Posts by matt

After taking a moment to digest some of the insights from the two awesome panels this morning, this thought is still dancing in my head a bit. At one point, John Mark Josling said (in paraphrase), I want to push the idea of deepening the social aspects of software. What if Photoshop had a sandbox that could enable you to watch designers/photogs editing a photo in real-time, so you could replicate their actions later? What if Fireworks allowed you to view “ghosts” of other editors creating projects?

I’m fascinated by that notion, especially as apps like Photoshop take their place in the cloud. What if you could “follow” Quentin Shih on Photoshop Express, getting notified whenever he was editing an image, and watch his virtual ghost create art in real-time on your screen? Or watch the ghost of Kutiman splicing and editing hundreds of YouTube clips?

This gets back to Robin’s notion of the emerging “public artist.” It also ties in with my argument about the responsibility of journalists to encode into their work information about how to replicate that work.

I’m coming to this late, but hot damn, Dark Was the Night is fantastic. Thanks, Sopheava.

I just ran across Siftables, another Media Lab concept that doesn’t suggest any immediate practical applications, but sent my imagination on a little trip. (The closest it got to a destination was this thought: “Wow, our kids are going to have even cooler toys than we did.”) “Siftables” lacks poetry, though. Might I recommend “Robinblox” or “Roblox”?

Steve Marsh might be the second-best writer in the entire Greater Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. And he’s written what might be the best introduction to a magazine website party photo gallery this week. It’s insider-y and superficial and pompous and awful and I love it. The event being photographed is the third annual Fashion Fight Night, which I’ll let Steve describe:

It’s fashion photographer vs. fashion photographer, with each ring holding a photographer, a model, and a team of stylists. Each snapper would shoot for three five-minute rounds, and then their results

The moral of Paul Tough’s stellar Whatever It Takes might be that sixth grade is far too late to start instilling sound learning habits in a student who hasn’t had a good educational foundation. Geoffrey Canada’s quixotic quest to bring left-behind sixth-graders up to their grade level in reading and math is somewhat heartbreaking. He ends the book still hoping that it’s possible to accomplish, but I finished it much less optimistic.

But this Phawker series is a hellish look at what happens after we’ve stopped trying.

That animated movie we’ve been talking about all month is available online. (Thanks, Waxy.)