Project: Nostalgia - a memory-driven webapp

When we think of the most influential and powerful emotions, love, anger and fear are all common but I'm always surprised by how infrequently nostalgia comes to mind. We have such relatively little understanding of memory to date but it's becoming increasingly more clear just how instrumental it is in shaping our perception, preferences, attitudes, and beliefs.

I've been entirely curious to see what kinds of things we can remember together by sharing pieces of our own nostalgia, whether it's shared or deeply personal, general or specific.

Truly meaningful memories are tough things to get at, but I've been putting together something of a "nostalgia engine" in hopes that through a shared collection of memories we can all get a little closer to understanding the way we think of nostalgia and the things we miss. Check it out, the full webapp is here:

Project: Nostalgia

Right now it's at the stage where everything is ready for some live trial entires, so I'd love to have a few memories of yours added to the collective. Let me say that I've loved everyone's submissions to date - some are simply hilarious. Keep them coming.

Over time I'll be developing some interesting ways to visualize and organize all the entires, so if you have any thoughts on anything you'd like to see, certainly let me know. You guys rock.

"Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect."

- Owens Lee Pomeroy

(what do you miss or remember?)

BooneOakley.com and an incredible use of medium

Presenting an entire pitch completely from the cloud, using live platforms was an interesting way to demonstrate digital media savvy. So I'm absolutely inspired by the guys over at Boone Oakley, who have pulled off something extraordinary by building their entire website from linked and well executed YouTube videos. Stellar.

the difference between knowing and doing: there's no shortage of knowledge in the world

Seth Godin spews out chunks of sage-like wisdom daily, but one that has stood out to me is his point on the ridiculously huge difference between knowing how to do something and doing it (we have an equally ridiculously frequent tendency to forget this).

The basic idea is that looking at anything in the world and thinking/saying that we understand how it's done (and could do it ourselves [and better]) is like being that kid at the magic show who says "I know how you did that trick!" (there's always one). Seth's point is: of course you do. "There is no shortage of information in the world."

We do this all the time. Think: criticizing executives, polititians, bankers, web designers, parents, race car drivers, Google, chefs, servers, Apple, psychologists, directors, actors, writers, ad guys and gals....

I've experienced this in a very specific way lately, while working on my "something-like-a-nostalgia-engine (beta build 1.0 soon!) project. For a long time I've gone about looking at really stellar and well-done websites, having "a basic understanding of how they work." I would think things like "oh okay - I see how this works. basically when you click here it makes a call to x server, and then it looks like there's some code that makes it fade away like that, it searches some database for a couple responses and sends them back... etc etc. Easy."

Of course, actually putting together all that code (most importantly: making it work) is a completely different beast. And, true to life, a LOT harder than you think. I've gone from "oh yeah Dreamweaver is easy. I know how that works. And that site is simple." to "wow there are a lot of details here that are impossible to account for without doing it."

(What are some things you do that are a lot harder than they seem? What are the things you think you know/can do better?)

A bit deeper on this tomorrow. Stay tuned.

webdev, nostalgia, and a preview

So now that I'm an entry-level web developer (read: finally started building my own servers/SQL databases/writing php/finally understanding what Dreamweaver ACTUALLY does ha) I've started to recognize the potential of my new-found internet superpowers. (That's actually a bit inaccurate; understanding the potential of what we can really do with a few basic tools is what drove me to pick them up in the first place and I highly recommend it. I started at xampp. not that it's necessary but it's nice and packaged.).

I promise I'll use my powers for good.

What I've chosen to begin with is some kind of repository/tool/application that will categorize/visualize/organize submitted entries of things that we consider meaningful, nostalgic and generally just miss. Since the prompt will be something as simple as "I miss: _____ " these things can be profound or simple, and I'm looking forward to seeing what responses I can end up with because they are sure to be fascinating.

The question I'm working on now is: "what's the best way to visualize a list of memories and nostalgic things"? My initial thought is to think of ways to apply tags and categories. Probably some kind of BuzzFeed-like set of pre-determined tags, as well as a quick prompt for the submitter to make up their own if they so desire. Those tags can be cross-referenced with each other for some interesting analysis. More thinking on that needed. Any thoughts?

Anyone want to do some beta-testing once I set up a domain and all? Let me know, you'll get an exclusive peek.

Or if you'd rather, here's a quick way to help: what's something you miss?