The NY Times has a pretty interesting interactive map of homicides in NYC dating from 2003 to the present based on data provided by the police department.

Take a look at it here.

SOFTlab’s website for Urban A&O was featured in Net Diver’s 10 year Anniversary Web Issue. Check out the Architectural Website Strategies article by Elsye Alam.

SOFTlab has just completed the website for our good friends Frank Gesualdi and Hayley Eber at EFGH.

The site was conceived as a pulsing array of pixels that contain the projects. After a while, it looks like the site is breathing, almost alive.

Go check it out.

Guess who has a new site? The cool kids at Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It only took them this long to get one, but they did come out in style. Awesome site, using -what looks like- Papervision. It seems like it also went up quietly just recently.

Check it out at www.dsrny.com

Oh, and welcome back Mr. Jobs.

Paris Hilton’s energy plan actually makes more sense than both McCain’s and Obama’s. I’m voting for her. oh wait, I can’t vote…

I recently received -not for the first time of course – this message requesting help. For the first time though, I actually sat down to read and redline it. Poor Miss Sandra does sound like she’s in a lot of distress, so much that she’s writing from Ivory Coast, yet the reply address -which is different from the outgoing mail address- is from India. Maybe she commutes to write emails from India. She must be spending her 5.6 million dollars flying between the two contries to write these emails…
I also appreciate the fact that there is a rose next to her name. That just tilted the balance and prompted me to -almost- help her. Or be sorry for her.
It’s all in the details folks.

The website for Joe MacDonald’s studio Urban A&O was recently launched. The project was led by Mike Szivos at SOFTlab.

Go check it out at www.urbanao.com

The group LAIRE (Live Action Interative Role-playing Explorers) is one of many groups that have been getting together for over a decade (!) at a Girl Scouts camp in NJ for LARPing (Live-Action Role Playing), exploring imaginary worlds, fighting goblins and completing quests.

Makes me wonder if they have the honey why don’t you go hunt for some baby food instead of fighting your friends with imaginary lighting bolts quest.

Hopefully none of my MMORPG playing friends will show up at the studio dressed up as an elf…

Read the Wired article here.

I’ve just come to discover Flock a new social web browser which is based on the Firefox technology. It allows you to have all those apps you don’t really want to have so easily accesible at hand: Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, RSS feeds, Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc etc etc. The can all be opened within your browser window and, heres the coolest (for me at least) you can post directly to your own blog through the web interface. It has a bunch other cool features that I’m just starting to check out.
This is the Beta release (it’s been very recently launched) but it still handles very well. This will be my first blog post directly through it so I’ll let you know how that worked out.

>> The picture uploading I ended up doing via the WordPress CMS. Flock will upload it (apparently) through whatever other service you have – it was going to upload via Facebook for me – which I don’t really want to do. It would be neato to have an extension that allows you to upload images directly from your computer without going through other services.
The tags are also added through Technorati, which create a whole new format for the tags below the posting. It’s not bad at all, it’s just not how I have it all formatted. In all, I think I’ll use it for direct text only posts. Anything with pictures I’ll keep doing via WordPress. Very cool though.

Workers at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have designed a game where the players play the part of a refugee. Among the challenges are escaping a war ridden town, getting asylum in foreign countries and starting a new life in a new place.

Read the BBC news here and play the game here.

It took me only 3 years…

The NYT had John Maeda design the cover of its latest edition of the Key Magazine, the Times real-estate magazine.
There is a short slideshow of the design process which is pretty fun and interesting.

View the slideshow here.

Thanks Mara for pointing it out.

Looking through our SOFTlab visitor statistics (nerdy I know) I stumbled upon FFFFound, an image bookmarking site which allows users to post and share their favorite images. It also recommends images dynamically based on user interests and tastes.

More design and arts based than pictures-with-my-puppies based, looks like it could become an interesting resource for cool images.

Google has recently launched Google Sky. Included within Google Earth 4.2, the SKY mode allows you to explore galaxies far-far away, the sky right above your location and perhaps even design flaws on the Death Star.

I had come across this experiment a couple of weeks ago but forgot to post it. Today, poking around my bookmarks I found it again.
It’s done in Processing and it displays about 3000 flocking elements. More on the project here.

And by all means, check the site All Manner of Distractions out. There are some amazing experiments in there.

I finally took a look at Google’s new Street View addition to Google Maps and it is truly amazing: you have a 360-degree street view which can be panned just by dragging on it. Just place the little fellow wherever you want to and take a peek of the city.
Why go visit places now when you can just sit on your behind and click your way through the world?

Just ran into this site for a visual effects guy out in Germany, Nastuh Abootalebi. At first I was looking mainly at the site design and UI, which scores a 9 out of 10 in my book. The dual screen “before & after” has been done before, but never so slick. I love that no matter what button you push or information you receive, the site remains smooth and continuous. And, if you don’t move your mouse for a bit, everything dims down so you can focus on the work.

Which is exactly what I did (after my rather short investigation of the interface).I’ve been living on the skirts of the post production world for a couple of years now, and what I’m learning is that attention to detail is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Having “The Eye”, so to speak. The ones who have it not only allow the spell of the director, editor, and designer to be cast over the viewer (suspension of disbelief), but can enhance it. Anyone can slap a robot on top of a background, but it takes an eye to really make it believable.

I highly recommend after a first viewing of this work, split the screens and take a second viewing by dragging the slider and scrubbing through the video while paused. This allows you to stop on a particular shot to see exactly what’s going on. Here are a couple of shots from the first video on the site that caught my attention. Obviously, the fx concept here is the multiplicity of athletes moving together, but to carry that through, it’s the details that count. It can become a bit of a game to find all the differences between the shots, but it’s not so much quantity as quality. The changes look believable while enhancing the shot.

Google has launched ‘My Maps’, where the creation and distribution of customized maps is a very simple process. ‘MyMaps’ gives you the ability to draw lines, create polygons and insert placemarks with just a simple click. Images and video can be embedded onto the description window as well (you’ll have to do it manually though). So, it won’t be long until we start seeing some very interesting mappings of cities. Guy Debord and the situationists would’ve been delighted.

The TED conference has begun posting videos of its speakers to the web at www.ted.com/tedtalks. They are nothing short of amazing. In particular I recommend: Rives and Richard St. John, but there are a wide variety of subjects to choose from.

TED is a conference a different ilk. First off, tickets are $6000 and you must be invited i.e. given the privilege to pay that price. Speakers must be acknowledged leaders in their industry, however it can be almost any industry. Speakers are given a strict 18 minutes to present something. This forces the subject matter to be fairly specific as well as makes for a very concise presentation. In addition, there are 3 minute mini-presentations that are awesome. Great for the web. Once you see a few of them, you realize though, that the key here is the speakers are all brilliant, critical thinkers.

I have not been to the TED conference, but I’ve had my eye on it for a few years. I first learned of it when Trollback posted a video (search for “TED 2005”) they had produced for the opening ceremonies. This is where the image above comes from and strongly suggest it be checked out as well.