State Department wades into Internet Information Design

Hillary Clinton's State Department is trying it's hand at the sort of online social networking savvy that served her boss so well during his campaign.

Their new site, Opinion Space, is a sort of left wing/right wing map that visually illustrates "which ideas result in the most discussion and which are judged most insightful by the community of participants," based on 5 "central" issues that Ms. Clinton, it seems, has chosen to focus on.

The software was created by the Berkeley Center for New Media and uses Principal Component Analysis from advanced mathematics to plot your overall opinion as a point (or star) in the constellation of other viewpoints.

"Opinion Space is designed to 'depolarize' discussions by including all participants on a level playing field," says BCNM director Ken Goldberg.

SF Gate's Tech Blog has a more extensive post highlighting the experimental version of about a year ago. One concept that seems missing from this version is the idea of "landmarks" (blue dots) that represent the opinions of public figures… for obvious reasons, given the host.

The largest problem I see with this is the standard limitation with polls - the questions define the debate. I had trouble with the first question, as I think nuclear proliferation is a serious international issue, but that a nuclear armed terrorist is an extremely unlikely occurrence. Remember, the last try involved an underwear bomb. We are not talking rocket scientists here, as yet.

However, the social rating/Ranking aspect is vastly interesting - I am wondering how this map is going to look in a month - mostly to the left is my guess. Unless Fox does a piece on it, of course.

I guess my favorite thing about this is that the State Dept. is leveraging the intellectual property of academic research and development in the real world.

It's no iPad... and that's a good thing.

Update: A couple more articles on the Microsoft Courier's current devolution, as Gizmodo calls it. I still think the interface idea is interesting, and is a step towards a more visual and less folder- and file-based use of the 'desktop' metaphor - it also seems to allow more cross-application sharing of data than the iPad. Saving you a click through, Gizmodo's latest article is based on this Engadget post.

Update: A friend said the book metaphor was dated, but I contend that it is not a book, it's two monitors, upping productivity.

Gizmodo has posted pictures and video of Microsoft's new "tablet" - which, it turns out, is more of a 'booklet'. The video is very much worth watching, especially if you are an interaction designer.

I happen to think this is FAR closer to what I had hoped the iPad to be.


Instead we got this:

JavaScript Java Sketch

Harmony is a fun and engaging javascript based drawing tool. It is instantly usable and has an uncanny ability to make the most inane doodling look good.

This amazing little web app was built by a web designer and developer named Ricardo Cabello.

This was created by "playing with various drawing algorithms" and the new HTML5 spec's <canvas> tag.

It is loads of fun - I did the little doodle on the left in about 5 minutes. Click on it for the full size version.

Graphic Design of the '70s

The van is just about the coolest movable canvass ever invented. Unfortunately, a certain segment of airbrush 'artists' got their hands on it in the '80s and well, I am sure you have seen the poorly proportioned results.

But those earlier, graphically pure vans live, on the streets of LA, and around the southwest, where rust has yet to claim them.

Joe Stevens has been chronicling both their current social environment and their slow demise (partly blamed on the "cash for clunkers" program).

Not so sure about the horizontal scroll used here - a more up date version of that coming next.