also on peterme, peter talks about the interface culture panel and also mentions scott mccloud (author of the awesome understanding comics). the latter made me think back to the animation, comics and film: narrative on the web panel at sxsw that taylor moderated, and which unfortunately sucked all kinds of ass. a very rich topic that had tons of potential instead became a stupid clipshow. wtf? in fact, i don’t even think there was a single discussion on the panel about narrative on the web. nothing about how interaction plays a part, or the shift from low to high bandwidth, or about the uniqueness of the computer-based screen medium, about experimentations with narrative, the combination of audio and visual data, how hypertext and dynamic data changes and effects how narrative needs to be considered, nada.
now, on the other hand, i thoroughly enjoyed the interface culture panel, as matt predicted, it was (for me at least, i overheard some people hating it) the best panel of the conference. tons of issues discussed, the most interesting being about creating webs of trust (an interest of mine for the past half-year or so). an issue for me was trust of the trust broker. it occurred to me that unfortunately, for most sites, you aren’t given the algorithms or exact composition of your web of trust. sort of also related to the profile that’s built about you by a company like amazon, which may or may not even be accurate. two thoughts occurred to me: when i doctor gives me any kind of exam or care, the medical data is mine, why then, for profiles that are accumulated on me that can be even more personal, is that information owned by the company? and 2) if i were to accumulate all this data and were able to keep it with me, how would i store it? ideally, i’d like to see some sort of transparency, ie at least if they collect all this data, i should be able to see it. perhaps, it might be possible for a personal profile to be formed that would reside at a trusted source. this is leading back, perhaps to a /. post that i mentioned earlier…