It seems that yesterday Google were forcing us to search through the UK domain. If you went to http://www.google.com and you were in the UK then you got diverted to http://www.google.co.uk.
Looking again today, I see that there has been a slight shift of strategy. They must still be detecting that we come from the UK because, the google home page shows a ‘go to Google.uk’ option.
There is more news about Google and it relates to eBooks .....
I saw this Remington Typewriter (circa 1920) during a visit to the Zennor museum and thought I should take a look at the history of the QWERTY keyboard.
The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1874.
A good explanation of his rationale for the layout will be found here
I have seen recently a demo of the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ system for displaying books. Go to their web site and take a look here. There seems to be this trend for making the sense of turning the page of an electronic book as realistic as possible and I thought I would take a look round and review the scene.
My art school teacher and friend, Robert Janz, once complained of a museum where he had seen a Chinese scroll painting mounted in a glass cabinet. Only one small section of the landscape narrative was ever visible to the viewers and the kinetic experience was lost. I was reminded of this when I started to think about the way we scroll our web browsers to see the content ‘below the fold’ of our computer screens and digital handhelds. It seems that we are happy to have the choice to scroll a lot but we don’t want to be forced scroll a little bit! Has the Ancient Chinese way of presenting narrative through the scrolling painting resurfaced in a new digital paradigm?
