Salsa Scoop

E-xemplar: Serialized Mission-Based Storytelling

 "Watching my brother be executed was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life ..." Death Penalty USA, the blog of DIA users National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, is two entries into a ten-part series called "Creating More Victims," which tells the heartrending stories of family members who lose loved ones to execution. (Here's the first, and the second.)  

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01:53 PM Dec 19, 2006 - 13 comments permalink

What Will Tomorrow's User Interface Look Like?

 In a sense, speaking of a "user interface" commits us in advance to a perspective on data manipulation that ought not pass unscrutinized. Indeed, it is one conditioned by our present-day point-and-click experience of computing -- where the things we wish to interact with are permanently alien to ourselves and can be met only through intermediary layers. But are these layers so abstract from the information behind them and the users before them? Last week's post on musical instruments offers pause to reconsider. Is it really right at any meaningful level to say that a harp numbers among "user interfaces for generating music through the vibration of strings"? A harp's interface is one with its function, with the tone it produces: give its strings instead a piano's "interface" and you have ... a piano.  

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11:59 PM Dec 18, 2006 - 9 comments permalink

Lots of Death Squads Running Around During the Last "Me Decade", Too

 Time magazine has named me -- I mean, you -- I mean, everybody! -- its Person Of The Year! Far be it from me to dismiss that as the callow audience-pandering of an entity too marketing-savvy to name Osama bin Laden the person who most affected events in 2001. I mean, my technophobic reservations, notwithstanding, any choice that gets Luce's old middlebrow warhorse tweaking the "Great Man" theory has something to recommend it. But I defy anyone to ingest in unironic triumphalism this representative puree of web 2.0 pabulum: "[w]e made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs [presumably this means good guys in flight suits and not bad guys in dynamite vests, but the great thing about the web is that you get to have it your own way. -jz] and built open-source software."  

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10:07 PM Dec 17, 2006 - 1 comments permalink

Advocacy Tools You Need, Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

 In the "vendor" portion of our role, we get to see some amusing marketing copy. Capitol Advantage this week announced a new tool called "Birthday Alerts" to help a few thousand of congresscritters' closest constituents jam their inbox or fax machine with form birthday greetings. Because clearly, what is lacking in the constituent-representative relationship is an adequate supply of webform messages that are -- their words -- "automated, fresh, and positive". I remember every time I weed out blogspam that nothing says fresh and positive like automation.  

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10:25 AM Dec 16, 2006 - 1 comments permalink

Webb Campaigner Wins DIA Election Pool

 Prior to November's election, we put out a lighthearted election pool to forecast the evening's returns. With Democrat Ciro Rodriguez' upset victory in Tuesday's runoff in TX-23, we finally have a winner. Jeff Popovich, a D.C. 501 Tech Club list reader who in September left a position as Vice President of Information Technology for a nonprofit called First Book to work on the Webb campaign and help defeat the marriage amendment in Virginia, predicted Democratic pickups in the House, the Senate, and the country's Governorships to within three seats, including a dead-on-balls accurate (it's an industry term) +32 seats in the House.  

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05:47 PM Dec 14, 2006 - 1 comments permalink

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