I've added some new links to ye old blog over the past year. Today I am adding a few more. I'd like to give extra attention to the following sites that blow my mind and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them as well!
The Bubble Project
The Bubble Manifesto:
Our communal spaces are being overrun with ads. Train stations, streets, squares, busses and subways now scream one message after another at us. Once considered "public," these spaces are increasingly being seized by corporations to propogate their messages solely in the interest of profit. Armed with heavy budgets, their marketing tactics are becoming more and more aggressive and manipulative. We the public, are both target and the victim of this media attack.
The Bubble Project is the counter attack.
The Bubbles are the ammunition.
Once placed on ads, these stickers transform the corporate monologue into an open dialouge. They encourage anyone to fill them in with any form of self-expression, free from censorship.
More bubbles mean more freed spaces, more sharing of personal thoughts, more reactions to current events, and most importantly, more imagination and fun.
We Feel Fine (this one is unreal!)
An exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds.
MINT
Refreshing Money Management
Mint is a modern, powerful, easy and secure web-based solution for managing your finances. And it’s free. You register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log-in information for the online bank, credit union and credit card accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.
Mint connects to over 3,500 US financial institutions. Your account information is updated each night. Mint automatically categorizes all your purchases, showing you how much you spend on gas, groceries, parking, rent, restaurants, DVD rentals and more, with amazing precision. An advanced alerting system highlights any unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills so you’re in constant contact with your money – effortlessly.
Mint goes way beyond just reporting. Using a patent-pending search algorithm, Mint constantly searches through thousands of offers from hundreds of providers to find the best deals on everything from bank accounts to credit cards; cable, phone and Internet plans, and more. Mint’s suggestions are “unique to you” as they are based on your individual spending patterns. For example, if you have $20,000 in a bank account that’s earning no interest, Mint might recommend a high interest rate savings account from ING or HSBC. Acting on that suggestion would give you an extra $900 in interest income over a year.
KIVA
Loans that chnage lives.
Yes, yes. This is the website I've had on my facebook profile for about 6 months now. but in case you failed to check it out, consider this another reminder.
Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
Kiva partners with existing microfinance institutions. In doing so, they gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Their partners are experts in choosing qualified borrowers. That said, partners are usually short on funds. Through Kiva.org, partners upload their borrower profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them.
You-Are-Beautiful
A photographic journey of a simple phrase that continues to travel across the globe...
The Visual Dictionary
A visual exploration of words in the real world.
The Visual Dictionary is a collaborative project to collect as many photographs of words as possible.
They aim to do this by asking you, the user, to send in your images of words, whether they be signage, advertising, graffiti, packaging, menus, written in the sky, tatoos, or made of grass - if its a single word, they'll gladly accept it!
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