I've been hearing that word lately all over the place...
Serendipity:
1) The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2) The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3) An instance of making such a discovery.
I described to a few del.icio.us RSS feeds and it's like a little piece of serendipity in my mailbox everyday.
Anyways, through that I discovered ITConversations which is a wonderful little audio archive of conference lectures. Interesting talks by Malcolm Gladwell, Alex Steffen, and others. (I've only gotten through a few of them but I'm sure that the other clips are equally engaging. And if you register, you can use the dandy "queue" tool to keep track of what you want to hear next).
I love this queue idea. I've muddled over the idea for a while since hypertext (while a god send) is extremely disruptive to narrative. I like the "InfoCollector" found on the Ars Electronica site. And Functioning Form has suggested another way to keep track of related weblog entries. Now if it could actually transcend one url......
Maybe that's where attention.xml comes in?
Information overload, oh my...
I went to the Skyharp talk (part of the SoundPlay festival) the other day. It was okay... nothing new since the artists aren't the most hi-tech people though they are really able to bring in an organic quality to their compositions.
The odd thing was that it was sponsored by the architecture program. I continually asked myself what Skyharp (a nature-driven sound art piece) had to do with architecture (building man-made objects) but it all made sense when one of the arch professors said that he recently attended a symposium. Three topics came up over and over again:
(a) meta-data of physical spaces
(b) mapping
(c) embodiment
Hot issues, indeed. I have to wonder if it's really an emergence of a new way of thinking (more of a reaction, I suppose, towards the influences of computer technology and telecommunications) or if it's just trendy.
Oh and check out the Mutation Workspace project by cellophan.de. That poster looks eerily like my Blog City project. (Once again, a reminder that everyone's brains must be connected.) I think the image is just for illustration purposes because they instead use a matrix of numbers on the actual site. Check out the other projects too... interesting stuff.