notes.husk.org. tagged archives.

2012-12-11

post/37719094902

photo 16:39:10

Jason Scott (via thoughtwax):

The vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.

The vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.

“ If we want all this digital stuff to be something more than an ephemeral performance, a dance that’s beautiful and glorious and something to be left behind as we keep pushing forward, we’re doing okay. If we want history to be something that doesn’t just trail off suddenly at the start of the twenty-first century, we need to be smarter, and think in a holistic, comprehensive way. ”

Joe Belknap Wall in a comment at Metafilter on a story about the worries about preserving (cinema) film, now that’s largely digital. (via)

2011-06-28

post/6993785792

quote 01:40:54

“ The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. ”

Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration (via deathbeard)

I keep thinking that I’ve drummed this point home, but perhaps not, so: it still amazes me that almost everything we do online has a timestamp (if not two), and yet services are so bad about exposing them, and especially about using them as a way to organise your stuff.

Flickr has a calendar view (which perhaps isn’t as obvious as it should be, but it’s there). Tumblr has dated archives, even if they only show you them at a crude resolution. Elsewhere, though? Barely anything. Sigh.

2010-12-16

Thoughts On “Archive Fever”

text 17:07:00

Matthew Ogle’s Archive Fever is a great call to arms. He sums it up himself as:

“Using real-time services inadvertently creates rich personal life archives, but they’re currently hard to get at. Let’s fix it”

I’m glad to see such a well-thought-out post emerge, because I certainly couldn’t have written one that good. There are a couple of things I’d like to add, though.

Firstly, I’d like to mention one site Ogle doesn’t: Flickr. Perhaps he doesn’t mention it because it’s not “real-time” (although neither, really, is Dopplr). However, it managed to tick all three of his demands, more or less:

APIs with no limits - Pro users can fetch their entire library, and search by date (posted or taken)
Infrastructures for historic data - the site doesn’t care if your photos are 1, 10 or 100 years old; it can find them anyway
New UI patterns - how about archives organised by calendar?

None of this is to say that the site is perfect. The archive pages seem to go unnoticed by many, and they’re not necessarily the most effective way to find things. (I’ve noticed plenty of friends who use tags with date information, since tag navigation is more prominent.) However, the comprehensive API let Photojojo build their Time Capsule service, and if one wants to experiment with a new UI idea, the data’s there.

Secondly, I’m encouraged by the response to a couple of iOS apps recently. Momento (review) and Tweet Library (review) both offer the archives that web services themselves seem to be neglecting (although, of course, in the case of Twitter both are hamstrung by the current 3,200 post limit of the API). The realisation of the post-real-time web (as Ogle has it) might have its detractors - note the first comment on the Tweet Library review, arguing Twitter has a paradigm of forgetting, and see @snookca’s comments in this discussion - but perhaps third party apps are a nice way to encourage services to open up archives for everyone.

2010-09-04

post/1064953904

quote 18:33:25

“ Crucially, both services specialise in transience. Both services started — and gained significant popularity — with a relatively basic feature-set. Twitter’s killer feature was that it was a conversational tool which worked across SMS and the Internet. Facebook’s killer feature was that it wasn’t as horrible as Bebo or MySpace. In neither case was proliferation of links (or sane URI design) a particularly significant concern. Twitter does have fairly sane URI design, but its front end was built in Ruby on Rails, which steers developers towards that end. Facebook’s URIs have actually had a significant overhaul in the last couple of years (but has actually made them worse: everything’s now stuffed in the fragment identifier). ”

Wibbly-wobbly socially-networky stuff by Tumbled Logic, on Facebook and Twitter. Quoted so I can come back to this later. (Open question: does Facebook actually have an archive? If you know a fragment identifier URI from, say, three years ago, is it retrievable? I know it is on Twitter.)

(Source: nevali)

2010-08-24

post/1003599405

quote 15:18:45

“ Everything we put on the Web is both ephemeral and archival — ephemeral in the sense that so much of what we post is only fleetingly relevant, archival in the sense that the things we post tend to stay where we put them so we can find them years later. ”

Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future’s past? (via Phil Gyford).

He goes on to compare the way that older sites - like Flickr - expose an archive, whereas newer ones - like Facebook - don’t, despite the fact that some of the promotional commentary for the Places feature has been about looking back in twenty years. In other words: “Facebook could be such a repository today, if it actually cared about history. It has given no evidence of such concern.”

2009-08-25

post/171247039

quote 13:10:11

“ Twitter feels like conversation, ephemeral, written on water, designed to fade away. Blogging feels like notes, writing as thinking and rehearsing, to be kept and remembered, written on paper.
And actually writing on paper, that’s still the best. ”

russell davies: written in water, written on paper (via ruminant)

It took me three years to realise that ephemerality on Twitter was generally regarded as a feature.

notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.