New Findings: 04/01/2007

Monday, April 30, 2007

Dandelife: blogging about the past?

Dandelife describes itself as a "social biography network." Very interesting concept. The idea of "blogging" your stories of the past, your memories, strikes me as potentially very fruitful. I'm interested in seeing how they work the publishing angle. People who want to do this seriously will want their content to be very portable. I also see the potential for extensive educational uses (think of it as an easy entree into oral history-like applications for students and their families).

Related sites of interest:

Sponit: basically one-off blog entries.

Panraven (just got a beta invite): sophisticated multimedia storytelling; format mimics a printed book with multiple pages per story and flexible text and image layouts.

Then there's always the "datablogging" site Reger.com, which I've been curious about for some time.

Martin Parr's collection of boring postcards

From

and

Martin Parr, Boring Postcards ($20) and Boring Postcards USA ($25), both published by Phaidon.

Friday, April 27, 2007

A new take on social bookmarking: Meshly

Meshly: social bookmarking via IM

I am really digging this service. It's the quickest and simplest way to post bookmarks to a central repository that I've found yet, and the social aspect of the service is simple and clearcut, too. Appears to have a small but strong community around it. This is a link to my personal page. I wish it supported auto-bookmarking to del.icio.us, and I wish the RSS feeds included permalinks to bookmarked pages.
- post by nathanrein

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Sky

0424071718

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The "Not So Big House": links & resources for human-sized living

This is a great book.

clipped from www.notsobighouse.com

The Not So Big House books by Sarah Susanka, bring to light a new way of thinking about what makes a place feel like home—characteristics that many people desire of their homes and their lives, but haven't known how to verbalize.

The inspiration for The Not So Big House came from a growing awareness that new houses were getting bigger and bigger but with little redeeming design merit. The problem is that comfort has almost nothing to do with how big a space is. It is attained, rather, by tailoring our houses to fit the way we really live, and to the scale and proportions of our human form. Two must-read articles about this topic include Cultural Creatives: The Rise of Integral Culture, by Dr. Paul Ray and a recent interview with William McDonough in Newsweek magazine entitled Designing The Future.