But the coolest filtering is personality-driven

Posted on

In August 1997, Infoworld arguably ran the earliest press article on blogging:

Blood’s simple

You may have caught wind of the latest technology that promises to be every user’s electronic secretary: intelligent agents. In theory, these bots will eventually crawl the Internet collecting and collating bits you’ve indicated might be of value. We haven’t seen a proof-of-concept yet, but there’s some flesh-based filtering happening on the Web now that’s beaten software agents to the punch.

Several online news sites offer headlines and off-site links to hot stories, but the coolest filtering is personality-driven. It’s the model through which the Web blossomed: In its infancy, the Net’s most popular pages were simply the bookmarks of early adopters.

So if you need an intelligent agent, pick one with some street smarts. Dave Winer, for instance, is a sunchild-cum-gadfly who updates his Scripting News site (http://www.scripting.com) several times a day with a thread of links that record the ebb and flow of industry doings. By doing so, Winer both sparks and records a fascinating dialogue. Another strong voice is Michael Sippey, architect of Stating the Obvious (http://www.theobvious.com). Tellingly, Sippey calls his daily list of links “Filter.”

The sites aren’t as personalized as an envelope from Mom stuffed with hometown news clippings that “you really should read,” but they’ve got the heart that algorithms and Boolean logic don’t.

Brookshaw, C., Hammond, E., & Talley, B. (1997, August 11). Loose Cables. InfoWorld, 19(32).

Designing a logo on Twitter

Posted on
THATCamp LAC logo

THATCamp LAC is an informal conference held in De Pere, Wisconsin, from 4 – 5 June 2011, to discuss digital humanities at US-American liberal arts colleges. Ryan Cordell, one of the conference organisers, posted his original version of the conference logo to Twitter in April this year, asking for opinions. I offered a few opinions and supplied remixes of the design, one of which was adopted as the conference logo within a day or two. I’ve just reconstructed the evolution of the design in a selection of public tweets.