The Reinvented Blog

I love the idea of Amazon’s new e-book reader, Kindle – it is really seductive to imagine carrying around all of your reading in one small device. Books are my basic security blanket – if I am going somewhere where I might, say, have 1 hour of downtime, I usually take at least 4 hours of reading material “just in case.” The Kindle would be great for me.

But I’m far too cheap to buy it. I don’t mind the $400 purchase price, but the on-going cost is way too high for me. The fact that you have to pay for blogs is almost a deal-killer, but the cost per book is really prohibitive at $10 or so per book. At the rate I like to read and/or skim through books, that is about $40 per week, or $2000 per year. I get out roughly 20 books a month from the library for free, and until the library starts to offer free downloads to Kimble, I’ll have to pass on buying it. Well, maybe it’s best to wait a while anyway – by the time they come out with version 2, it will probably have added color and images and much more web interactive capabilities. And then I’ll load my security blanket with at least 10 unread books at a time. I can’t wait.

We deal with increasing amounts of data everyday, and are constantly struggling to make sense of it. Data visualization – the art and science of presenting data visually – can make large amounts of data understandable and memorable if it is done well.

There are lots of great examples of effective data visualization – check out some of the best at visualcomplexity or read the Information Aesthetics blog.

But very few websites take advantage of these methods. This is one area where print media is still ahead of web media – a typical copy of Newsweek will have a visual graphic that is far more sophisticated and compelling than what is found on a typical website.

One reason may be that creating good data visualizations is actually a very hard thing to do – it requires strong quantitative, technical, and visual abilities to produce a result that is both insightful and attractive. And it takes time to create, which is sometimes a bad fit with the fast pace of web creations.

Tag clouds are examples of visualizations that are popular because they convey information that people want. But on many sites tag clouds are annoying or hard to use, with the information looking cramped or jumbled. It’s difficult to figure out how to make tag clouds attractive and effective without taking up most of the webpage space, and most designers haven’t yet achieved it. And tag clouds are such a simple form of data visualization, so it’s easy to understand why the more complex forms of data visualization are still not used widely or well.

Web designers/developers should serve as the cartographers of our digital age – figuring out how to chart and describe the new territory in new ways. But we are not yet using the tools well. As the nature of the web changes – shifting from information stored as a collection of web pages to information stored as data (the “semantic web”) – we will have to get much better at data visualization if we are to make sense of the data onslaught.

I spent last weekend at the DC Startup Weekend, and it was a really great experience. The concept is that designers, strategists, and developers in a city get together and get an alpha/beta version of a web 2.0 product live by the end of the weekend, in 54 hours or less, when the project is not even selected until the weekend starts. The startup weekend concept is the brainchild of Andrew Hyde, a young entrepreneur with a big vision.

It’s impressive that a large (50+) group of people can quickly find a way to work together when a lot of them are initially strangers, and all of them have the type of intellectual competitive firepower that comes from being so good at what they do. The accomplishments in the short time frame are equally impressive.

But what strikes me as the most interesting aspect of the weekend is that the work was happening simultaneously on all fronts (marketing, design, business plan, development, coding, etc.) when all logic would dictate that many of these processes should be staged sequentially. A lot of the credit for making it work probably belongs to Matthew Vanden Boogart who led the development team, with the task of trying to program the project even while it was not yet designed.

I think that this is the people equivalent of computational distributed processing. I remember how the advent of distributed processing had a dramatic effect on the types of products I could create – I was creating products for the financial markets at the time, where all the processing had to be achievable in the time between when the stock market closed one day and opened the next morning – and the increased speed of distributed processing allowed all kinds of creative things to be done that were not achievable before. Maybe the type of people-distributed processing in the Startup Weekend model can also lead to similar breakthroughs in creativity and efficiency.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about digital smell. I’ve been so sucked into the digital world over the last couple of years that it took me a while to realize that it only covered two senses – audio and video. Where are the digital mechanisms for the other three senses – digital smell, digital taste, and digital touch?

It’s hard to envision the encoding and delivery mechanisms for digital smell, but not difficult to imagine what one could do with it (hey, who wouldn’t be thin if you could make brussel sprouts smell like chocolate and vice versa?)

There are current uses of smell to market products that could be amazing, and amazingly manipulative, if digital smell technology were available. The New York Times has a great article on scent marketing and “brandscents.”

And Smell-o-Vision is making a small comeback, even without a good way of delivering the smells. But media experts like Robert Thompson (director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University) are doubtful about whether smell adds a new dimension to movies: “I think it’s forever going to be a novelty….It’s just not necessary, and there aren’t very many movies that would make us even care about smell.” I disagree with him – I think we will eventually experience the power of full five-sense (or is it six-sense?) media experiences, and they will make current media seem extremely limited by comparison.

Recently I was talking to my sister about digital smell and she started talking about Lucretius and his problem of how you see rounded corners through the ether when the shape is actually a rectangle, or something like that – well, she’s a philosophy professor and this is the way she thinks and she makes it sound interesting even when I don’t fully understand it. I haven’t thought about Lucretius since I took my Philosophy 101 final many years ago, but I can see that there is a connection – it was a fundamental concern of the ancient philosophers to think about what is reality and how we perceive reality and what we can know about what we see, and it still is a fundamental concern today – even if it is often in more mundane terms like figuring out if a photo has been Photoshopped beyond all recognition of what it once represented.

As our perceptions of reality get more and more complicated as they are increasingly manipulated with digital mutations, I wonder if we may be tempted to care less about what is actually real and care more about what is really cool to experience. Digital smell would be an awesome experience.