Ballinasloe Blogger’s Blatant Ballot Boost Bid

The Boy Johnny has gone and gotten himself nominated again for this year’s Irish Blog Awards.

So, in keeping with the tradition of all of the free publicity that I have been giving MaguiresMovies here on ThoughtPort, why don’t you all flock to the awards site in vast numbers and cast your votes before the fifteenth. He is in the Best Arts and Culture section.

John coped exceedingly well with not winning the award in oh-six, but he has high hopes for this year...

2006 The Year In Review: Friend’s Blogs

Being an annual assemblage of sundry content from within my nano-quadrant of the blogosphere.
Partly to redress the navel-gazing aspect of my previous post, and mostly because it would be fun to do. I decided I would share some of my personal highlights from my friend’s collective bloggings and flickrings over the previous twelve months. Seeing as Time magazine has made “You” (yes, they do mean you) their Person Of The Year for 2006 and that we are all now participants of the great Web 2.0 social-networking group-consciousness uber-mind, then it is worth celebrating that in some way at the year’s end. Anyway, who says that link-lists are still the lowest form of blogging?
Benny has two pretty prolific blogs, so I will start with him. I really liked this Tarantino illustration he did for BennyPix. While over on the darker side, at his alter-ego’s site Metal Ruins Lives, he gave us this happy little pastoral scene. Yes, Quite, Indeed. Also, while not strictly much of a website, his moody electronia is available for listening here.
Daragh’s roving camera eye gave us this neat photo of me and Ethan, and I do kinda like this cool little doodle.
Hilary Kenna kick-started Type4Screen this year (she built it in WordPress too: we’re not worthy, we’re so not worthy). I find her posts looking at the characteristics of individual typefaces most interesting. Dave Suttle’s post ‘from the coalface’ was noteworthy as it addressed some of the day-to-day realities of designing for electronic media. Can we have some more of that please? Hilary also flickred this photo which still totally cracks me up every time I look at it. Sumo-tastic. Dave’s photo of Sam covered in dinosaurs also gets an honourable mention for general creepy-crawleyness.
John Maguire writes weekly movie reviews, which a least gives him some sort of schedule which the rest of us lack. Always a great man for turning a phrase, he is at his most enjoyable whenever taking a hatchet to the more crass outputs of the Hollywood machine. His critique of this particular cultural crime being an appropriate example: “I remember there were lots of colours and loud noises.”
Ruth and Eoghan were kept busy with baby Killian for most of this year, but he still made it online too. Photogenic or what?
Declan and Barb were in London, where Dec took this neat photo of Big Ben and this one of a Polish-Mexican restaurant, Yum! (They did lots of other stuff too.)
Claire and Michael went to Korea and Japan this year, their photos only make me want to go back east again. Jealous much? Indeed.
And finally, just to tire you out, there was Luke’s exhausting account of his successful completion of the Devizes to Westminster race last April. I think that I need to lie down after that one.
While I hope I did not miss anyone, no doubt I have. Lets see how many of the rest of my friends make it into my blogroll by this time next year.

Is This Legible?

You are reading this on a screen, most likely on the CRT or LCD display of your primary computer, possibly on the small screen of your PDA, or even, at a stretch, on your smart phone.* Do you ever think about the layers of technology involved in getting this post from its origins on my PDA screen onto your screen? The last step in that sequence – the visual expression and rendering of letters and words onto your screen – is the interesting specialism of my friend Hilary Kenna. Hilary is now blogging as part of her PhD research programme. You can read her musings, cogitations and insights about on-screen (and sometimes even off-screen) typography at Type4Screen.

In a world where the amount of on-screen content is multiplying exponentially this has got to be a fruitful area of research. Admittedly, this sort of topic is appealing for design-nerds like me, but I think it can be of interest to a broader audience as well.

Having not given this topic too much thought before, I am personally most interested in the area of text on mobile screens. Most of Thoughtport is written on my Palm PDA screen in twenty minute bursts and that device’s on-screen text representation is adequate for that task. But, after reading a few novels on my PDA, I have abandoned it as a tool for long-form commuter reading. (Whether that decision was a function of the quality of the on-screen glyphs and any attendant eye-strain. Or whether my decision was driven by the allure of the insistent podcasts one wheel-click away on my iPod menu. I have not decided yet.) In my experience the PDA is far more useful as a writing tool than as a reading tool.

I am taking it that it can surely only be a matter of time until somebody solves the challenges restraining the arrival of the ‘iPod Of Reading’. Delivering on the promise of that is really going to require a serious quality bump in the legibility of handheld screen text. Even today, reading The Economist’s editorial about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the PC reminded me that the modern mobile phone is a computer in all but name, and that is how the majority of the world’s population are receiving, transmitting and managing their data. That is the current situation, not in some notional future. Where PCs are not available, mobile tech is propagating wildly. Great swathes of the world’s people are just never going to be interested in sitting in front of a PC screen. Here in Ireland I think we are still more fond of our large screens. Yes I can read my Gmail on my Nokia mobile phone, and I have tried it once just to see how it works. But I am not going to do so regularly at this stage, because the on-screen experience simply is not adequate yet.

If I was researching and thinking about text on-screen in 2006 and after, I would be looking beyond the traditional canvas of the PC screen, I would be interested in how we are going to best read, say, locations on our in-car GPRS screens, or geo-tags on my mobile, or always-on realtime Bloglines feeds on my iRead and so forth. More seriously, beyond tech-nerd frivolity, mission-critical applications like air-traffic control screens, or bedside patient monitoring screens in hospitals do come to mind...

Whatever the technological platform, we are all soon going to be reading far more text on small screens, in daylight and in poor light and on the move. Of course type design will have to play a pivotal role in adding value to that experience. Exciting times lie ahead.

—
* I am excluding the myriad possible non-screen eventualities such as that you are either reading this on paper in the handsome leather-bound edition of ‘The Complete Thoughtport: Volume One 2004–2021’ (as published in 2058) or that you are having it wired directly from ‘The Twenty-First Century Internet Archives’ into your brain via wetware implant in some far-flung future.

Delicious Tags: Hilary Kenna | On-Screen Typography | Graphic Design
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Melt/Flow

My mate Luke has put his snow-boarding blog on hiatus. Obviously, he was tired of getting bombarded with zillions of inbound page-views from the link I have had on the ThoughtPort blogroll for the last year (wink). He has not hung up his snowboard and taken to sitting on his posterior like the rest of us. He has not given up on his blogging either. Rather, he is off on another earnest sporty adventure. This time training for an ever-so-slightly completely mental 24-hour canoe race. Go on and make yourself feel all unfit, (and learn about boat tippiness) by reading all about his progress at his, er, Paddlelog.

Critic at Large on the Interwebs

My old buddy John Magure has taken the plunge and started his own movie-related blog. On balance this can only be a good thing for the Internet, if not for humanity as a whole.

Check in there for his unmediated opinions on all things movie-related – as well as whatever else wanders through his mind. A good starting point is his recent post on sequel-itis. The one where he described Patrick Swayze an ‘elbow-faced meat puppet’. John has a unique way with words.

Snowguy

A big call-out to Luke whose snowboarding weblog (see my blogroll below) was name-checked in last Saturday’s Guardian Unlimited Travel.
Way to go Luke!
I hope any resultant spike in traffic did not knock the old server too much.

Hi Dave!

You know I was reading recently that of the umpty-gazillion whatever blogs that are now out there in the blogosphere, about 60% are mostly inactive. So I guess that my one sometimes falls into that category.

Also, seeing as I was mostly using this as a link-repositry for books to buy and read, and that after then buying and not getting around to reading most of them, I have not been using my blog for that purpose either.

Do I sound like I am justifying myself? Enough of that then. Look, there are some new buttons in my Blogger dashboard, so I am off to try out some of the new tricks available.