danbruno.net/blog

Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamato on Yahoo! Answers: “How old were you when you first heard the term, ‘Nintendo,’ and what does the name mean to you now?”

The most expensive things at Amazon.

iTunes 7.1, which dropped a week and a half ago, came with the unexplained feature of “enhanced sort options.” If you don’t have the patience to figure out what that means, but you like organizing, Paul Mison has your back.

Essentially, each song now has fields like Sort Artist and Sort Album which change the order things are displayed in your library. So if you’re anal about organizing your collection, like I am, you can go change all the Sort Artist fields to “Hendrix, Jimi” and “Simon, Paul” so that everyone pops up in the right spot. You can do the same thing for song and album titles, but I’m not sure when that’d be necessary.

Note that while iPods respect sort fields, Front Row does not (at least not yet).

Last night I somehow came across the album Feast of Wire by Calexico. It’s one of those genre-bending experiments that’s hard to pigeonhole; I’d call it a mix of Western, Mexican, electronica, jazz, and indie rock music. You probably haven’t heard anything like it. Worth a listen. [Amazon, iTunes]

Flickr offers two ways to organize photos. The first is through “sets,” which collect them into virtual photo albums. This follows the folder metaphor that computers have used for years, so it’s fairly intuitive for casual users.

The second way is through “tags,” a new organizational method that’s all the rage these days. Each photo is assigned a number of keywords — for example, “joe sarah party nyc 2005.” Later, the user can search for all photos with a certain tag or combination of tags to pull up, say, all photos of Joe at parties. It’s an incredibly powerful and flexible system, and one that Flickr is rightly proud of.

Of course, most people are used to the folder metaphor and don’t want anything to do with tags — they just want a photo album called “Johnny’s wedding” that they can email to their friends. Even people who embrace tagging, like me, are still fond of the more traditional organization.

To that end, a Flickr user called cheesepuppet asked for the ability to create “sets of sets.” It’s a logical enough request — if you can have folders within folders on your hard drive, why can’t you have sets of sets on Flickr? The staff agreed, and said they were working on it.

That was in October 2004. Last week, they finished.

There were various excuses made for the delay — understaffing, problems of scale, higher-priority projects, and so on. I bought them for a while, but three years is a pretty long time for any new feature. Facebook, for example, rolls out new functionality on a fairly regular basis despite its staggering popularity. So what gives?

Flickr was among the first sites to use tagging, and it remains one of their identifying features. In any given interview, it’s bound to come up in at least one question. Flickr was advertised as a revolutionary photo sharing service, and much of its uniqueness was bound up in the tagging interface.

While the staff was supposedly working on subsets, many of the features that were actually released had to do with tags. They created a vastly improved search algorithm, for example, and rewrote theto make it easier to tag multiple photos at once. I don’t think the timing was an accident. Rather, I think Flickr put subsets on the back burner, despite the constant nagging form the community, and worked on their pet feature instead.

I can’t help but think that the release of subsets is a concession. “You don’t want to use our fancy new tags? Fine!“) The fact is, despite the best efforts of the staff, many Flickr users remain invested in the traditional folder metaphor and don’t really care for, or understand, tags. (See, for example, this list of photos tagged with “upon.”)

Change is slow, I suppose, even though Flickr may be loath to admit it.

Whew! Looks like I got caught up in the pre-spring break crunch. Sorry ’bout that.

File under “neat but useless”: I made an account on Twitter, one of the recent crop of shiny, colorful, user-driven, Mozilla-compatible, feed-readable, whitespace-lovin’ Internet applications — what people like to call Web 2.0. As far as I can tell, Twitter basically a glorified away message service. You can have people’s updates sent to an IM screenname or a cell phone, and you can update your own message remotely through any number of protocols and programs. My favorite is this Quicksilver script.

You can create a Twitter account here and check out my page here.

UPDATE: Twittervision places Twitter updates on a world map as they happen. Mesmerizing. (via Waxy)

From yesterday’s list of technological annoyances on Coachean Life:

1. Instant messaging. When the IM was invented, I was sort of there. Says I to me, well, that might be useful. But to be honest, I have always found that Instant Messaging prioritizes annoying way above utility. I simply do not wish to be available to anyone, anywhere, any time. Nor do I wish to give the appearance that, because I am available to anyone, anywhere, any time, and I am not somewhere responding to you at this very moment, I am doing my best to be available to anyone except you, anywhere, any time. But, of course, that is mostly the case. Most of the people who would IM me are people I do not wish to be IM’d by. My universe of the IM-worthy is very tiny. Creating such a tiny list for IMing hardly seems worth the effort. Besides, my mother doesn’t even own a computer.

I don’t like IM much either, but I do use it. It’s convenient since I’m usually on the computer anyway, and since I like cell phones even less.

It helps to humanize interactions. I use real words whenever possible (with the exception of “haha,” I suppose), and I hold my messages to the same grammatical standard as my speech. I set Adium to display people’s real names instead of the vomit of letters they often identify themselves with online. (I also used to display photographs instead of buddy icons, but after the sixth time hearing, “You used that picture of me?” I gave up.)

In the past I would go through my buddy list every so often and delete the people I didn’t talk to anymore. (I didn’t want to get sucked into compulsive away message checking; I waste enough time on the Internet as it is.) Recently I’ve taken to using IM more like a phone. I put all of the deleted names back, but reorganized the list into two groups: “People,” which is people who I talk to often, on speed dial, as it were; and “Aliens,” which is everyone else, or at least everyone who I can reasonably expect to talk to again. I keep the latter group collapsed, so my buddy list only displays the handful of people who I’m most likely to message.

With regard to the “available to anyone, anywhere, any time” issue, IM etiquette seems to have solved this — if you have an away message up, people will assume you’re screening your calls and won’t expect an immediate reply. It solves the “annoying above utility” problem quite nicely.