Imogen Heap: "Just For Now"

A fantastic YouTube clip to start your Monday. Imogen Heap sings a round with herself, mixing it in real-time.

Blackle.com is the new green

Heap Media has responded to Mark Ontkush's observation that a black background version of Google would save 3000 Megawatt-hours a year by going ahead and building one.

From a usability perspective, white type on black is clearly harder to read, so I don't think this is a final design answer. But I like how Blackle sparks conversation about new and better ways to green the web. Kudos.

(Thanks to Todd for showing me this.)

Second Chance Trees

Oh, I love this. Another great example of how Second Life can help spark conversation, and foster real-world progress... in this case on the issue of reforestation. (from 3pointD)

Greening the urban fabric

Check out this post in BLDG on the New York Bike-Share Project. A fantastic idea—both convenient and human-scale. I'd love to see someone do this here in San Francisco.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas @ TED

Holy cow.

Memory lane

Also in Underwire this week, Edwin Tofslie's super cool poster showing the evolution of Apple product design from 1976 to the present.

SL Challenges Real World Bureaucracy

A great story from Underwire, suggesting how virtual worlds and, for that matter, contests, can enable positive social change:

"Frustrated with the lack of movement and community involvement with a plan to build a new garden in the central Halles area of Paris, local residents started a competition within Second Life to come up with possible designs for the real world location. While the association knows that the winning design (whose creator won 275,000 Linden dollars) won't be implemented because it doesn't consider real world conditions, they're hoping the competition will put pressure on the mayor to move this project along. It's been in talks since 2004."

Imagine if SL had existed a few years ago, while closed-door groups were debating what to do with Ground Zero...

Outside.in widget

I often tell clients that the two most exciting areas for innovation, across industries, are extreme local and global interconnectedness.

I've been working on an extreme local digital media report for awhile now, covering the latest platforms for networking and community building, only to discover repeatedly that Outside.in is already investing in many of the principles and features I've been looking for.

And this morning, thanks to my neighbor Sexy Widget, I see that Outside.in is opening up its site, with a widget that displays and accepts local news tied to the user's zip code:

"This widget has important implications for Outside.in for a number of reasons. On the distribution side, by freeing up its content so that it can show up anywhere, Outside.in has just sweetened the pot for local content publishers in terms of potential distribution reach. This is a big deal, as unlike Google News, Outside.in is not a crawler driven business. It relies on content that is manually and explicitly submitted via its site, and only after a registration.

There are also benefits on the marketing side. While the widget serves as a distribution platform for Outside.in content, it also serves as a marketing tool to attract more consumers and producers of local content." (Sexy Widget)

I'll be installing the widget myself and giving it a whirl later this week. I'll let you know what I think.

Cycles of culture

In his recent SALT talk, Steven Johnson plugged the book Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti. I just finished it, and it's hands-down one of the best analyses of literary history I've ever read.

Moretti practices what he calls "distant reading," looking at the full literary output of a society over time. His models—the graphs, maps, and trees of the title—bring some hidden cycles of human culture into sharp relief. He also offers some tentative, but compelling hypotheses regarding how and why new artistic forms arise, evolve, and decay.

P.S. Anyone interested in an engaging debate about cycles of artistic form should also check out the discussion of music—and specifically, David Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain on Music"—taking place in the North American Future Salon Yahoo! group. Look for the subject header "Accelerating Change."

Marketing vs. advertising vs. branding

Funny and accurate. (As seen on kottke.org.)

Plunge in CD Sales Shakes Up Big Labels

From today's NYT:

"Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. 'Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,' Mr. Sinnreich said, 'and then everything goes kaput.'”

Open-source museums, open-source art

In April I attended the super fun opening of OSMOSA -- the Open-Source Museum of Open-Source Art -- in Second Life. I'm glad I went back a month later to see how far SL residents had pushed the concept of free, fully editable art in a free, fully editable museum. Check it out.

(Thanks to Kenny Hubble for the party invite.)