blog.edeverett.co.uk

 (Warning – rambling, fairly unstructured and inconclusive thoughts ahead.)

I was recently reminded of a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: when will we stop learning to write? When will children stop being taught to write with a pen? Will, in the not-too-distant future, pens and pencils become quaint antiques, as we see cassette tapes or non-digital cameras? If you where a toddler today why would you bother learning to write? It’s hard, messy, frustrating, slow and largely irrelevant to everyday life. Signing my name is about the only time I write anything now. If I have to write something longer it takes a few lines for my fingers to remember what they’re doing—it’s surprisingly easy for us to forget even skills we take for granted.

Belated links and inspiration and stuff I found interesting this week, decorated with some thoughts:

I’m still unsure exactly what a NUI is…

..but this video, from last year, of Bill Buxton talking about touch interfaces is worth a look: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TechTalk-NUI-Whats-in-a-Name

Directions  = recommendations?

People asking for directions to location can be seen as a ‘vote’ for that venue: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-of-google-maps-directions-logs.html. There’s probably a lot in it but the semantics of “I need to get to … ” are quite different to “That place was great!”. Not least as one happens before the event and one after.

Links and inspiration and stuff I found interesting this week, decorated with some thoughts:

GTA street view

http://www.gta4.net/map is a nice use of Google Street View that allows  you to explore the GTA world. It reminds me of these interesting uses of custom Google maps:  http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/08/design-portfolios-on-google-maps.html I’d like to see this sort of stuff used more/pushed futher.

Social Epidemiology

“Sickweather scans social networks for indicators of illness”: http://sickweather.com/#2 Sounds like a  nice idea for networked hypochondriacs. Seems like a logical extension of http://www.google.org/flutrends

Dumb and Dumber

The Wisdom of Crowds effect get less when members of the crowd influence it: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline (This makes me think we should ban all press once an general election has been announced.)