I plan to attend an interesting event in Toronto tonight - a meeting of Dorkbot-Toronto.

Dorkbot-Toronto seeks to explore all uses of technology in the development and discussion of art and creative exercise. It is meant to be an informal and collaborative environment where anyone can drop in, listen to presentations, and meet others for future collaborations. We invite people across all disciplines and skill levels to attend and explore ideas of hybridization, as well as perform open investigations into electronics and code.

Meetings are always free and open to the public.

If this sounds like your kind of event, and you are around the Toronto area tonight, I suggest you check it out.

I have added a google map perspective to this post if you need directions.

Three presenters are planned for tonight:

• Jeff Mann & Michelle Teran - LiveForm: Telekinetics
• Rob Cruickshank - Spiral Inscriber
• Greg Judelman - Knowledge Visualisation

I’ve never been to one of these meetings before, but I suspect it will be pretty cool.
iUpload Perspectives Applied (what’s this):

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The boys (and girl) at iUpload are up to something…

As you may or may not have noticed, I have not made many posts lately. But, there is a reason for the lack of content - and a damn good one at that.

I have been working on a world-class blogging application with the amazing team of entrepreneurial software developers at iUpload.

Please buckle your seat belt and remain in a seated position, while I write up some of the juicy details.

In the meantime, take a look at where my mind has been in the last little while. I just happened to have started a del.icio.us account a few weeks ago, so the links it contains are a pretty good idea what I have been up to. Or, to put it visually, here is my extisp.icio.us over the last few weeks.

Wordcount is an online interactive visualization of the frequency of word usage in the English language. I created the above image after searching for echo and generation. The graph below shows how most of the time people stick to a small subset of available words.

Why I blog this? It offers a different perspective on how we use language. It is also an example of a simple, clean, and stylish flash interface which presents a massive set of data in an easy to interpret way.

via Genius Now

Here is an example of another java graph visualization, Tree by Texon. Quite pretty. Looks like they are using Processing for the smooth visuals.

tree accesses the source code of a webdomain through it’s url and transforms the syntactic structure of the website into a tree structure represented by an image. this image illustrates a tree with trunk, branches and ramifications. first each tree is initialized, than all html links are detected, chronologically saved and finally displayed.

the first tree corresponds to the domain; according to the syntax of the website each further tree that builds up represents a subpage including all existing elements. the color of these trees reflects the color values of the domain and its subpages.

The image below is the tree for this blog.

And this is the forest that appears after leaving it on long enough. (I am one of the trees on the right side)

The forest is built in real-time without any noticable refresh. Looks like an interesting art project, but there is no interactivity from what I can tell.

Why I blog this? Mark added a comment to my previous post about his visualization tool, MyDensity. I think he will enjoy the link - it seems to be fairly good example of a similar Java visualization. And to answer your question: I want it to be real-time, interactive, and visually pleasing. Basically, let me hunt with ease through the mass of data. And find subtle ways to give me more information on that data, such as using different colours, sizes, etc. But keep it simple :)

via Josh Robin via Protein

My prediction was correct - Mitch did notice my posting about MyDensity. Check out his recent RafcliffBlog post entitled Bolstering our maps.

So, how has my MyDensity graph changed? Let’s take a look:

The results are quite different than the results from a few days ago. Last time it only returned a few sites that linked to me.

The results are different than what I expected. It just seems to be a graph of the sites I link to. I was hoping to see new sites (like his) that had linked to me since I posted about MyDensity.

So I became bored and decided to use the Fengshuinate box, which I had not noticed last time. I had no idea what it did, but here is the results:

According to his 1-minute-guide:

use the Fengshuinate box to see the map of how all the sites are interconnected, which rearranges the map to show the most central sites in the network. Unchecking Fengshuinate will freeze the map in its new arrangement; the longer you leave Fengshuinate checked, the more dispersed the map will become.

It is kinda cool, but each iteration takes a while and Java visuals are hurting. The applet also consistently crashed my Opera 7.54, but Opera 8 seems fine.

Why I blog this? It relates to my previous post about MyDensity.

Mitch Ratcliffe is the founder of a small company named Persuadio. Persuadio was recently featured in Esther Dyson’s PC Forum - one of hottest annual events in the technology and venture capital worlds. Why? Because Mitch is an entrepreneur with an innovative piece of software. His company has created a free blog social relationship exploration tool called MyDensity. MyDensity maps the first two degrees of the social network around any URL. People can use it to figure out where they are and how people find them. The basic idea is to increase understanding of how people’s sites are rising and falling in popularity and where those changes start in the market.

What we hope to let you do with our tool is let you see where [on the Web] you are compared to all of these other kinds of interests and then measure how much value is somewhere and who you need to influence in order to get people to start paying attention to you.

I found out about MyDensity thru stories Mitch is posting about his ongoing entrepreneurial experiences. See his Red Herring posts entitled We’re talking real money now (Mar. 9/05), Crunch Time (Mar. 17/05), and The extraordinary lightness of entrepreneuring (Mar. 23/05).

Also check out RatcliffeBlog, his personal blog, where he announces Persuadio LLC.

Why I blog this? Because I think he is on to something.

We need more ways to visualize the heaps of metadata the Blogosphere produces. The picture below (created about 24 hours ago) shows the results of a search for this blog. This is a young blog so I did not expect any results, but I had a few.

Searching with MyDensity returns a graph that you can dig into. Needless to say I am impressed with the application. The visual interface and navigation need work but can be upgraded later - innovative functionality comes first. When the resources are available a better visual interface can be built and MyDensity could be set to kick ass. But hey… maybe I am biased?

Why I really blog this? As you may have guessed, the primary reason for this post is to attract Mitch’s attention. I would hazard a small bet that he notices. Maybe this post will help increase Echo Generations popularity. I guess I will just have to check in from time to time using MyDensity to see if it does.

If he notices this post I wager mucho dinero that the next time I use his search engine the results for this blog will be worth posting about… again. :)

via ZDNet - Startup Persuadio visualizes opportunity in the Internet’s long tail. ZDNet also hosts an audio interview with Ratcliffe (mp3).

How much can we understand about human motion using only simple cues? Take a look for yourself using BioMotionLab1.6, a flash-based visual demonstration developed by an international team of researchers headed by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Troje. Adjust four different sliders (male/female, heavy/light, nervous/relaxed, and happy/sad) to change the motion of the dots. It is amazing how much the human mind can ‘read’ from the motion, even though only minimal data is presented. I played around with it for a few minutes and found their simulation to be a fairly elegant examination of human movement using such a small number of points.

Dr. Troje holds a Canadian Research Chair in Vision and Behavioural Sciences. The Biomotion lab operates out of two locations: Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.

From the Biomotion lab site:

We are working on several aspects of visual perception and cognition. Our major interest is focused on questions concerning the biology and psychology of social recognition. That is: conspecific recognition, gender recognition, individual recognition, recognition of an agent’s actions, intentions, and emotions and personality traits.

In the past, we had mainly worked on the psychophysics and modelling of human face recognition. More recently, our focus shifted towards perception of biological motion as a major source of social information.

The goal of our current work is to provide a solid basis for the description, analysis and synthesis of animate motion patterns. We want to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the information transmitted through biological motion, its perception and underlying neuronal mechanisms. In addition to human psychophysics, we are using the pigeon as a model for ethological and neurophysiological investigations in the context of courtship behaviour, social learning, and social fascilitation.

The procedure they used to create the display will be described in detail in a forthcoming paper submitted to the Journal of Vision. Troje, N. F. (submitted) Decomposing biological motion: A framework for the analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns.

Why I blog this? I referenced it in my Cybernetics and Society (STV205) class, but was unable to actually demonstrate the visualization because I did not have a computer available at the time. To anyone from class who was interested - Enjoy :)

Today I found a great example of the type of innovation that web services allow for. Keita Kitamura and Yugo Nakamura have created an awesome flash-based visualization / book search engine / referral magnet / graphical search something called amaztype. They have used Amazon’s web services in a way that I find quite innovative. Try their Amaztype typeographic book search for yourself, I think you will also be impressed. I’m guessing they will make a fortune in referral fees for a modest amount of work - great idea.