angermann2

Written by John McVey

Thomas Angermann's angermann2.com website is a combination "social bookmark" and blog. It does not feature essayistic posts, but rather snippets of content from other sites under categories (topic tags) of AI, architecture, art, audio, brainstorm, cartography, computing, conference, default, ethnography, hacking, haptic, information design, location-awareness, mobile, mundane, retro, social, space-place, spatial, swarming, urban, walking, wearing, wi-fi, and stuff (as of 18 March 05).

angermann2's most prominent visual features are large size type (font-size: 2.5em), accompanied by a much smaller, footnote-like font-size: 0.7em for meta and feedback content; liberal use of float:left and absence of fixed width; and some arresting photographs. All of these together yield a somewhat improvisatory look that belies the learning and sophistication behind the site. It looks like style, but isn't. Add to this a couple of google ads -- a feature shared by other blogs -- that serve to anchor the site to the present. I am initially unsure whether I am seeing this site the way designer Angermann intends, but then realize that designer Angermann has surrendered some control over the look to me.

angermann2 doesn't work like what I take to be a conventional blog, because the persona of its maker is not explicitly described within the site (e.g., in an "about") section. And so one needs to find out more about Thomas Angermann elsewhere. There are quite a few elsewheres -- a series of rehearsals, they might be called -- that include www.angermann.dk www.itu.dk/people/angermann and del.icio.us/angermann

Angermann did a Master's thesis at IT University of Copenhagen on place and mobile computing" in collaboration with Jens Christoffersen. Walking, mobile computing, context awareness appear throughout his websites and lists, and in the blogs they link to.

His del.icio.us bookmarks are similar to those in angermann2 but minus visuals and occasional comments. As I look over new developments like social bookmarks (del.icio.us) and flickr (amounting to shared photo albums), I see a movement away from the "designed" presentation, to another centered on the user's questions and curiosity. I see a situation in which all of us are becoming librarians of our own virtual libraries. (And we're not bound to the library desk, either!) Users classify their documents, links and photos, using or misusing their own or existing (conventional) tags. The internet becomes a vast shared scrapbook, partly structured, mostly not (giving rise to the term "folksonomies").

I like it that the wikipedia entry for "blogs" includes "commonplace books" ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblogs). In his Decimal Classification and Relative Index for libraries, clippings, notes, etc. (Fourth edn, revised, Boston 1891), Melvil Dewey - of Dewey Decimal fame - envisioned scrap-books as one of the uses for his system. There were also related systems for filing commonplace book entries, one of them being John Todd's Index Rerum, that went through numerous printings.

The depth of work behind angermann2 - as represented both within it and in its more conventionally structured ancestor and/or parallel websites - supports its somewhat improvisatory visual structure.It assumes that the reader comes to it with knowledge and can navigate or intuit her way in and among its content.

The pursuit of these leads takes one away from consideration of the "design" of angermann2 that was my brief for this writing. Yet this seems appropriate given Angermann's own interest in mobility. Mobility means smaller interfaces. With less room (and time) for conventional layout "design," emphasis must be on performance relative to purpose and place. There's a dialogic aspect to this dynamic, this relationship of query and processing, that brings to mind the opening passage of Plato's Phaedrus -- "Where have you come from, my dear Phaedrus, and were are you going?" For good or ill, we remain our own navigators.