01.20.09
Posted in Culture, Media, Modern Life at 12:26 am by thomas
Jason Scott over at ASCII has a rather hearty rant about the Cloud we are supposed to put all our data in. And he is absolutely right. In fact, it couldn’t be said better!
Over the last few years we’ve all been trained to entrust a large number of companies and organizations with a lot of our work – photos, stories, bookmarks, backups, calendars, spreadsheets, texts, movies, GPS data, 3D models, panoramas… you get the idea.
And many of these services are great and offer us a never-before known way to present and share our work with others and to interact with lots and lots of freely available data from all around the world.
But what these services almost never even mention is that fact that if you didn’t back up your data before you uploaded it, or if you in fact created it in the cloud, all the time you’ve spent and all the information out there can disappear in a minute.
As the creator of MapSkip I am myself guilty of creating a sink for your information, and I will actually make it one of my top priorities to add a reasonable option to allow users to export their own stories from the site whenever they want to do so. I’m not sure yet what form this will take, but it will be most likely a one-click download of a text file with all your stories. I’ll try and have that up and running by the end of February.
Maybe this is one of those things that need a name – something like “One-Click Retrieval” or “Quick Download” with a snazzy logo. This should then be made a standard feature that every self-respecting social network and Web 2.0 data sink will HAVE to have if they want to look serious about your data.
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01.14.09
Posted in San Francisco History at 11:38 pm by thomas
While idly searching the Library of Congress archive for old shots of San Francisco I stumbled over the photo below (click for a very large version) – It shows Market Street from between Stockton and Grant towards the East, with a clear view of the Call Building over an elaborate arch that spans Market Street.
Now, I’ve spent some time looking at historical photographs of San Francisco, and I’ve never seen that arch before.
The photo was taken by B.L. Singley from the Keystone View Co. as a 3D stereograph, and the Library of Congress dates this photo to 1899, but looking at the numbered sequence for other photos of the Keystone View company would move this shot into 1897 – where other photos by the same photographer document a “Christian Endeavor Parade” on Market Street in July of 1897.
The convention of the Christian Endeavor Societies seems to have been quite an affair – here is a quote from an article in the New York Times from July 5th, 1897:
“This city is a sea of color, the decorative ribbons of the Christian Endeavor Societies, the Stars and Stripes, and the bunting hung in honor of the National Holiday floating in the breeze…” – this sounds very much like a description of the scene in the photo.
The article further chronicles the arrival of several thousand convention visitors, and a local reception committee of more than a thousand.
I haven’t been able to find any other online resource that mentions this arch and it is conceivable that it was built to welcome the convention guests in 1897 and then torn down in spite of its rather elaborate design, but there is one more wrinkle in this story… the Call Building was not finished until 1898!
So either my theory is wrong, or the exterior construction of the Call Building was already finished by July 1897, which would make this one of the earliest photos of the then tallest building west of the Mississippi!
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