Rainer Bauer informed me that Munnin, ultra-fast eBay browser, now uses two-color Identicon to identify eBay sellers.

While seller identity matters, less so during browsing so Munnin saves screen real-estate by replacing textual seller identity with identcon which also makes it easy to recognize active sellers. Cool.

It seems the thing to do this weekend is save Chronicle so here is my advice: Fire Everyone.

Fire all the reporters and editors then hire them again as independents based on ad-revenue profit sharing and performance-driven contracts. Reporters write stories. Editors pick and polish stories from reporters. Newspapers package and distribute news, ads, and classifieds. With cost shaved down to ankles and revenue optimized by performance feedback, they can survive.

It's all done with a mix of technologies: CMS, feeds, IM, VOIP. Editors subscribe to writers' feeds and selected articles go out to candidate feeds. Augmenters subscribe to the candidate feeds and output enriched (spellcheck, grammar corrections, image, article layout hints etc) versions. Section editors selects from daily harvest of enriched articles for each edition. Layout designers and ad providers feeds off that to add section layout hints and ads. All newspaper has to do is select section editors and print what they produce. It's a complex mesh of people working in real-time. Some will work part-time and some will be amateurs but pros will get the premium they deserve for availability and quality.

Although the component technologies to make this happen exists, integration and deployment will be tricky. But, in the end, successful newspapers of tomorrow will resemble a mix of manufacturing clusters at low level and factory line at high level , populated independents each working out of self-interest, a tightly integrated ecosystem, a Jungle of Journalism.

Some display bugs (uses non-zero winding rule everywhere now) squashed. Server-side identicon renderer now matches canvas-based renderer in graphics quality. While unintentional (can't complain ;-p), performance has improved and uses less resources as well.

Updated source code is here (version 0.5).

Wikipedia now has an entry for identicon. Kind a brief but it's a start. Thanks to whoever did that.

My son finally got his Wii this morning, after he and my wife went there at 7am to stand in line for 3 hours. I did confirm that Identicon is Wii-compatible. :-p

I've been playing with sound this weekend. It seems options for dynamic sound is rather limited. Flash can't play MIDI and ubiqutous media players tend to stutter as sound is changed dynamically and continually via script. I think even a limited sound studio capability using AJAX will be very displeasing user experience wise. .NET 2.0 XBAP security policy for Internet includes MediaPermission and full range of sound is supported in modern Java applets so I'll investigate that angle.

As I dig deeper into the world of audio, I am stunned by how complex the world really is. It's as if I dropped right into Wolfram's boat-anchor of a book. In hindsight, it's obvious to me that sound is at least as complex as the universe we live in since sound, by its nature, is a mirror. Thankfully, limits of our ears truncate the complexity down to more manageable level although, even at that level, all musicians could do was individually traverse the soundscape on foot like travelling bards, mimicking and rebelling with and against each other.

Scott Sherrill-Mix has written WP_Identicon, a 9-block implementation of identicon for Wordpress. He even added extra shapes. It's also listed at Wordpress Plugin Database site.

Get it for your Wordpress (roundhouse link-kick to Matt ;-p) blog!

While my server was out to lunch, Jesse Dubay posted about Identifrac which creates mini-fractals instead of stitching patches together. Good job, Jesse! It's cool to see people like you expand the identicon universe.

I'll be participating in the Wikithon next Wednesday at Socialtext's new office. My goal is to help people add identicon support to their wikis. If you are interested, join me at the Wikithon. Heck, even if it's not wiki-related, come on down and let's talk about your identicon application. Personally, I would like to see them in IMs and IRCs.

Adding identicon support to WikiCalc/SocialCalc will be interesting too since it is difficult to tell what each numbers in cells represent without looking at the column and row headers. One idea is to auto-assign each column and row labels then display them in cells on mouseover. So the number 512 is in Electricity column and January row, moving the mouse over the number would display identicon for Electricity and January.

I am working on another wiki-related idea which I might be able to show at Wikithon. All I can say for now is that it'll open up a whole new world for wiki users, not unlike the way WikiCalc does.

I just deployed the latest version of Daily which uses canvas-based implementation of Identicon. If you use a browser with Canvas element support (Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 9.0+), take a look at some of my posts with comments (including the one that started the avalanche if you want to see the rare sight of 400+ canvas elements being rendered on the fly). You'll notice that identicons look much smoother looking now. On IE, it looks the same. I could have used excanvas but I didn't feel it was stable enough.

One thing that puzzles me though is that Firefox 2.0 seems to fetch the URL of image element *inside* the canvas element when I was expecting that to happen only when canvas support is not available (i.e. no canvas support or when scripting is off). That hurts, particularly for monstrous posts with hundreds of identicons. Currently, I am detecting only problematic canvas support (Safari 2.0) to generate canvas tag without image element within it but it looks like I'll have to do more to emit only the canvas tag if I am going to avoid unnecessary image requests.

Anyway, let me know if you run into any problems seeing identicons. Meanwhile, I am going to spend some quality time with the Identitune idea.

Update:

Apparently, identicons are not rendered on javascript-disabled Firefox browsers because canvas support is not disabled when script is disabled. They should spell out expected behavior in the canvas spec. While at it, an attribute for specifying data is needed. For now, I am using title attribute but that feels wrong.

Update 2:

Fixed noscript/canvas issue by adding img version inside noscript tag. Fixed unnecessary img URL fetch in Firefox by skipping fallback img tag inside the canvas tag (this speeds up canvas version load lightening fast, even with 400+ identicons in a page!). I think canvas support in browsers needs to workout these common issues.

Just doodling wih ideas like I used to do with rocks and dirt when I was a kid, I am wondering what the aural version of identicon (identitune?) might be like and how it would be generated from random bits? It'll help visually impaired folks to distinguish large numbers but not necessarily text.

Turning a sharp corner, I think identitune could run amok copyrighted melodies. But I like the idea of assigning people, places, and things melodies of their own...

Jason: "I am very tempted to do something similar for mobile phone numbers!" - Great idea. I get cross-eyed when I scroll through my contact lists on my PC as well as my cellphone.

 Dominic Cronin comments: "Perhaps it also makes sense to use this when managing a network with lots of different machines." - Bingo, Dominic! Using identicons instead of using the same PC icons in the list or graph of machines in the network will make it easier to distinguish them.

Using identicons to represent products (i.e. ISBN or SKU) will enhance readability of invoices, shipping list, etc.

I'll update this post as suggestions keep rolling in. :-)

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Some design tips:

Multiple Types of Identicons in a Page

If your use case uses more than one 'class' of identicons within a single page (i.e. wiki page using identicons for names as well as links) then you can help users distinguish different identicon classes by wrapping them with class-specific borders (i.e. circle for people and square for links).