short blocks because there are more people there..." I think the countervailing presence of long blocks is actually what creates more dynamic short blocks. New York's long east-west blocks implies that there are relatively fewer streets running north-south, meaning travellers moving in that direction have fewer routes to choose from and thus are more concentrated on the avenues. This higher density of foot traffic (and vehicular as well for that matter) encourages all of the dynamism we expect from crowds. It seems then that what is most important in determining the block dynamic isn't any absolute distance but rather the relative length of blocks running in the two complementary directions. I'll have to crack open The Death and Life of Great American Cities again to refresh my memory about what else Jane Jacobs says about block lengths specifically.
Posted on
Dec 25, 12:55 AM
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Linking
Tany Rabourn sparks a very interesting discussion about the Power-Law distribution of links on the Internet and the ways in which Google's PageRank algorithm may break down and fail to give us the search results we'd expect: *Pixelcharmer: Field Notes: Power Law Distributions. Much intriguing research referenced here, it'll take awhile to digest...
Matt Jones has some interesting commentary in response as well, especially his thoughts on making technology more accessible in order to widen the blogging demographic, perhaps making blogging more "relevant" or representative of life in general.
Posted on
Dec 25, 12:18 AM
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Adaptation & Usability
I spent some time checking out the sleek redesign of the BBCi site today and it has one very interesting feature I don't think I've seen anywhere else.
All of the story links are grouped into boxes on the homepage: "News", "Sport", "TV", "Radio", &c. If you pay careful attention you'll notice that each time you click on a link, the background color of the box the link sat in becomes just slightly darker. Over time this has the effect of visually pushing your most-used sections into the foreground, while sections you rarely click in begin to fade into the background.
Fabio Sergio of freegorifero makes an interesting analogy to the physical world:
Another relationship between BBCi and RealSpace: physical things that get forgotten and not cared for slowly start to show this by getting covered with dust, dirt, rust. They age and decay. Over time, they fade. Digital objects completely lack these LO-FI qualities and keep their first-day sheen forever. This also brings back to memory a satirical piece written about all the sites that end up never getting updated and how that should be reflected by some sort of digital rot.
How might interactive products show the qualities of a wooden artifact? How could they age gracefully?
Posted on
Dec 21, 7:26 PM
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Walker in the Wireless City
Last week the New York Times published a great article about the free wireless broadband access the City of New York is providing in beautiful Bryant Park, which is one of the most vibrant public spaces this young suburbanite has been to. The article: Walker in the Wireless City (free registration may be required?)
I wonder if once the free-and-open wireless network trend really starts hitting the uptake portion of the S-curve, we'll begin to see backlash due to:
- Weak wireless security
- Abuse by bandwidth leeches (aka the "free ridership problem")
- Weak traceability of malicious users, spammers, hackers, etc.
I hope any such backlash can be avoided, because ubiquitous wireless bandwidth is a really cool thing and will begin to enable much more "social" technologies than we can currently even imagine. A recent article in the Economist drives home the point that many smart people (cf. Bruce Schneier[1], my favorite security consultant) have been trying to make for years, that macro-level computer security is not fundamentally a technological issue, it's a social one. For example, check out this quote:
In one survey, carried out by PentaSafe Security, two-thirds of commuters at London's Victoria Station were happy to reveal their computer password in return for a ballpoint pen.
Surely if that's the case, it hardly matters in practical terms how weak WEP[2] is? (see this and this for details)
[1] Also be sure and signup for Counterpane's monthly newsletter if you're interested, it's a fantastic summary of the major news in the security community. Schneier's post-9/11 commentary has been especially insightful as well.
[2] Wired Equivalent Privacy algorithm, part of the 802.11 wireless networking standard.
Posted on
Dec 3, 12:51 AM
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Sedaris Eggers Smackdown
Via kottke.org, yet another obsessive Dave Eggers tidbit: Sedaris Eggers Smackdown
In conversation, Sedaris is rather like his writing: funny, sharp-witted, but seldom really mean. Except when the subject moves to a certain young writer whose first book's back cover featured an admiring blurb from Sedaris himself. An act for which he received little thanks. 'Dave Eggers is a huge pain in the ass. A huge pain in the ass,' says Sedaris. 'I went on a tour last year and he had just been on one before me, so I was visiting a lot of the same bookstores he'd been to. And I would go to stores that were actively unselling his book. Like, someone would go to the counter with the book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] and the staff would say, "Actually, that book's not very good. No one likes that book. You should read this instead." Because Dave Eggers would have been in that book store the week before and yelled at the people who worked there and treated them horribly. He's a horrible person...but he's a really good writer.'
Posted on
Dec 3, 12:40 AM
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