Blockies lets you annotate the planet even more than you have done already. You take a photo on your cameraphone, put a sticker with a unique code where you took the pic, send it to blockies.com with the code appended in a message. Now anyone passing just needs to message blockies, GET your unique code… and they get the photo. “Photo graffiti”, they call it. Now, to batch upload to both Blockies and Flickr… [via We make money not art]
Google Maps UK
19 April 2005
Yep, it’s live: Google Maps UK. Same features as the US version but without the creepy satellite photos (yet). Pretty accurate, good route-finding (although it automatically assumes A-roads are faster than anything else, which is not the case in London), and all the business data is taken from Yell so it’s got lots of great stuff in. Like, for instance, all the Indian restaurants near me. The top link, Indigo, I can strongly recommend.
Recycled Plasticbag
19 April 2005
Tom Coates has redesigned Plasticbag. He’s worried about people not liking it; I say don’t worry. It’s a design that will support the longer blocks of text that Tom’s moving towards. It’s also a very pleasant site to read text on – too many people design sites badly for longer blocks of text, partly because they assume that everyone reads in RSS now. It reminds me a lot of Interconnected, another site that I love reading posts on (as opposed to merely from).
I’m also a big fan of the archives; perhaps the date-based stuff could be laid out better, but I do like the simple breakdown of each category.
I’m now a bit worried about the current look of Infovore; I’m still working out how to use the site, what sort of material will be posted on it, and how best to present that. It’s not even that I like redesigning; I just feel the content could be better presented. Tweaking, I think, could be the way forward.