Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.

Digg Swarm

If you don't read Digg...shame on you.

For the rest of us, Digg has become an incredibly valuable source of information. But paging through pages of text for something to catch your eye gets old quick.

Digg Swarm was launched in 2006, and I have increasingly used it more and more since then. It has really grown on me. You can watch in real-time stories that get "Dugg" to become more popular. The visual size of the story bubble grows as the story's popularity grows. The yellow dots connected to the story show you who is digging the story, and the size of the yellow dot shows you how important that user is in the Digg universe.

Also, if the same person Diggs two stories, a connecting line is shown to highlight other story bubbles that may interest you. The connecting line between two stories gets thicker as more users Digg the same two stories showing a stronger connection.

Usually I start it up and let it run for a little while before I check it out. That way it has some time to build up some connections and story history. It starts from scratch when you start, so you only see the stories that are Dugg from that point in time and after.