Pinboards

You can stick pins in:

• The world. (This one is big -- takes a long time to load.)
• A timeline of popular music from the 1950s to now
• A 2D book recommendation chart
• A 2D movie recommendation chart
• A football pitch of great players
• A picture by Edouard Manet (with a little bit of art history).
• A picture by Salvador Dali. Be surreal!

You get to enter rollover text for your pin plus, if you wish, a URL.

Sign your pin or leave it anonymous -- it's up to you.

You can't yet:

• Stick pins on top of each other. (This is coming soon: you'll be able to see a tilted view of the chart with people's pins stacked on top of each other.)
• Take out a pin or edit it, once it's in. (And the only way you can comment on a pin is stick another beside it.)
• Design your own pinhead. You have to choose a sphere in one of nine colours.

Once you've tried that, you can also stick a pin in:

• A 2D pin survey

Noteboards

Alternatively you can put a sticky note (labelled with one character) on:

• Britain
• My visitors' wall

Requests and rules

Please help me build up a corpus of ideas and opinions for newer, more dynamic visualizations, by adding a pin or two (preferably with multi-word text and with a link).

All pin contents are in the public domain. So when you add text and a link, you are saying you will not try to claim copyright at some later date, or stop the data from being incorporated in any databases.

There are no guarantees that your pin, your text, the interactive pinboard, the pictures, the website, or anything will remain online.

Right now this is an opinion-gathering project and I'd rather people add what they like without me trying to police it. I will have to remove stuff if it is illegal, if my website supplier prohibits it, or if I decide I want to. As I said, no guarantees. The ultimate aim of all this is to develop wiki-like collaboration in a spatial and visual way, so please be creative in what you contribute. This means you can advertise, but don't hog space by spelling out phrases or arranging pins in big patterns.

If you've got this far, you'll probably be a careful, thoughtful, pin-sticker. So here are one or two extra thoughts for you:

• Rollovers that come at the subject sideways tend to be more interesting than those that just say what the destination of a link is.
• In the examples I've set up, I'm hoping the pinboards might develop distinct styles. I don't know what state the Manet one will be in by the time you see it (maybe the voodoo temptation to stick pins in people will just be too great), but it is at least intended as a slightly more academic, fact-based example, than the others. In the best case this sort of mechanism might encourage individuals to find things out about a subject (the painting) and add to each other's snippets of wisdom. On the other hand, I don't think any of the examples need be taken too seriously. So anything that's funny is welcome anywhere. (Whereas sticking pins in people is just childish.)
• Pinboards and noteboards are just a first attempt at functionality. You'll notice too that backgrounds are also a first attempt. Some sort of collage would be nicer for the music and recommendation charts. If you're good at that sort of thing and would like to donate a background, I'd love to get it. Should warn you though that the plan is that later versions of this will effectively be in 3D, so 2D backgrounds may have a limited exposure.
• I'm hoping future developments will come through student projects though I expect myself to do the stacking pins feature and allow people to create their own simple survey/recommendation charts. Other things that might come along sooner rather than later are dataless pins and user pinhead design.
• Thank you.

John Robinson. 23 June 2006.

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