archive/January 2008  <

Credits des Tages:

I Am Legend's Creature Vocals by Mike Patton. Ja, genau der.

MapLib let's you upload high-res images and explore them with Google Maps' interface.

I looked for high-res versions of Mark Lombardi's work (as even the prints in the ''Global Networks'' catalogue are mostly unreadable - however, the map below is from the catalogue's cover - the quality is ok, but actually this is one of Lombardi's smaller graphs) and found some at alt-f4.org. See the result below.

Besides the often praised aesthetic value of Lombardi's work, for me it is equally important how he combines different kinds of visualization into a single schema, for example the social network graph and the timeline. The nodes in his graphs can be different entities: Persons, corporations, even years. The meaning of edges includes influence and control, flow of money, loans or credits, transfers of assets, blocked or incomplete transactions and the sale or spin-off of a property.

PS: If you're using a feed reader, please visit this posting on my blog to see the map.

IMHO quintura improved significantly since my last visit a year ago. The interface is even more ajaxy and updates search results automatically depending on what you're doing on the word map. And it's good that they put the search results from bottem to the right.

As I said I wished for an interface like that to browse del.icio.us tags.
Well, quintura can do that now!

PS: To see their widget in action please view this posting on my blog.

A year ago I wished we had Decentralized Social Networking based on openID. Back in August '07 we saw the rise of NoseRub starting as a PHP library trying to achieve this purpose. In the last months NoseRub's founder Dirk Olbertz enlarged the team and improved the library. They even started a reference platform based on NoseRub: Identoo.com. And it looks promising indeed!

Identoo allows you to create a profile and add web(2.0) services you use (del.icio.us etc.). This alone wouldn't be so extraordinary, basically it's a lifestream many services offer. But what I haven't seen doing another project is recognizing most of your contacts from these services and let them add as contacts to your Identoo account.

But let's not forget, Identoo is (at the moment) a reference platform, or let's say your identity provider. Identoo/NoseRub could be for social networking what WordPress is for blogs: a service provider (wordpress.com) and an open-source software (wordpress.org) for the same purpose.

And, as with WordPress, this could of course work: Those who're just looking for the functionality and are not interested in the technical details choose Identoo, others who have their own webspace and want to be in control (meaning both the technology and their properties) take NoseRub.

So, for those interested: See you at http://identoo.com/walterra/

Wolfgang Prinz on choosing a Rendering API for GVS

"If rendering performance were a western movie, JOGL would be “the good”, Java3D would be “the bad” and Java2D would be “the ugly”."

http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/x-coll22100/wprinz.pdf

"We're all travelers in this world
from the sweet grass to the packing house
from birth to death
we travel between the eternities" --Print Ritter