Sunday, March 8, 2009

Ambient Websites

My favorite place for Gimme Shiny is on the TV in the living room. It becomes ambient visual stimulus, like a picture on the wall, but one that's always new. This has led me to go hunting for more such "ambient websites"; sites that you can just go to and they do something interesting, often based on the amazing amounts of user-generated content on the Internet, with little or no input.

David Troy has made a few of them, including Flickrvision and Twittervision, and he's got some great things to say about our over-reliance on clicking. Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs have created a couple nice ones as well: Twistori and CreativeScrape.

To bring it all together, I'm experimenting with a "meta" mode for Gimme Shiny that cycles through a few of them (currently Flickrvision, Twistori, ___will___you, the normal Gimme Shiny of course, and an experimental web mode that flips through popular pages on Digg and Delicious). Check it out, let them know what you think, and please let me know if you know of any other ambient websites I should know about!