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In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

She then ends with disappointment in the site because "...none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time."

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

Posted by ben at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Given the petabytes (exabytes?) of words that have been expended on social media, user generated content, participatory media, etc. etc. etc., it is miraculous to read a book that lays out clearly and simply the why and how of the phenomenon. That book is Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. I like reading a lot of the clever and snarky commentary about the blogosphere, and geek out on the details of one start-up's idea or another. But the clearing away of superfluous material and the deceptively simple and straightforward presentation of ideas is a masterpiece of editing. Making social media tools and products has the potential to make our connectedness to each other and our culture better and more human. But the huge amount of half-assed opinion there is among all the people trying to figure this stuff out could swamp that project in bullshit. Shirky has done the world a favor.

See also a video of Shirky's lecture-presentation on the book, and his blog around the book's themes.

Posted by ben at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Sarah just turns me to warm goo, babbling all the clichés I've heard, because the overwhelming love blows all other thought away: She amazes me every day, she is beautiful, precious, it is such a blessing to take care of her, it is unnerving how fast time slips away, etc. We are so, so lucky. She is three!

Posted by ben at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Mets have come into their own as a team, finally. They have a convincing claim on leadership of the East, built with hard work and despite missing their best pitcher, while the Yankees cannot find a win with a huge roster of monster talents and an almost hysterical desperation. It shouldn't be this way looking at it from the "moneyball" point of view, or the momentum point of view, or any point of view really. The Mets are comprised of a decent payroll of good players, a couple of stars, and a good coach, but they have no superheros among them to speak of. They play doggedly year after year, occasionally miraculously, mostly unevenly, sometimes heart-breakingly badly, but come back again and again somehow to compete in the most tantilizing, frustrating place in the world: just outside the Yankee's spotlight (clearly, a great place to get slowly and quietly good, though).

It's worth mentioning the way The New York Times has dealt with this switch in fortunes: amazingly badly. Here's a grudging, fourth-paragraph quote from their main story as the Mets took their second win in the series with the Yankees, and pulled away from the Braves to first place in their division as the Yankees fell apart: "But nothing about this game [...] could alter what those around here already suspected: The Mets are a better team, and not only because of their record, which improved to 28-14, the best in the National League..." As the capper, the headline for the article is "Another Injury to Another Pitcher And Another Loss for the Yankees." Give me a fucking break. They should stop reading team popularity polls and cover what's actually happening.

Regardless of what happens this year (the Yankees will eventually do something, the Brewers and the Indians look pretty good; it seems wide open), these Mets look like they are settled down and playing for themselves, and it's great to watch.

UPDATE: Wow, what a difference three weeks makes! Despite all the injuries, I'm still loving watching those Mets...

UPDATE 2: Oh my fucking God what the fuck was that?????!?!?! Utter, complete, total humiliation!!!!

Posted by ben at 2:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

It was impossible for me not to know about the iPhone as soon as it happened, I am a sucker for anything Apple. But I don't actually want one, which is weird to me, as usually I would want one of each from the entire Apple Store. I don't love my Treo at all, but the main value in it for me is as an Internet device; for that the damn keyboard is the affordance that makes it workable and useful. I really do hope that the touch screen is a great text entry thingy, but having used many, I can't really see how it will be.

But I do like the phone for the way that the interface is implemented. It is nicely visually polished, and the interaction design is ok, but what really makes it sparkle I think is the cinematic way that all interactions have smooth transitions from one state to the next. Looking at the demo of retrieving a voice mail, all the steps flow smoothly into one another, and when I close an item it zooms back into the place where it came from.

It's profoundly relaxing to see, and makes me realize how much brain overhead it takes on a daily basis to look at my phone and interpret what is happening, what just happened, and what I can do next; these things take very very tiny bits of attention, but it really adds up. It's like a tracking shot in a movie; where rather than cutting from shot to shot to show someone doing something the camera simply moves to follow them continuously ( I think of the opening sequence in Nashville and Boogie Nights — it works to introduce the characters because it's obvious whose story it is from the shot, instead of asking you to interpret artful framing or a sequence of different emphases into a whole).

Web design could use some of this continuous quality. The fanciest Ajaxified sites are still mostly a deck of flash cards, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I now own one, of course. My skepticism lasted only until the price drop :)

Posted by ben at 4:58 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Four months later, a verbal explosion! 262 and counting...

again airplane alligator apple applesauce are arm around away baby ball balloon banana barn bath bathroom bear bed bee beep belly big bike binkie bird bite blanket blocks boat bonk book bottle bowl box boy bread brush bubbles bucket bug bunny butterfly camel camera car carrots cat cereal chair change milk

mommy cheese chicken chin clean clock close clouds coat coffee cold colors cooking couple couscous cow cracker cup daddy deer diamond diaper did dirty dog doing done door down drum duck ears egg elephant eyes face fall find fire truck fish fit flower foot fork frog funny fuzz get girl glass glasses

go goat gone gorilla grape grass guitar hair hand hat have head hear heavy help hi hippo hold home honk horse hot house hug hurt I in inside it jacket jump keys kiss kitchen knee knock kookaburra leaves leg legos light lion little lock lotion make mat mess mine monkey moon

more mouse mouth move movie my new nice night no noise nose nurse off okay on one oops open other out outside owl pajamas pants peas pee picture piece pig plate play please poop put raisin read rice ride right rock run see shave sheep shower shirt shoe sink sit sky

sleep slide snack snake snap soap sock spoon star stairs stool strawberries stroller sun sweater table take that there throw tickle tiger tired toast toes top towel tower toy train trash treat tree truck turkey underwear uh-oh up walk want warm wash watch water where who work yes yoghurt you zip

Posted by ben at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I've always loved the deck of cards Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published back in the 70s, Oblique Strategies. The koan-like ambiguity is helpful when wrestling with design decisions. I like words, but I thought some of the concepts would be even more usefully vague in pictorial form...

Posted by ben at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Barnard College Emily Gregory Award 2006, acceptance speech by (my aunt) Amy Trompetter

"You were born with your authentic self and your ethical integrity intact. You are moving from innocence to sophistication and deciding what are the realistic compromises that you must make in order to live in this imperfect world that you have inherited from past generations. My advice is to do puppetry, or something similar, which offers infinite possibilities to you.

"To recommend itself, puppetry offers no prestige and certainly no monetary gain. It is as labor intensive as the work of medieval artisans. As a puppeteer, you are assured of hard work and obscurity, which is very freeing as long as your passions are fully engaged in what you are doing. There is nothing to lose. The beauty of the work is its own reward and it will sustain you. Of course you do not have to be a puppeteer, but you must follow your heart. Do the life’s work that you are meant to do.

"Theater and puppetry demand not only the most labor-intensive and time- consuming dedication. Theatre workers must also study and know everything about history, art, music, movement, psychology, religion, languages, writing, dramaturgy, and so on. Theatre is by nature multi-disciplinary, and demands a life-long quest for knowledge. Every new production opens a whole new field of study. Idea drives good theater and the distillation of precise and profound idea enacted onstage is one of mankind’s most powerful means of communal expression.

"On the one hand, there is your well-developed intelligence, and on the other, the intelligence of the people and things around you. You can impose your own intelligence on your creative work, but when you begin to respond to the intelligence outside of your self, then your work will take off. There is an intelligence that is inherent in the universe, in nature, in each living being that you meet, in the materials that you work with. Puppetry has its own intelligence, which is almost too simple, and then on the flip side, it is the most mysterious and profound. It is easily missed, but not by Barnard students and not tonight. I interpret tonight’s award as an honor to a discipline called puppetry.

"These final words were left by a friend, on my answering machine as a horoscope reading before leaving for Russia. They may be the words of Gandhi. 'Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Everything your heart desires will come to you, but only if you are a brave rebel who relentlessly resists the conventional wisdom.'

Posted by ben at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ()