design goals

Cooltown

Cooltown

Howard Rheingold's book

Starfire Knowledge Navigator

To be edited

A discursive paper of the history

Useful video links to demos of the past including Starfire

Starfire

The original point and click

To be edited

The original demo of the mouse

An interview with doug engelbart

Wired interview with Doug Engelbert

What inspired them. Mr Bush

Visual representation of news reporting trends

NewsMap

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator...Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe...It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it. "

I wonder whether such tools are a good way for activists to develop awareness in ordinary people of political realities. In this instance, this tool would allow people to understand intuitively the ecosystem of newsreporting in the US. Perhaps if this was combined with a tool that showed what actual news was there at the time (and how recent it was), this could be a powerful political tool for change.

A nice addition to this, would a tool that allowed people to explore how stories develop and what makes stories explode.