I just finished writing a plugin for WordPress called Wikipop. This was my first WordPress plugin, and I was pretty surprised at how straightforward the process was. If you’re thinking about getting your hands dirty, check out the Plugin API page, which is really all you need to get started. Anyway, the point of the plugin is to let you link to Wikipedia articles from your posts without totally derailing your readers. Links open in an inline window like this.
I recently got to spend an hour talking to some representatives from the New York Times, and I was reminded how great some of the stuff they’re doing online is. The basic format of nytimes.com isn’t revolutionary (though it is well-designed and easily navigable, which in general is a revolution in news sites I could totally get behind), but if you keep an eye on those article sidebars and special section callouts, you will occasionally come across one of their understated yet ingenious “interactive features”. The Times may be suffering lately, with their new building mortgaged and a first-quarter loss of $74 million, but stuff like this makes me believe they have a better shot of surviving in the digital age than any of their competitors.
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I definitely don’t intend to be in the business of making posts here that consist only of one quote or link to something else without any commentary or original ideas from me. HOWever, the following is the quote I mentally reference most often in my daily life, and it’s one that informs both what I do every day and what I hope to be covering in this blog. So I’ll post it as a sort of kickoff, and you can do with it what you will. All further posting will consist only of the most carefully crafted original thoughts and speculations from yours truly. Probably.
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One category of blip that seems to be frequenting my radar lately has to do with a certain kind of information design. This subcategory seems like it deserves a better name than “information design,” in that it serves to take great heaps of shapeless data and make something beautiful and interesting out of it. On second thought, maybe that’s what all of information design is meant to do. Maybe it all deserves a less boring name.
In any case, in this sub genre I’m talking about, the purpose is not to, say, take weather data and make cool charts out of it, or creatively show people how they could be saving more on their taxes with a color-coded deductions table — it’s to take a whole category of information that you never would have thought to look at, and creatively squeeze it through a series of algorithms, filters, and visualization subroutines until it becomes something really thought-provoking.
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