from Directions Magazine, via Donna:

Jotle is a new Google mashup that combines Google Maps with Flickr and YouTube. According to a posting at the Directions Magazine's Web Map Gallery by Mikhail Novikov:

Google Maps + Wikimapia + Placeopedia + Flickr + YouTube = Jotle! Jotle is an new Flickr photo and YouTube video explorer that takes Google Maps and mashes it up with Wikimapia and Placeopedia placemarks. Jotle lets you zoom into various parts of the world and see map points for Wikimapia and Placeopedia. Jotle then uses the tags for these locations to pull in photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube. Though it's definitely not the first Flickr + YouTube Google Maps mashup it is the first that uses this clever location-plotting as a way to suggest photos and videos for the areas of the map you're looking at. It's also a great compliment to the immense value both Wikimapia and Placeopedia offer in the area of travel and tourism. Now in addition to researching areas you are about to visit using Wikimapia and Placeopedia you can also use Jotle to get a visual feel for the immediate area.

hmm… well, i'm not sure if it's our slow internet connection or the mozilla browser, but don't believe the hype. while the concept of jotle is sound, the perfomance leaves much to be desired. the app was very unresponsive and we had a hard time figuring out what did what [or if anything did anything]

…

[after spending a bit more time playing around, we feel we may have been a bit too hard on jotle. it is in beta, after all, and our connection is terribly slow. still, there's something about the UI that we feel is seriously lacking.]

from the adaptive path newsletter:

"Five years ago, Robert Reimann wrote a seminal article for the Cooper Newsletter called 'So You Want To Be an Interaction Designer.' Like many people, I read the article and said, yep, that's what I want to be. I took Reimann's (good) advice and found both work and training as an interaction designer.

"Now, thanks to my book, I find myself in the odd position of people asking me how to become an interaction designer, what it means to be an interaction designer, and what do I really do all day? And while Reimann's essay is still a great place to start, I want to embellish on to his advice with some of my own."

→ read the entire article

from the adaptive path newsletter:

"Over the last few years, more and more people have begun to recognize that design can be a vital component of strategy as well as a driver of business value. You only have to mention successes such as the iPod, Netflix and Target to generate near-universal agreement that design creates business value. Unfortunately, citing examples oft-used in traditional business magazines isn’t enough. Although an entire industry has grown by applying design methods to business, many practitioners in the field lag in their ability to communicate business cases for design initiatives, perhaps subscribing to the notion that such efforts are beyond their domain of expertise."

→ read the entire article

collective machinery is a website dedicated to exploring and facilitating collaborative multimedia, internet-based, and locative production. Toward that end, our site is an open "forum" (wiki-powered). Anyone can add pages, edit existing content, and ask questions.

Conceptually, collective machinery is divided into two areas:

1. General topics—Discussion area for people to share information and tips on topics such as phonography, photography, APIs.
2. Specific projects—Actual collaborative projects that want to use collective machinery to organize/promote their collaboration.

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A conference we wish we could have attended: interface explorer 2001. Just the blurb to Lev Manovich's lecture, "Cultural Interfaces and Data Aesthetics," makes us weak:

The society in which gathering, processing and distributing information plays a central role needs its own art forms. Before us is the challenge to figure out how to employ these tools to create new art; how to interface them not just to data, but to representations of human experience, subjectivity and memory.