this is mikel.org — Page 538 — Michael Boyle's weblog

The 5k winners

May 4, 2000 by Michael Boyle

have been announced. I just played with Blocks for the last half hour!

to reading the Feed piece by Julien Dibbell about Jorn Barger. One of the things mentioned are “Wunderkammer” – European curiosity cabinets. That’s kind of odd, because one of our designers, Gilles, is doing his PhD dissertation on ‘cabinets de curiosits’ – wunderkammer. Weird coincidence.

So I was checking

May 4, 2000 by Michael Boyle

the difference between Google and Alta Vista’s new Raging search engines by doing a search on “michael boyle montreal” and comparing the results. Google was much much better. It put my old but still nominally active personal page at the very top and caught all my hits from when I worked at CTHEORY and put them near the top too.

The best thing, though, was to see my listing in the library. I’d never seen that before – I’d forgotten that they put theses in the library.

Interesting

May 4, 2000 by Michael Boyle

news about people’s online behaviour today. Wired News reports that people focus much more on text than graphics at online news sites.

It raises a lot of questions – but the preliminary one is “which online news sites really use lots of graphics?” I can only think of the single little photo (usually about 200×200 or so) that most sites put up. And an image like that doesn’t provide the detail that a well-printed newspaper photo has.

It also brings to mind McLuhan – is the web a hot or cool medium? TV was cool and movies were hot – it’s all about resolution and the infinitely higher resolution of film as opposed to NTSC-standard pixels. The imagination is even higher res, so radio was/is hot, not cool like TV. I tend to think the web has elements of both, and that’s what this study might point to.

If it changed, when?

May 3, 2000 by Michael Boyle

I just visited Precocious a minute ago and boy does it look great. The thing is, though, I’m sure I’ve been by before,and that it looked different than that. Anyhow the deep reds and ochres remind me of my childhood in the early 70s. A kind of an earthy, sincere but passionate feel.