When will this happen? Ummm…….yeah. Maybe spring break? for now, it sits here being ugly.
Everyblock is both fascinating and scary at the same time. It filters an assortment of local information by location so you can keep track of what’s happening in your own neighbourhood, right down to your own block.
I just ran my own address, and even though it didn’t find much for my exact street, I am astonished by the depth of information pulled in from the surrounding area - business licenses, a murder (murder!), lots of theft under $300, some narcotics (marijuana under 30 grams) charges and one possession of crack(seriously?), some real estate information, etc. What is especially surprising is the huge number of sources being aggregated, from a Chicago Public Radio story looking for Pakistani born Chicagoans reactions to Bhutto’s death to police records (one of my neighbours was murdered? what!?) to a “missed connections” ad on Craiglist, to city business licenses, both large news papers, and what appears to be fire department logs.
On the one hand, great aggregator. On the other hand, how much information do we need? Sometimes I struggle with aggregators - I am overloaded with things I don’t need to know, but as an information junkie, want to have just because I can have it.
The bonus, of course, is that I live in an area of Chicago often referred to as being rough, yet the crime for my neighbourhood is much, much more mild and run of the mill than for the gold coast, which I checked after my own. Chock full of sexual assaults, cocaine, and other serious crimes.
Some great visualizations of how Flickr works, via Flickr, naturally: a simple version, and below, a more complex one, via Bryce Glass at soldierant.
Over on Multicultclassics, a nice example of the most overused African-American stock image in the ‘families’ category. I believe these two were also on a United Way poster recently. This is not a critique of the models, by the way, but of the advertisers and marketers who chose those models, and who appear to have one ‘go-to’ black image, one which incorporates very, very light skinned people as representative of African-Americans, and is comfortable with representing an AA family as one with a child and one female parent. I notice more and more lately, especially after reading excerpts of model Alek Wek’s recently released autiobiography, how oddly African-Americans are portrayed, especially in American advertising and marketing communications, and I can’t help but wonder how we all internalize that representation. Wek made the cover of Elle magazine in November 1997, and at the time that was considered a very daring choice, since the traditional assumption about covers is that magazines with dark-skinned models sell fewer copies than covers with caucasian or light-skinnned models. Think about that for a moment - in 1997, it was considered a daring move to put a woman with dark skin on the cover of an American magazine. In 1997.
Every day, I look at things that were designed by professional designers, and I think about how every piece was designed for a specific function on every single thing you own, and the best comment I have ever read about design was from an Amazon reader, who wrote that the Kindle looks like technology as designed by civil servants. There is a lot of poorly designed product out there, and even more badly designed advertising. Lets mock it!
This theme, that is. I am using my site to give a hand’s on demonstration of how themes work. Also, comments are now disabled, because I have enough cialis and porn, thanks.