This article talks about an interesting piece of research in Israel on the scientific definition of beauty, and how to algorithmically manipulating images to make people appear more attractive. The results are pretty impressive (pun intended).
Wing pointed out to me that WordPress ships with a plugin, Akismet, which helps defeat comment spam. I thought I’d give it a go, so until further notice comments are back!
Interesting post giving one opinion on the mistake AOL and Microsoft made by not buying YouTube. The comments are almost as interesting to read as the post itself, with opinions being quite polarized. I tend to agree that much of what Google bought was the community, since I suspect the technology under the covers isn’t anything startling. Additionally, some of Google’s success is in keeping operational costs low by leveraging their common environment. It wouldn’t surprise me if first order of business is going to be a rebuild of YouTube based on the Google Video service.
Jeff Han’s amazing presentation at TED 2006 (alternate) shows what he believes is the future of machine interaction.
As the amounts of digital information grow exponentially, and information models get ever more complex, his point is that we need less interface, not more. This demo looks incredibly intuitive for doing some quite complex tasks, and the important thing it — as he says a number of times — that “the interface just disappears”.
I’m always amazed at the richness of applications that people are creating to run in the browser. Gliffy is a fantastic application that look and feels a lot like the original Visio, before it suffered feature-itis and bloated into a full office application.
My old colleague Andy Stanford-Clark made the mainstream media in the UK with an article in the Daily Telegraph on IBM’s recent Innovation Jam. It’s not as humerous as his llama video, but certaily carries a little more prestige. Congratulations!
Chartreuse have an extremely insightful post on why Paris Hilton is such a phenomenon.
For many years I resisted the lure of Amazon as I really didn’t see the point in buying books or music online when I could go to the local book shop, browse and pick up what I needed. The experience was more comforting and the instant gratification beat waiting a week for it to ship. The cost saving for buying online just wasn’t enough, and was often offset by the shipping costs. Read the rest of this entry »