Reading and driving

Apologies for the lengthy gaps between posts. February - with KiwiFoo Camp, Webstock, life, work and radio - is always a bit of a squeeze.

Over the weekend I had the privilege of attending KiwiFoo Camp, a gathering of about 170 people from fields as diverse as farming to psychology to product design. It was my third year attending, and as stimulating and eye-opening as ever. My particular revelation was Tim Bell from University of Canterbury and his Computer Science Unplugged work, which I'm hoping to write up on my work blog shortly.

One of my favourite sessions was one I co-ran with Nat Torkington; a simple session where people in the room simply make book recommendations. I've been to or run three or four of these sessions in the past 6 months with different groups, and I find the overlap and the idiosyncrasies fascinating. I've collated almost all of the recommendations into a list on Goodreads. The one missing item is The Pitcher and the Well, a memoir of an anonymous RNZAF navigator recorded as he lay dying of wounds in a German POW camp during WWII. However the full text is available online.

Later today I'll be on National Radio's Nine to Noon programme in my usual fortnightly art slot. I'll be talking about Google's Art Project and, if I get time, the ways Google Earth have been used for archaeological research. These are the links I've provided for the show

The Google Art Project site

Google Art Project YouTube channel

Roberta Smith on the Google Art Project, New York Times

Alastair Sooke on the Google Art Project, The Telegraph

Google Earth

New Scientist article on archaeologists using Google Earth

National Geographic article on archaeologists using Google Earth

The Internet

Earlier this year I paid my dues and became a member of Internet New Zealand. There was a bit of healthy peer pressure behind my decision to join up, but also a sense of obligation. I make my living online. I spend a lot of my non-work life online. The web is crucial to me staying in contact with friends and colleagues. But I don't know as much about the internet - and the threats to a free and open internet - as I should.

So, if you've ever looked at your computer screen while browsing blogs or emailing home or facebooking, and wondered - how does this page appear in front of me? how does Amazon remember my credit card details? what's the difference between 'http://' and 'https://'? why do I use Internet Explorer 6? - you should check out this cute little online book from Google.





20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web covers topics from open source browsers through to cloud computing, HTML5 to protecting your privacy online. That might sound dry, but please - just give a few minutes of your time to trying it out. It's a lovely interface to play with, if nothing else; but overall, I guarantee you'll learn something.* If nothing else, you'll find this handy link to the What browser? site, which will instantly tell you which browser and which version you're using (and has a handy 1 minute video that tells you what a browser is).

*Sure, the book is an advertisement for Google's browser, Chrome. But there's no harm in reading it anyway.

Nay, I say.

Hi there. I'm Best of 3. You might know me for my relentless support of such web phenomena as Flickr and Twitter.

Well, today I'm here to tell you that all the glistens on the web is not gold. There's a lot of hoo-ha on the wires this morning about the partnership between Google Earth and the Prado, which has resulted in 14,000 megapixel digital images of 14 of the Prado's key works being made available for intensely close-up viewing through Google Earth (which you need to download to access, so here's the link to do that).

The resolution of the images is beyond amazing; the white flecks of paint in the eyes of the Infanta in Las Meninas are easily visible, the flicks of apricot paint on the side of her cheek are centimetres long on my screen. But. It's only 14 works from the collection. There's no plan to digitise more at this level, or to work with other museums. I'm not even sure that the images are available on the Prado's own website (it's refusing to load this morning).

While I'm not as hung up as Jonathan Jones on the lack of the silvery light when you see the works in person, I'm going to favour standard digitisation and and easier method of access over extraneously high-quality, extremely limited digitisation every time.

However - the video recording how the images were made and stitched together is amazing. Enjoy (and I recommend on mute).

What are you thinking? Take Five

Search queries coming to Best of 3 over the past month have been predictably dominated by two memes: Bill Henson, and the selection of Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale.

For some inexplicable reason, 'mondegreen best-of-3' brought a bunch of visits. And someone's been shopping ... 'yvonne todd framing' came up a few times.

Seraphine Pick remains the most-searched-for artist, with an honourable mention to Michael Parekowhai.

My favourite search this month is "time to get to a curator", which I hazard is either a student seeking a career path, or an artist whose calls aren't being returned.

How do I know all this? Because I use Google Analytics on this blog. Through GA, I can delve into all kinds of tasty details about visitation to this blog ... including, for example, how many visits I get from various galleries and tertiary instititions around the country.

You can use these kinds of tools for good or evil. You can enter your organisations IP address/es into this page on Wikipedia & see what your staff have been editing on work computers ... or you could find relevant entries, go to the History tab, then set up an RSS feed to be alerted to changes on the entry (you'll find the RSS link on the left-hand side of the page).

You could snoop on your staff and potential hires' personal lives on Facebook and Bebo - or you could talk to your staff about using social networking sites as part of their work.

You could set up some Google Alerts, Google Blog search RSS feeds*, and Technorati alerts (do some searches on relevant phrases - e.g. 'christchurch art gallery' or 'auckland art gallery building', then click the orange 'Subscribe' icon. Note that not all versions of IE support this, so you're better off with Firefox - but then again, you always were.) Then you can listen in to what people are saying about you.

Or do some targeted Googling; try the command link:your_url_here to see where links to your sites pop up. Or go to Google Blog search and use the command inurl:search term.

All of this stuff - it's what I mean when I say 'web presence'. You're more than just your website these days (and that means individuals as well as organisations). You're (hopefully) spread all over the web, the subject of all kinds of conversations. Get out there and find out about them.

* Hey - has anyone noticed it's Marc Chagall day on Google?

Tall dark and handsome

A bit OTT

You know what we don't have enough of in our art reporting?* Physical descriptions of artists and curators. This NY Magazine write-up of the coming Whitney Biennial includes the following in the first 3 paras:

"doe-eyed bearded men and slim-hipped men"

"Momin, petite in heels and a tightly belted long sweater over a dark green baby-doll dress"

"a lanky 34-year-old New York artist"

"a tall blonde woman standing in the center gallery. It’s Henriette Huldisch [with] her taller, blonder husband, Andy Graydon ... It’s past eight and Huldisch, who has an infant at home, is giving Graydon the look that means it’s time to leave. It’s barely perceptible, a flattening of the lips and an intensity about the eyes."

A bit mental

Meanwhile - Sydney's Hardware Gallery opened its annual Google exhibition over the weekend:

On the same day, at the same time, all the artists had to google the same phrase. From page 2 of the results they had to select one site as their sole source of inspiration for their artwork.

The phrase this year was: Completely Rooted.

For the organisers, the phrase's appeal "lay in its ambiguity".

A bit dirty

Robert Rauschenberg has filed lawsuits against a Florida artist and art gallery who have allegedly been selling discarded studio items found in Rauschenberg's trash.



*Yeah, okay, okay, we don't have a lot in the way of art reporting, so this is a fairly open-ended question.

Nothing but net

Or more appropriately - nothing to do with art.

Every now and then I find a new online tool that changes my life, in a large or subtle way. Getting a feed reader was one of those moments (and yes, I've tried to convert you before). It's completely revolutionised the way I engage with news, ideas and people online.

A subtle improvement: when I found out that in Firefox (and if you're not using Firefox, what kind of art-loving liberal are you?) clicking on a hyperlink using the scroll button on your mouse forces the page to open in a new tab.

My newest find is Google Notebook. If you do a lot of research on the net, copying and pasting chunks of text and URLs into Word docs for later reference, this will change your researching life. It's simple, lightweight, and being an online application you can access it anywhere - fantastic if, like me, you work from two different computers. [If you just want to save interesting web pages but your Favourites are overflowing, I recommend Ma.gnolia].

iGoogle

Yeah yeah - I do, you do, we all do, Google.

iGoogle is Google's rebranding of its personalised homepage option. I got introduced to these last week. If you have a Google account (Gmail, Blogger etc) you can go to Google and personalise it as your homepage: add news feeds, alerts from you Gmail, your Google calendar, clocks, count-downs, "messages from your sweetie" (I think that one's for the Americans).

So I dutifully customised my homepage, and then pretty promptly forgot about it. Now though, people are being invited to "express themselves with iGoogle" by selecting a page theme (see this announcement from Google Australia).

So, just as dutifully, I dug my iGoogle back up, and tried out the seven themes that were available. And they were dull. No, worse than dull - syrupy. So a syrupy reskin of a service that duplicates a bunch of stuff that I already do. No wonder the air is rushing out of the Web 2.0 bubble.

Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm

I like the way that sounds like Noam Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'.

It's taken from Nicholas Carr's article yesterday for the Guardian's tech section, which talks about Google's introduction of an algorithm to its search engine that will stop Googlebombing - the practice that lead to that exciting-at-the-time phenomena where you could type 'miserable failure' into Google and get sent to George Bush's White House site.

Read me first - Guardian website

In his article, Carr notes that Google has done this not to make the web a better world, but to protect its image:

"One of the company's top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: 'Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us. But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.'"

An interesting thread of comments on the article has started on Slashdot

Defused Googlebombs may backfire- Slashdot

New from Google

Google has released a new product - a search engine that offers full-text search across more than 200 year's worth of American patents, or about 7 million patents.

Google Patent Search

The US patent office had already made this information available online, but Google claims to have improved the search functionality.

An article from yesterday's Guardian, by Dan Glaister, describes the new search tool and some of the celebrity patents that can be found on it, from Jamie Lee Curtis's nappy-and-a-baby-wipe design to Marlon Brando's drumhead tensioning tool.

Dan Glaister article - Guardian website

Zeitgeist take 2

Nicholas Carr, on Rough Type, has posted the top 10 2006 searches for Google, Yahoo and AOL. His conclusion?

"There's only a single overlap: "American Idol" appears on both Yahoo and AOL. That's it. I would have thought that, given the sheer number of searches done through each engine, there'd be a lot more similarity in the results. I guess it means that very different types of people use each of the three engines.

Looking back over the results, I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL users are geezers."

Dweebs and horndogs - Nicholas Carr