Links for 2006-06-23 – plasticbag.org

MOG is a new attention-tracking site for music It’s a bit strange. It’s got some attention because it was linked to from BoingBoing, but I have to be honest, at first glance it looks a lot like a crappy last.fm – a site that they completely haven’t acknowledged in most of their press.
Stephen Hawking is about to argue that we have to think of cosmology backwards Rather than look for initial physical laws that have always applied and understand our universe to have unfolded from them, we instead have to view our universe as just one expression of an initial much wider set of possibilities, all of which once co-existed..
The Australian reports on the culture change of having Ray Ozzie looking after Microsoft I can’t remember if I’ve met Ray Ozzie at some event or other. If I did it was briefly. But after seeing him at ETech and from what I’ve heard of his work, I can’t help thinking he’s going to have a positive impact at Microsoft…
Paul Graham has written up his XTech keynote on ‘Why Startups Condense in America’ I’ve just re-read it and the first thing in my head is that he doesn’t pay attention to the contextual benefits that the US has in terms of global media dominance, ready availability of cash / massive living space and expansive natural resources. To an extent, having a tenth of the planet’s land-mass for 1/25th of its population has got to make it easier to accomplish good things.
Wordcount It’s a bit of a classic visualisation in Flash of the frequency of the usage of different words, but it’s a good one. Very nice indeed.
The Beazley dictionary of Classical gods, cities and things Lovely resource, with pictures and all kinds of neat stuff. Looks a bit crappy, but probably pretty easy for search engines to parse…
XHTMLized – you do the design, they build it in valid XHTML and CSS in a week for $149 I can imagine a load of friends of mine using this service. In fact, I can imagine myself doing some design work for plasticbag.org and then deciding just to give it to them to build properly rather than spending a week fighting with code outside of work
Ryan Carson announces ‘Amigo’ – a new service for hooking together advertisers and people with e-mail newsletters I have no idea whether it’ll work or not, but it’s interesting. Ryan keeps observing these very small, niche markets which actually do have money to spend, but which probably wouldn’t be large enough for bigger companies to notice. Pretty clever (if it works)
The Royal College of Art Summer Show 2006 The product-, interaction- and various other forms of applied design-show starts tomorrow (Friday). Simon, Paul and I are likely to wander down late this afternoon to get our yearly fix of inspired (and bizarre) new ideas. Good head fodder and a glimpse of the future…
Imagining Albion: The Great British Future Radio 4’s doing a show this evening about the history of Britain as expressed in Science Fiction. Looks pretty interesting, although unlikely that I’ll get near a radio to actually hear it, unfortunately.
Yahoo! Local / Maps now support Microformats “Starting today, we‚Äôre happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews”
BumpTop Prototype uses a more physically realistic desktop metaphor, while combining it with the affordances of paper It’s completely beautiful and totally insane. God knows whether this will be the metaphor for manipulating documents in a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if large chunks of this kind of interaction appear all over the place. Beautiful. Interesting.
Pitchfork presents 100 Awesome Music Videos All complete with embedded YouTube links so you can actually watch the damn things. Copyright infringement by the megaton, but it’s fascinating, beautiful and completely absorbing. I’ll be playing with this a lot this evening. Mmm. Classy.

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