On Friday night I went to the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition at the V&A museum.  Decode bills itself as showcasing “the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.” and on the whole it lives up to this.

The exhibition begins with an interactive light and sound installation – lights shaped like reeds that react as you walk through them. It was fun, and interactive, and a great introduction to the exhibit. The next part was devoted to artworks rendered by code, graphical representations of mathematical algorythms and live infographics. All quite pretty, but a number of them were on small 19 inch screens set into walls that required visitors to be up close and personal, and viewable by only 1 or 2 people at a time. These pieces would have been much more impressive if displayed at a larger scale, or projected onto larger spaces.

The rest of the exhibit was dedicated to interactive pieces. My favourite exhibit was called Oasis – a lightbox covered in sand that acted like a pond. Shifting the sand around caused AI fish and amoebas to appear that grew and swam around. Fun, cute and a great way to get people interacting. I did however think it needed to have a bit more colour – black fish/amoebas on a white background covered in black sand meant that sometimes the little fish/amoebas got missed. Colour would help them standout and perhaps create more visual feedback, for example changing colours the longer the fish has been in existance.

It was also a shame that some of the bigger interactive pieces were either away being repaired, or not functioning correctly on the night.  One of the perils on these types of works is that technology tends to be fragile. Things break, programs crash or freeze or sometimes they stop working for no reason.

Despite that it was still a good exhibit overall. I would have liked it to be bigger, to have more works but for £5 I’m not going to complain. I’d definitely recommend it as worthwhile, especially for the varying styles of interaction on show and also for the sheer novelty factor of being in a venue like the V&A for such a nerdy show!

Edited 11/02

It has been brought to my attention that the Decode exhibition was actually done as a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a digital arts organisation. onedotzero look like they’re doing some interesting stuff, so go check them out.

Meredith Farkas has put up some preliminary results of her Biblioblogosphere Survey, and there’s some interesting stuff there.

The figures for the percentage of bloggers being academic v public are interesting as it makes me wonder what the other 37% do.

2. Back in 2005, only 19% of bloggers were public librarians while 44% were academic librarians. In 2007, that gap is closing. Now, 33.6% of all library bloggers work in academic libraries and 29.3% are public librarians.

Also, this quote made me smile:

6. Want to be happy? Well, you may want to become a school librarian, work in a law library or work for a consortium or library system, because those three got the highest scores for job satisfaction.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the final results of the survey!

Meridith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free, and Social Software in Libraries, is conducting another survey of the biblioblogosphere (the results from the 2005 survey are here), which you can participate in here. I think the results will give interesting insight into the biblioblogosphere and the way that it has been changing and growing. It’ll be nice to have a bit more of a presence from UK and legal library bloggers as well – I think we’ve grown a lot in the last year, and it would be good to see how much.

Go forth and participate!

The Telegraph has a service (is it new? I’m not sure. I haven’t noticed it before, and it still seems a little unfinished, so I’m thinking it can’t be that old), where you can subscribe to a limited selection of news articles. They have created a few broad categories (sport, news, opinion, business, and so on) and have selected a number of resources that you can feed into an RSS stream. And, somewhat shockingly, they aren’t just recommended Telegraph columns, but things from all over the internet, including columns from their competitors (they offer feeds from the Times and the Guardian).

Now it is very limited (you can’t add in any other feeds, but can only select from what they have made available). And it is a little clunky (it’s all ajax, which I don’t really like as a functional platform – it’s too prone to slowness). But I quite like it nonetheless.

It feels to me like the gateway drug of RSS – not quite as hardcore as setting yourself up with feeds and a feedreader, but you can have a small selection of things to read. It’s the sort of thing you might suggest to your not-terribly-net-savvy parents, or to someone with limited English. You would move on from there to a real RSS reader – probably GoogleReader, as the format is somewhat similar. It’s enough to get you hooked on the crack that is RSS, but not so daunting as having to go out and actually track feeds down yourself. And I really like the fact that they’re not limiting themselves to Telegraph resources, but are expanding their options to other sources. I think it’s worth checking out.

Many apologies for the lameness of our posting – we have both been beset on all sides with many many things to do, keeping us from the blog. As some small means of recompense I present you with this, pretty much entirely un-library related, list of interesting links. I don’t remember where most of these came from – they are the result of clearing out a backlog of two months worth of saved interesting links.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension: Awesome visualisation of string theory and dimensions. Makes my brain hurt a bit, but very interesting.

The Crossing: Beautiful flash game by Orsinal (actually, all of their flash games are beautiful, but this one has little deer! What is there not to like?)

blawg.com list of lawlib blogs: Loooooong list of law library blogs. If I wasn’t so information overloaded already, I might even give looking at it it some thought.

Slacker: More internet radio! I don’t think this is new, I just think I missed it, but as the first track it played on the Alternative station was The Decemberists, it’s already won me over :)

iTunes Autorate: An autorater for iTunes that makes me wish I had a Mac. I never remember to rate tracks in iTunes, and having it auto rate things according to how often I skip/play tracks would be kinda cool. Not terribly useful, but still kinda cool.

Five Ways to Mark Up the Web: A Techcrunch post talking about different tools that let you post-its or notes or other bits and pieces on webpages.

Screengrab: A Firefox extension that lets you take screengrabs of the entire length of a webpage, and save it in a variety of different formats. Handy tool.

Boomshine: Incredibly simple and incredibly addictive little online game. Soothing music too. I’ve wasted far too much time playing this.

listeningtowards: Lectures available for download. Amongst the most popular are Kurt Vonnegut and Bill Bryson – there are over 1000 on there, so there’s bound to be something to slip into the mp3 player for those long dull commutes.

Lumosity: Brain training games to improve memory and processing speed – it makes me feel a bit like a computer in need of an upgrade, but it’s interesting to do.

You Don’t Know Jack: has reinvented itself as a web game! C’mon – you all remember it don’t you? And now it’s snarky trivia-tastic-ness is right there in my browser!

The essential guide to piracy: Remember kids, piracy is wrong. But if you’re going to pirate, pirate safe, kay? No one wants the RIAA (or their international counterparts) on their tail.

46 essential KM blogs: Being up to my ears in knowledge management recently has made me check out all the KM blogs around. (Repeat after me – I don’t need another blogging scene to get involved in. I don’t, I don’t)

Entropia Universe: not!Second Life. I haven’t downloaded this yet, nor do I use Second Life, so I’m not really in a position to make comparisons. It’s setting itself up as a competitor though, so it’ll be one to watch out for.

and now, time for sleep. I promise we’ll try and by more regular with the posts now though, really.