I was digging through lots of old discs of photos today and found these from my 2002 venture out to Asilomar as part of the wacky little contingent that worked on whether or not a professional organization for information architects would be a good idea, and if so, what would it be?
In this whiteboard shot, we’re figuring out what to call it — which was of course dependent on what sort of organization it would be to begin with.
I realize the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture was too clunky for the long term, but something about being there was magic. I think in part because the place is so beautiful and simple, and relaxed.
I have a whole set of pics up from 3 years ago in my flickr album. Go check them out!!
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2005.
The Internet: Past, Present and Future – Internet & WWW History — an excellent history of the birth of the Internet.
Also see this timeline.
Article in Business Week, The Power Of Us, explains how Skype is the latest major example of how the vast organism of humanity that is the Internet can rise up and form emergent systems and infrastructures.
I like the language used here — it’s appropriate, I think, to the magnitude of the phenomenon. It’s evolutionary, a massive natural shift, and even super-corporations are puny in its wake.
Says Skype CEO Niklas Zennström: “It’s almost like an organism.” A big, hairy, monstrous organism, that is. The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide — along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more — are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. “There’s a fundamental shift in power happening,” says Pierre M. Omidyar, founder and chairman of the online marketplace eBay Inc. (EBAY ) “Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they’re involved in.”
In 1987 some friends and I traveled out to visit the Rev. Howard Finster in Summerville, GA. You may have seen his artwork on albums by REM and Talking Heads? But that wasn’t his main gig … his main gig was being a folk visionary for Jesus (and sometimes Elvis) who had an entire cosmology all his own. He was in some ways the William Blake of North Georgia. He had an entire garden of sculpture and art that he called Paradise Gardens, some of which the boys in REM helped him out with when they were younger lads.
We sat with Howard and listened to him opine, surrounded in his cramped living room where almost every surface had been turned into art — ceiling tiles, doorframes, everything. He served us CocaCola (a beverage he believed to be in some way ordained by God, with mystical significance) and played his banjo for us some.
I had taken along a weird little guitar I’d found and rebuilt (and painted turqoise…I was silly) and for some reason had a hankering for him to scribble something on it. An angel or something. I sheepishly asked him for that, but he took it into his kitchen for half an hour and then came out with it looking like you see here.
Howard told me way back then to please share the message he’d inscribed there. I never really thought about that until now, when it hit me that with the Internet, I can indeed share it with anyone who cares to see. So here it is.
Thanks to the instructions on tweaking my .htaccess file at John’s Weblog » Moved to WordPress, my bloglines link should still work.
However, while I do plan on keeping the ‘memekitchen’ domain for the foreseeable future, in order to keep all the links in the world still pointing to me, I do suggest switching to Inkblurt.com if you’re syndicating me.
Thanks!
I moved my web host from Pair.com to Bluehost.com. Why? Because it was insane not to. A cursory comparison of what they offer for the price makes it pretty obvious. (Bluehost vs. Pair)
But it’s also because I wanted to change from Movable Type to WordPress.
I really miss getting comments on a regular basis, and Movable Type has no built-in sophisticated methods for combatting this problem except for their TypeKey service, and spammers were even using that. WordPress has proxy checking and other things built in. But WordPress requires the use of MySQL, and to do that at Pair meant upgrading to a higher service level for another $100 — that’s just nuts when BlueHost is a very respectable outfit and offers better features at their basic level than pair offers even at their most advanced level of service.
I managed to get everything installed, though, very easily. I’m still not sure if I want to go about trying to be sure any possible “permalink” out there on the web will end up working for memekitchen and inkblurt, etc. I figure people can search for it on here if they get a 404 (I need to edit that 404 template — add to my todo list).
I have to say the WordPress interface is clunky compared to Movable Type, and there are some confusing things about it (for example when you’re editing or creating a regular “page” sometimes the tab tells you it’s a “post” instead, and the “post” tab/interface is used even when you’re editing other things that don’t quite count as posts) . Plus I’m hoping that a lot of functionality I was expecting might be found in their considerable PlugIn offerings.
Still, it’s free, so why not try it out?
Anyway, feel free to leave a comment. I want to see if activity can pick up now that people don’t have to register with a separate service. And I’m curious to see how much spam actually gets stopped by filtering out open proxies and such.
I’m going to be trying to move the blog and my site to a new host over the weekend. So if something weird happens here, that’s why.
Google SMS is yet another thing that’s been around for months that I haven’t heard about yet.
Verizon charges me like $1.25 each time I call for the phone number to a restaurant or anything of the kind. But I can just message Google on my phone, now, and it’ll look it up for me!
Of course, you have to query it the right way, but really…pretty amazing.
For the coolest plastic figurines ever, check out Parastone Mouseion collection. Guaranteed to turn your office cube into a conversation piece.
According to the site: “With the greatest respect for the original works of art the designers of the Parastone studios in The Netherlands have brought to live famous paintings by lifting images out of the flat surface.”
As much as I like Bosch, the Aubrey Beardsley one may be my favorite.
The Pirate Supply Store!
Authors Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida opened up a specialty shop that sells pirate supplies in SF. The proceeds go to support the writing labs for kids that they started (one is at http://www.826valencia.org/).
One day I’ll have my head out of my rear end enough that I’ll not only write excellent books, but co-create the hippest publishing entity ever and find the time to set up non-profits that teach children how to do and love wonderful things with words.
In the meantime, I’m going to continue preparing for that day by watching TV and eating nachos.
I took this with my camera phone while hanging out in a pet store with my daughter. It’s a baby macaw (yeah, just a baby, but still its head is bigger than a softball)
And I sent it to Flickr with my phone, where it was added to the inkblurt album. And now, from there, I hit “blog this” and type this entry, and it goes straight into my blog!
I know a bunch of people already know about this, but some don’t. (And I just now used it for the first time — and I’m easily amused.)
I’m slowly migrating over to a new name here. Memekitchen will still work for email and for getting people to the blog, etc, but the new name is…
“InkBlurt”
Yeah it feels a little weird in the mouth. But I like it. It’s a little less high-concept than “memekitchen” and people will probably know how to pronounce it and not have to be familiar with meme theory to get the reference. Plus there are about a zillion other “meme-something” sites on the web now.
I was a little shocked nobody had this domain yet. Maybe I’m alone in thinking it’s a cool name?? S’ok … it’s mine and I loves it.
About this blog
Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
BTW I also tweet at @inkblurt.
