I may not be the first to air this idea, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Google pr0nrank refers to the number of Google Image Search pages it takes to reach a NSFW/dirty/titillating image for a given search term.
winston churchill is 48; an image of a bodily organ near a face appears on the 48th page of results.
aficionado is 1. The first row of results contain suggestive bikini ladies.
In neither case, of course, was I expecting to find such images.
Like the digital equivalent of an IZOD gator, email programs insert small branded tags in the “.signature” portion of the message.
Free webmail services like hotmail, yahoo, and MSN have their ads
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself with MSN Messenger 6.0 — download now!
http://www.msnmessenger-download.com/tracking/reach_general
and
——————————————————————————–
Don’t pick lemons.
See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos.
While in recent years we’ve got the device specific sigs. The first one I really noticed was
Sent from my Blackberry
and of course the superest of coolest
Sent from my iPhone
These little tags (and think of the tags on Levi’s jeans or skin tags, more than folksonomies) advertise the product (as with the Yahoo et. al examples) but they also tell you something about the person. I’ve got one of these. Beyond that, the message might be I’m cool enough to have an iPhone, or I’m lucky enough to work someplace where they buy me a Blackberry.
But they also tell you something else. I wrote this message in some situation you can’t possibly (and probably shouldn’t) imagine, when I had a few seconds to kill er um spend responding to you, away from a full keyboard where I could hit my expansive wpm and correct the embarrassing typos. Just like when we call someone on their cell phone, we may not know where we’re reaching them and therefore how the interaction will proceed, when we get an email from a mobile device, we can’t assume the normal context of use (computer, full screen, full keyboard, some time committed to the act).
And so I was tickled to get an email over the weekend that included this customized .signature
Apologies for brevity and any blunders in spelling; this was sent from my iPhone.
Nicely done. I don’t know how to change the iPhone signature, and I realized upon seeing this version that I’d just always assumed that my correspondents would know how to interpret the default. But I’m probably expecting way more empathy that anyone has time for.
When we were in Hong Kong last year, we took the tram up to Victoria Peak. The experience is quite dramatic, crawling up an incredibly steep incline.
Since it’s on a cable, at each stop along the way you feel the sway up and down until the doors open, and of course all the blood is rushing to the back of your brain, and the world outside the train is diagonal. Multisensory displacement!
I was intrigued, then, to see the funiculaire at Sacre-Coeur in Paris.
It’s a clever design that keeps the passengers oriented in a more horizontal fashion. Simpler and easier, and between the two contrasting modes is perhaps a nice commentary on the different cultures.
Last weekend we took in a cheesy exhibit about Da Vinci. I was struck by this image.
Da Vinci is suggesting a physical connection between the eyes and the brain; that the eyes are almost external-facing brain organs. I don’t know anatomy (beyond what’s on the outside) so I don’t know if this is accurate, presumably it was based on some dissection work. But the representation suggestions a mental model of how things work up there; the windows to the soul are linked right into the house of the soul.
Most of us have come across the hipster-geek phrenology heads at one point or another.
Interesting to consider this image, then.
which connotes a scientific accuracy, tied to machines, computers, technology and of course, objectivity. How will these images be interpreted in 300 years? Will they be just as quaint and amusing as the other ones seem to us?
This page takes a thorough and scholarly approach about the history of representations of mental mapping, plus they have some more cool pictures!
Another toilet picture, dedicated to Gene, who I influenced with my healthy interest in toilet interactions.
From my hotel room in Paris last month. How do you flush this one? Turns out that it’s the middle silver panel. Although there’s little visual indication, the panel is hinged behind just enough that it can be pushed along the bottom. There are almost-invisible letters on the bottom right corner. The left and right panels do nothing, by the way.
At first I thought that circle-in-a-square was some flush button, but it’s a deodorant puck.
Recently I wrote about the importance of practicing our noticing and reflecting skills. A few weeks ago I read on MetaFilter about John Stilgoe “a professor at Harvard who teaches his students how to, among other things, mindfully observe the urban and suburban environments they inhabit.”
I bought his book Outside Lies Magic, and although the book itself is so-so, the introduction is passionately articulate about some of these same issues I’ve written about
It is a book about awareness in ordinary surroundings. It is a book about awareness that builds into mindfulness, into the enduring pleasures of noticing and thinking about what one notices.
I hope this book encourages each reader to widen his or her angle of vision, to step sideways and look at something seemingly familiar, to walk a few paces and see something utterly new.
“Anti-Groping Appli” by games developer Takahashi
was released in late 2005 but has only recently climbed up popularity rankings, reaching No. 7 in this week’s top-10 cell phone applications list.
The application flashes increasingly threatening messages in bold print on the phone’s screen to show to the offender: “Excuse me, did you just grope me?” “Groping is a crime,” and finally, “Shall we head to the police?”
Users press an “Anger” icon in the program to progress to the next threat. A warning chime accompanies the messages.
The application, which can be downloaded for free on Web-enabled phones, is for women who want to scare away perverts with minimum hassle and without attracting attention.
In 2000 I made my first trip to Japan to help our client understand the role of mobile phones (“ketai”) in Japanese culture (in order to discover unmet opportunities for the company with their own customer base). We learned a great deal (both from participation and from observation!) about the indirect manner of communication (for example, the absence of “no”) and heard many stories about how the mobile, through its email capability, had enabled ways to circumvent this. People told us stories of negative feedback from a boss to an employee, or a relationship breakup taking place via the phone, and how that was acceptable.
If it’s culturally difficult to scream “Take your hands off me, you @#$%^$ freak!” on a subway train, then this application makes sense. It seems to acknowledge a need and a culturally-appropriate vector for responding to that need.
Steve in Tokyo in 2000
ads that “clean” the streets.
[Using] high-pressure cleaning machines to wash brands, logos and adverts onto dirty pavements…the SAS team blasts the stencil with water and steam on dirty walls, roads, pavements or even road signs…Nothing but water and steam are used, and it’s all perfectly environmentally friendly and legal, SAS stresses. …”[W]e wanted to apply a technique that was not just eye-catching and effective but also friendly to the environment. What could be more natural than water?”
But wasting water is hardly environmentally friendly! And steam requires fuel to produce. This sort of claim is too easy for anyone to make and is too often unscrutinized, like the folks at Springwise who reiterated the company’s hollow verbiage without challenge.