cell phones and the map metaphor

A great New York Times article that ties in directly with the post-geographic/hyper-geographic living concept I was exploring last year.

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives

space is the place

Idea for 'mood stabilizing' room

- room functions as RSS aggregator of inhabitant's blogs/Facebook & Twitter feeds, etc.
- based on content of feeds, changes appearance/atmosphere
- looks for keywords in blogs, etc. to gauge person's mood
- puts on comforting/happy music & makes room bright and warm if person is sad
- put on calming music, projects soothing colors, lowers temperature if person is angry
- if person is in the mood for love, well...possibilities are endless
- can also add appropriate images (photos of family, friends, happy stuff, etc.) if user is feeling nostalgic or lonely
- if blogs reflect interest in a particular subject, can project images of subject

Precedent: Michael Naimark - Displacements

internet applications midterm idea

Whoa, I just realized that this is just the midterm project, not the final project. Time to scale back in scope. Sweet!
I would have liked to look into the Netflix API but didn't see any documentation about how it interfaces with AS3. So instead I'm thinking about creating a widget that grabs all the first year DT students RSS feeds (basically, their podcasts) - or maybe just grabs images from their pages or text from their blogs on the a.parsons server and mashes them up.
Cool? Cool.

links

Compulsive note-taker that I am, I inevitably end up writing down a whole bunch of websites, artists, books, concepts, etc. to check out during pretty much every class I'm in. Unfortunately, half the time I never get around to actually looking into any of them. I'm hoping that if I post them here, I'll be more likely to do so at some point.

1/27 Interaction Major Studio

Brainpop website (from Hilary)

Art Backwash blog (from Antoninus)

1/28 Information Design

Bohm on Creativity (book)

Parsons Institute for Information Mapping

Kohei Sugiura

Charles Joseph Minard

Martin Wattenberg

Richard Paul Wurman

Stefan Knecht

1/28 Internet Apps: Client-Side

Gapminder (from Greg)

Ribbit (from...I don't remember his name)

gotoandlearn.com

Papervision!!!

BabyNameWizard - more Martin Wattenberg

Daytum (from Catherine)

Colr.org // kuler.adobe.com

Aviary.com

PrettyLoaded

Firstborn Design Studio

BigSpaceship

1/28 Mobile Media

John Gruber blog

Barcamp.org

Caribou Honig on the "third screen"