Notes

The TPUTH

The TPUTH had been sitting in a browser tab gathering dust for over a week, and we weren’t quite sure exactly what to make of it, until we read iA’s excellent first write-up, The TPUTH, Part I.

As it turns out, even more impressive than the impeccable design are its technological underpinnings: TPUTH is powered by the same engine as webtrendmap.com, monitoring over 9,000 high-profile Twitter accounts and mining them for data. In the words of iA:

While the machine is a geeky as you can imagine, the GUI of the backend is the very opposite. It’s easy, fast and pretty. Optimized for quickly choosing, editing, cross-referencing and publishing the best links, it allows us to publish two days of headlines in more or less 30 minutes.

As interesting as the technology behind the ‘Socially Generated, Machine Filtered, Hand Polished, Electronic Newspaper’ is iA’s follow-up post, The TPUTH, Part II, which sets out to answer the self-imposed question: “How are we going to monetize satirical over sized headlines?”.

It could be argued that TPUTH is developed as a proof of concept of what can be achieved with what is a highly monetizeable asset: a machine - the Web Trend Engine - which can read, filter, index and cross-reference relevant Twitter feeds for you and even evaluate the importance and media relevance of these links, and present them in an easy-to-publish format.

Ka-ching.

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The Periodical

The most recent entries in the Periodical and Reviews sections:

• AIGA have long fought the good fight against crowdsourcing, clearly articulating the very real issues that plague the 'winner takes all' approach to sourcing design by subcontracting it to the masses…
• In 2009, Andy Baio - a writer and entrepreneur who helped build Kickstarter - ate his own dog food and launched a Kickstarter project called 'Kind of Bloop'. The idea was elegant, and one we immediately fell in love with…
• As the old saying goes, "You only get one chance to make a first impression." Launched amid much fanfare late last week, Color is, apparently, "a miraculous application," and one of the first of many, new life-changing applications for the 'Post-PC World' in which we now live. It's also guilty of a not insubstantial degree of hyperbole…

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Learn how to build hand-crafted web pages using well-structured XHTML and lean and efficient CSS. By embracing a web standards approach, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions enables you to create web sites that not only look great in all modern browsers, but are also accessible to a wide variety of audiences across a range of platforms - from those browsing on everyday computers, to those accessing the web on the latest, emerging mobile devices.

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The Authors

In addition to their role as lecturers in interactive design at the University of Ulster at Belfast, where they have been active in promoting a web standards-based curriculum, Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson are practicing designers and digital artists. Their work has featured in a variety of design books and magazines alongside numerous internationally respected designers and they are regular speakers at design conferences and workshops worldwide.

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