Tuesday, April 07. 2009
If you're like us, you're constantly looking for things in your neighborhood, whether it's [restaurants in zurich] or a new [dentist in houston]. If you specify your location in your query, we often show your results on a map. But we've noticed that much of the time users make simpler searches, like [restaurants] or [dentist].
We like to make search as easy as we can, so we've just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don't type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you. (Click on the image to view larger.)
How do we guess your location? In most cases, we match your IP address to a broad geographical location. You can also specify your likely location using the "Change location" link on the top right corner, above the map. We try to make our guesses as good as they can be so that whether you're shopping for [groceries], [sporting goods] or [flowers], or looking for your [bank], your [gym], or the [post office], you can just say what you want, and we'll try to find it right where you are. You can also search for specific stores or street addresses near you, like [cornelia st cafe] in New York, for example.
Or [111 8th ave] in New York.
We hope this new feature will make it just a little bit easier for you to get where you're going.
Posted by Jenn Taylor and Jim Muller, Software Engineers
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Via Official Google Blog
Personal comment:
Une évolution de Google Maps qui tend à faire des résultats de chaque recherche quelquechose de personnalisé et "localisé". C'est une tendance, littérallement un "trend" actuel du design d'information. Tout comme les résultats d'une recherche standard sur Google sont désormais personnalisés en fonction de l'historique de nos recherches passées, sauvegardées chez Google.
Ainsi, ce que l'on voit sur notre écran est personnalisé, "individualisé". C'est encore une fois une tendance actuelle, viser l'individu et la singularité (la surveillance tend également à ça). C'est "bien", mais d'un autre côté, on a parfois également besoin de partager la même chose avec un grand nombre de personne, pouvoir comparer avec d'autres (ce qu'étaient dans le fond jusqu'ici les "mass médias").
A mon avis il ne faut pas tout individualiser (interfaces, résultats de recherches, contenus, publicité, etc.) car cela forme un sentiment d'isolement. Il faut pouvoir choisir, customiser ou "tuner" entre une version individualisée et une version mass-médiatisée.
(Pictures of space-time trails in CatchBob!, nothing really related to the paper below, just found it illustrative of this digital trail notion)
Perusing “Where Were We: Communities for Sharing Space-Time Trails” by Scott Counts and Marc Smith, I was interested by this notion of “space-time trails”.
Constituted by the movement of people in space indeed forms an interesting social object. Space-time trails incorporate both a collection of spatial positions with relationships to one another along with sensor and community-based annotations (photographs, video, environmental sensor data, physiological attributes, community-based content such as tags and comments). According to the authors:
“We argue that space-time trails, or routes, include an intentionality on the part of the user that contains more information than a collection of points. A route has a start and finish, as well as properties like time, distance, speed, directional orientation, numbers of stops, and so on. When browsing, retracing, mining, recommending, and searching, these collective and relational attributes can be leveraged for a significantly richer end-user experience than could a collection of points.
(…)
The sum of these changes could be considered to be a kind of “pervasive inscription revolution”, an era in which practices of inscription explode to include almost all human actions and interactions. The signs of the expansion of inscription are visible in the behavior patterns seen in many online services.“
Why do I blog this? interested in how “routes” and “trails” becomes social documents enriched with other forms of information (beyond synchronous/real-time location-awareness). Some interesting new practices can emerge out of this and lots of issues regarding privacy are about to be discussed.
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Via Pasta & Vinegar
Personal comment:
Trails as social documents, relational & social objects.
G33 CON, a solo exhibition by the artist duo JODI
JODI have developed the outskirts of their computer-based practice to channel the dirt style animus of technological amateurism and participatory-media. JODI’s personal anthropology runs parallel to and thru the wealth of folk-practices on the world’s networks, from fax-phreaking and list-spamming to web-crashing and youtubing.
until 23 may 2009
Project Gentili, Berlin
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Via manystuff
Personal comment:
Une expo de JODI en Allemagne (le retour!). J'aime assez l'expression de "folk art" ou plutôt "folk electronic art" pour qualifier le travail de JODI. Assez intéressant que le design électronique rentre dans le champ du folk et du vernaculaire...
If you, like me, are not one of those 3,250,789 or 1,140,917 (revised version) online viewers who already watched "Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year", you will probably enjoy its huge amount of worldwide facts and its use of minimal infographic animation.
Watch the most recent, revised version of the video HERE. Does anyone know if there exists a high-resolution version?
The video, or at least its original concept, seems to originate from Karl Fisch. You can learn more on his blog about Version 2.0 and Version 1.0, which have a different visual quality.
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Via Information Aesthetics
Personal comment:
En dehors du côté "information in motion", quelques données intéressantes à connaître sur l'évolution de notre environnement contemporain (mais discutables?)
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