My fave project in the ITP Spring Show last night was definitely AL-gorithm by Alex Kaufmann (seemingly unlinkable).

Wanting to experience language the way a computer does—as meaningless packets of information—Alex printed up 22 copies of his favorite passage of All the King's Men and cut out all but every instance of a single letter on each sheet.

The finished product is 22 sheets of paper with seemingly random placements of a single letter that create the full passage when stacked on top of each other in any order.

The very best thing about this project—aside from the Brian Dettmer-esque OCD required to complete it—is that it's basically the opposite of Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (see this great interactive version). Each unit of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems has its own meaning, but reordering the strips destroys the original meaning of the original poem (and rarely produces new coherent meaning)—and in AL-gorithm each page has no human-decipherable meaning, but reordering them preserves the original text. Cool!

The only thing it needs is a better title. How 'bout a quote from Queneau? "Oh reader thinking thus your heart will lock."

A little mechanical and electrical engineering porn [via Google Blogoscoped] to start the week off right:

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My fave part is when the technician goes into a container to swap out some hardware on a scooter, referred to by the narrator as his "Google-provided personal transportation device." Hilari!

We have this saying around the internetz, "links are the currency of the web." It's actually a bit of an understatement. Links transfer not only attention and authority, but also direction and meaning, helping us figure out where to go and what to expect when we get there.

"rusty chain" by shoothead on flickr

Links don't just transfer meaning directly, when visitors read the context of a link before following it, but also indirectly, through the relevance algorithms of every major search engine, which almost universally include anchor text, even after Google's 2007 algorithm update to diffuse the most blatant link bombs. As Google's webmaster tools explains it:

[Anchor text is] how Googlebot sees your site. [...] This information provides good insight into how your site is seen by others.

This simultaneous transfer of authority and meaning is something I thought about a lot when writing a reeeeeaaalllly long paper on how search engines construct authority, and it comes up again and again professionally when the name of a project I'm working on doesn't correspond directly to search queries I want to optimize it for. Turns out Google rewards boring product names as much as boring headlines.

Anyway, enough with the 2-to-3-year-old search engine links. My point is that the skyrocketing adoption of Twitter and the increased use of URL shorteners it necessitates are altering the dynamics of power and meaning in the link economy. Anecdotally, I've stopped posting anything to my del.icio.us account with the intent of actively encouraging my friends to visit those links. I still save bookmarks in del.icio.us for refindability and tag clouds of my interests, but if I want people to look at something I'm thinking about or working on, Twitter is far and away my first choice. For a larger-scale example, consider that traffic to Fred Wilson's blog from Twitter has tripled in the past three months, and of course, the hockey-stick traffic chart of Twitter itself.

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It's worth noting that, according to bit.ly stats (which I obsess over), a reasonable portion of the traffic I send to a link via Twitter comes from it updating my Facebook status—and, indeed, half of that Fred Wilson post I pointed to earlier is about the increased traffic to his blog from Facebook. But Facebook's walled garden approach means that search engine spiders can't find the links we're sharing there at all, so it's pointless to spend time thinking about Facebook in this regard.

my friend Anne Helmond in her avatar_nofollow picture on flickr (robots nofollow t-shirt)

Links shared on Twitter, however, are almost always public to spiders as well as humans. Even though Twitter disappointingly barred Google juice from passing through its fingers by adding the nofollow attribute to all tweeted links back in September, most search engines do follow nofollow links—and do use the anchor text in nofollow links to determine the relevancy of a page for the keywords its linked from—they just don't use links with a nofollow attribute to calculate the ranking with which they weight the page's authority generally. But shortened URLs shared on Twitter can't transfer meaning to humans or to spiders because Twitter doesn't allow its users to create links with anchor text.

This can lead to dubious hilarity: URL shorteners make it way easier to rickroll—I mean, rickroll—your friends. The deeper meaning of rickrolling, such as it is, is that neither the clicking human nor the spidering robot knows what to expect on the other side of the link.

"you've been rick-rolled!" by stovak on flickr

For humans who are not being rickrolled, the context of a Tweet usually tells them what to expect, but search engine bots are still at a loss for the meaning they usually retrieve from anchor links. This information is being collected by some URL shorteners—for instance, check out this bit.ly info page for a wikipedia article I recently tweeted—but it's not being passed on to search engines for use in determining relevancy.

This doesn't mean a doomsday for relevancy algorithms: Twitter may be starting to explode into the non-tech-elite world, but it's not outpacing anchor-link-friendly blogging yet.

If it does, I wonder how search engines will rework their relevancy algorithms to include "information on how [a] site is seen by others" in addition to the keywords its creators have planted on it.

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related: Check out this Hacker News thread on how URL shorteners are making money that was recently tweeted by my friend Aditya. Pretty interesting that there is no stunningly obvious business model for URL shorteners, despite their seeming positioning as brokers of the link economy. Those who are keeping thorough analytics on their short URLs (like bit.ly and cli.gs) are sitting on a gold mine of data, but it'll take serious work to monetize that information.

My coworker and about page glamour-shot photographer James told me yesterday that Silverback, which we had oohhhed and ahhhed over a few months ago when it was just a holding page with a very cool (albeit almost unnoticeable) parallax effect, has released some hot new usability testing software for Mac.

I tried it out today at work while testing a microsite I've been plugging away at for awhile and it's absolutely incredible!

Silverback unobtrusively records all actions on the screen and the tester's facial expressions and comments (through iSight) and lets you mark important moments in the video using the Mac remote. After testing is over, it combines the two videos into one file—the screen capture is the main image with an inset video of the user's face—and exports as QuickTime so you can share the results without a plethora of software licenses.

Four absolute best things about Silverback:

1. It completely hides itself during recording so the user isn't distracted by his own image in the corner of the screen somewhere.
2. It subtly highlights every click with a little bubble in the final video file.
3. Fifty. Dollars. That's it.
4. Gorilla scientist logo, OMG!

The only problem is that you're not "supposed" to do usability testing on a Mac, since it's (still!) not the platform of choice for most people. But I think that if you're sure your site works the same in Firefox or Safari as it does on IE, this is definitely the way to go. At $50 for this much functionality, you pretty much can't go wrong.

Check their demo. This embedding of it starts mid-way through, skipping the overview to show how the recorded session will look when exported:

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By the way, Silverback is the creation of an English web design and consultancy group called Clearleft.

I'm just back from a trip to Florida, during which I had a chance encounter with one of JetBlue's new BetaBlue planes, equipped with free WiFi access.

I somehow missed the much documented inaugural flight, so I was shocked and psyched to see the BetaBlue pamphlet, but saddened to read that the WiFi provided no actual web surfing, but only email and instant messaging…and only through Yahoo!?!

According to Engadget, "If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features [...] will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo."

Well that's a relief! JetBlue, if you're listening, keep in mind that we'd rather have the option of paying to get service-agnostic access than be limited to an account with a contacts list that's about three years outdated, eh?

Of course offering WiFi at all — especially free WiFi — puts JetBlue light years beyond any other airline (and just reinforces their status as my all-time favorite airline), but seriously: We get that you don't want to give unlimited internet access, but don't tell us whose servers will be holding our emails and IMs.

Oh, and btw: What on earth does free Yahoo! email and IMing on your planes have to do with an RSS icon? If we can only log into Yahoo! email and Yahoo! messenger, we pretty much by definition cannot access our ballooning number of unread items in Google Reader. Ya know?

Wow, there are way more barcode fans out there than previously imagined!

As a follow-up to barcode arts & crafts, here are some of the interesting links I received in response:

Roger from the QR code-obsessed London-based site 2d code sent me this hilarious video from The Voice of the Street explaining how their project, which gives street artists QR codes, is supposed to work. Get a load of the voiceover.

And Jerry of Bar Code Nerds (tagline: "Yep. Not only do we admit it, we're damn proud of it.") sent me a link to his massive online collection of old-school barcode graffiti and art, including this awesome picture of a print (I think?) called spaceball by someone named AlmaZ.

spaceball by AlmaZ

Closet barcode lovers, take heart. Kindred spirits abound on the WWWs.

So two weeks ago when we were all having a chuckle at Google ad sales people's surprising faith in the future of scannable barcodes for tracking print ads, I wanted to post a few notable barcode arts & craft projects. As I commented on Sean's post, geeky artists and are way more likely to increase the virtually nonexistant adoption of barcode cameraphone scanning in the U.S. than…uh…advertising—and it's still a long shot.

But then I got extremely distracted by the primaries, so I never posted it. Well, now that Super Tuesday is over and our hopemonger (best new word ever) is finally ahead in the delegate count of everyone except The NYT (which seems to be refusing to count even one more delegate until Hillary starts wining), voilà!

QR code needlepoint

This awesome needlepoint QR code by tikaro apparently uses semapedia to point to the wikipedia article on pillows [via craft].

QR code cake

Flickr user Magitisa must have an incredible amount of patience, because she stenciled a QR code onto a cake [also via craft].

every barcode

In case you forgot what barcodes used to look like, there's the non-cameraphone-compatible Every Barcode animation by the barcode-obsessed Scott Blake of Barcode Art. He's got plenty of other barcode goodness, but Every Barcode is definitely the best—how can you beat a flash animation that cycles through all 10,000,000,000,000 possible barcodes (if you let it run for ten years, that is)?

space invaders scarf

This extremely geeky scarf, made by a strange collaboration between British knitwear designers Office Lendorff and "mobile enthusiasts" (although it's not really clear what they do when not encouraging knitwear enthusiasts to knit QR codes onto scarves) Kaywa features a secret QR code knitted below a pixelated Space Invaders pattern. According to one purchaser, the code reads "insert coin for new life."

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

And, of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with semacode posters that pointed to old photographs of the former Third Avenue El.