Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

What will happen to all my information when I die? As of today, I have over a TB of music, movies, files, documents, images and other stuff on disks and drives. Some of it is in my possession and some of it is on servers all over the world, just a password away. When I pass away, hopefully that won't be for several more decades, I may have thousands of terabytes. 

When I pass away someone will grab one of those big drives and do what with it? Presumably it would be a family member...maybe one of the more luddite ones. They will throw it in a box or a garbage can.  All of the data I have stored on servers spread across the world don't know me or have any connections to me and will have no idea.

What do they do with aging data? Does it have a life? Does privacy keep everyone from accessing it? Does your data have a will? Do you have impossible passwords that will guarantee no one will ever see it? Weird to imagine, isn't it? 

I miss Show and Tell. Getting together a roomful of people and learning about things that I wouldn't normally come across in my day-to-day life was a great part of being a kid. So, lets start it up again.

I've got a long backlog of things I'll never formally write about. But some of  'em are interesting and maybe--just maybe--someone else might find them interesting. So here are a few of mine:

• Tobias Wong
  Tobi executes dense concepts with incredible simplicity. These are approachable visually and compelling intellectually.
• Denis Wood
  A Raleigh native, Denis has been making maps of Boylan Heights and the surroundings since 1970. But they're not conventional maps by any means. Think: maps showing how light falls on the ground through the trees. Listen to a podcast on This American Life.
• WNYC's RadioLab
  RadioLab is incredible. I can't remember when I tuned in to a radio broadcast with so much enthusiasm. If you're an NPR listener, it's like This American Life but abstracted up to the level of the human condition. Listen to the "Musical Language" podcast to learn why people violently revolted to Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring.
• Peter Mendulsund Interview on Design:Related
  Great book cover designs, and the dialogue behind how they were made. What's better? Hunt out his portfolio to see the designs that didn't make it past the focus groups. Man, crowdthink can be so bad.
• TED Conferences
  My perennial favorite--and not simply because I don't have a TV that can net a signal. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design; the conferences were the  brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman. For you, skip the $8k entrance fee and watch them online. What do I suggest? Sir Ken Robinson's speech "Do Schools Kill Creativity" is a great appetizer. TED in its 2008 session right now, so subscribe to the vodcasts now and get the videos once they're edited.
• Del.icio.us tagged "Public Data"
  A meme started by John Udell, this is basically an effort to tag freely accessible, public data. Search this and use IBM's ManyEyes to make some spurious yet visually interesting analyses.
• Brooklyn Superhero Supply
  So, yeah, this is a front for Dave Eggers' writing group in NYC. But Dave is a the kind of writer that makes your eyes bug out and your teeth clench when you read his work. So it's cool. And he's got great design sense. BKLYN Superhero re-fronts the site of his writing group with all accoutrements necessary for waging a war against villainy. Need Speed of Light tonic? They got you covered.

Now you. What have you seen cool recently?