David Emery Online

What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.

File under “mind blowing” and “why didn’t I think of that”.

It reminds me of when Google first released Google Maps, playing around with the draggable maps and wondering how the hell they did it without using Flash. A little light bulb went off in my (and judging by the buzzword-ification of AJAX, a fair few other peoples) head about the possibilities it revealed were possible.

This is just like that.

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Assuming this reporting is correct, I think it’s incredible that someone in his position can be so shortsighted; in the future (actually screw that; it’s already happened) people are just going to deal with being Google-able, both from the employer and employee sides. It’s going to be the same for everyone, so it’s not going to be an issue.

Without commenting on the article's argument, I nonetheless found this graph immediately suspect, because it doesn't account for the increase in internet traffic over the same period. The use of proportion of the total as the vertical axis instead of the actual total is a interesting editorial choice.

As you may have read elsewhere, Wired are currently running a ‘The Web Is Dead’ story in a fairly shameless attempt to get traffic (spot the irony). The key basis to their hypothesis is a graph of the split in overall internet traffic between web, video (which apparently includes YouTube, even though that’s a web site…), peer to peer traffic etc. However, as this Boing Boing post so clearly demonstrates, it’s an incredibly misleading graph as it doesn’t account for the fact that internet traffic as a whole has massively increased over the time period they’re graphing.

In other words, Wired are lying with graphics, and it’s pretty shameful and shameless.

What’s a Dimension then? Well, basically what it says right there on the homepage: “Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.”

More brilliant work from the BERG team.

I hated the media-creep of iTunes from the start. A dedicated ‘QuickTime Video Library’ would’ve been my preferred solution for Movies and TV shows, a rebuild of iSync to handle MobileMe and iPhone synchronization settings, and a standalone iTunes Store app (or, frankly, web site) for media purchases.

I have a real love/hate relationship with iTunes; I love the fact it has all my music in, and the power of smart playlists and the useful features it’s accumulated over the years, but simultaneously rue the fact it’s undoubtably the worst designed application Apple have.

I think it’s quite interesting that on iOS the functions iTunes does on the Mac are split out into 3 different apps (or 4 on the iPod/iPad with the Movies app) – “iPod” for media playback and organisation, “iTunes” for purchasing media and “App Store” for apps. I’d quite like to see something similar on the desktop, with the Finder handling syncing devices (don’t really need a separate app for that I don’t think).