Information Aesthetics has already written about that thing in February, me clumsy lamard has discovered it just now. Me like that wable table, but me will not buy it. Afraid of my fastfood and longdrinks being spilled on my bearskin imitation.

The personal feeds from webapplications like Plazes, Flickr, and Last.fm tell much about the activity of an individual on the internet. In this project we aim to explore how you can visualize the changes of your web identity over time and create a physical link between your virtual and real identity. The interface consists of both a physical table and a web application. This direct feedback from your web identity is customizable and can be connected to any RSS feed.

Sweetcron is a service that brings you the features of friendfeed and tumblr. Apart from the fact that it’s build for being hosted at your own web server. Kind of a wordpress for feeds. Check the developers site yongfook.com for a working demo blog.

Update: Sweetcron Beta is out for evaluating:

• Sweetcron program files
• Seetcron documenatation

It’s closed beta right now, but the developer, Yongfook, promises to launch it soon. It is going to be 100% open source and offers some more features:

• Automated Imports: Uploaded a photo to flickr? Bookmarked a new site? In a few minutes it will show up on your blog, thanks to the power of RSS feeds
• Easily Customisable: Edit simple templates to change your Sweetcron look.
• Self Hosted: You can keep alll the data safely on your own server and run Sweetcron on your own domain.
• Fully extensible: Write your own php classes and slot them right in!

Check the Interview with Yongfook on Lifestreamblog.com

via t3n

Que privilegio: I am on soundcloud.com now! This platform is a great way to share your music with the world. Not onlyfor downloading the files: In soundcloud, any member can comment directly to his favorite passages of a track. There are more common community functions inside.
Drop me a line if you like to join: I have two invites left.

Check out this mouthwatering Remix by TJ Kong:
Ben Mono - Jesus Was A B-boy [TJ Kong & Nuno Dos Santos Remix]:

Sounds great? Here’s a TJ Kong Promo DJ set:

Read this statement of the Soundcloud scientists, Alexander Ljung & Eric Wahlforss:

As you might expect, over the years we’ve grown tired of getting emails with YouSentIt links or FTP log-ins just to be able to check out our friends latest soon-to-be released tracks. Not to mention how annoying it is to try and email a reply with some comprehendible feedback. Music is just kind of tricky to deal with over email. So, we thought we’d change that. SoundCloud is our way of doing it.

ICANN Web regulators voted on June 26th to allow the creation of thousands of new domain names, from .bag to .coke, in one of the biggest shake-ups in Internet history.

This will radically change the way users navigate the Internet and also has major implications for businesses and consumers worldwide:

• Companies worldwide will be forced into registring a wavelot of new domains to secure their grounds. It’s not affordable for anyone – costs of $100,000 to $500,000 to land one of these babies may be enough to avoid Cybersquatting of TLDs. Nevertheless I have some concerns about sharky entrepreneurs might trick people into rapidly registered domains like apple.laptop, google.query or crumpler.bags
• People today are afraid of not being able to remember domain names in the future. But, actually, I guess this will not be a permanent problem. When the system establishes, it will be as common to enter a domain name like tate.london or becks.beer.
• Finally, additional characters will be allowed in the TLDs also. How will I be able to enter a TLD like viktualienmarkt.münchen, if I do not use a german keyboard? Even worse, how to enter TLDs or domain names in chinese writings?

Still, I appreciate the approach. All concerns will be channelled or diluted by the common marketing rules in the next years, as always. Do not fear the Zeitgeist.

Read more opinions here:
• ICANN’s custom TLD will be a nightmare
• SEO Chat Forums: Custom TLD’s On The Way

I just gathered some interesting news from Mister Wong:

Zattoo is a RIA [Uhm, just call it a program] that let’s you watch TV on your Compu without extra hardware [PCI tv-card] or a subscription to a commercial service. Zattoo is currently focussed on European channels and licensed content, and it’s completely free.

I was disappointed when I realized that I can’ watch BBC2 or Canal+, because my IP address is recognised as being German, and legal regulations prevent us to watch programs we probably haven’t payed broadcasting fees for. Maybe you can bypass this limitation using an Open Proxy Service, see the link below.

On the other hand, it’s just as simple as switching on the Telly.

Zatto is based on peer-to-peer technology, just like Hobnox, Pando, Joost: or Miro. In a Peer-to-Peer TV system, each user is simultaneously downloading the program to watch it, but also uploading the video stream to other users. This way, all users contribute to the overall bandwidth of the service. The streams are usually slightly delayed to the original sources. But the video quality is better if there are more users, which makes powerful servers farms needless.

Zattoo itself provides very smooth streaming quality and might be considered the service experts were waiting for - due to it’s simplicity.

Check the links for more information:

• Open proxy Services
• Quick summary on popular TV streaming services on ReadWriteWeb
• Interviewing zattoo.com’s co-founders

Zattoo delivers live TV legally, just like a cable network. Presently Zattoo doesn’t create its own channel from archival contents, nor do we yet carry user-generated content. Instead, we work with broadcasters to re-distribute their content simultaneous, unaltered, and unabridged. Compared to Joost, we provide live TV viewing instead of archival content delivered on-demand.

Sugih Jamin, Chairman and Co-founder of Zattoo

Melt!, the Indie & Electro Festival organised by Intro Magazine, now uses widget marketing, just like Daft Punk did in October last year. Widget Marketing might come in disguise of a microsite that is embeddable by a simple HTML code snippet.

The Melt! widget looks like that:

Cool stuff.

• Short definition of widget marketing
• Blog me widgets are powered by french multimedia agency Ibernatus

Why is it so effective and widespread within the new web landscape?
1. This form of viral marketing provides an extremely good ROI based on the resources available. Your embedders become your marketing team.
2. Widgets may take time and manpower to develop, but the deployment and embedding cost nothing.

The May 2008 issue of german PAGE magazin focussed on interactive information design. It’s the cover story, therefore the topic gets highlighted quite accurate.
The bottom line is: A change in the way we perceive information is happening right now, and the reason is web. I do emphasize this: With the help of accessible, structured databases and visualizing tools like Actionscript and Processing, there is more to charts then a bar graph.

Never before there was so much data to absorb and manage as it is today. Jens Franke talks about a generation of fresh designers who encounter the flood of information and the rising urge for knowlegde, using new, interactive media.

A few cool links from this essay:

British History Timeline The history of Britain broken down into bite-size chunks. Flash tool by which you can browse historical events or take a guided tour on topics such as Slavery or Technology.	Marumushis Newsmap Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
Relation Browser: Visualization Toolbox for creating your own visual context system - based on a planetary design, ergo: circular shaped icons. This geographical demo was created in order to demonstrate the visualizations’s capabilities by displaying the CIA world factbook information about countries, continents and oceans.	Well-formed data | Elastic lists Example of the elastic list principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures, based on a Noble prize winners dataset.Elastic lists enhance traditional facet browsing approaches by visualizing relative proportions of metadata values by size and by brightness.

Unfortunately the essay is not yet available online.
You have to wait or order the printed issue here: PAGE magazine
The .PDF for download will be available around July 2008.

I love that graphic department at Twitter: Isn’t this a peachy illustration - consider that this was used during a database crash. Luvly.