TED 2011: What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

<< Previous | Next >>

View all

Artist Candy Chang has launched a public art project inviting passers by to chalk their own ending to the sentence: “Before I die I want to …” on a disused building in New Orleans that has been transformed into a giant chalkboard. “Before I Die” started life as part of an exhibition called Freeriding, by Subtext Projects in a gallery before taking to the streets. Chang selected a large, boarded-up corner building in New Orleans to transform into an enormous blackboard.
She told Wired.co.uk in an e-mail interview: “I bike by this blighted house all the time and I wanted to a nicer spacemake for my neighborhood. The messages you see in public space right now are mostly advertisements.

Chang is a 2011 TED Senior Fellow who has had a broad career involving founding a record label, working on community urban-design projects, being an art director at The New York Times, as well as a working as a design researcher at Nokia and an electro DJ.
You can check out some of the responses that have been documented. Chang is currently working on a public installation in Fairbanks, Alaska, in April and one in Turku, Finland, in June.

Google Lets Users Blacklist Sites From Search Results

Google is giving users the ability to block sites that annoy them from ever showing up again in their search results, via a new link next to search results.
The new links will be visible to English users of Google.com starting Thursday and Friday (IE8+, Chrome 9+, and Firefox 3.5+). The change builds on a recent extension the search giant made for users of its Chrome browsers, and signals that Google is listening to the complaints of users that web results are being polluted by low-value content farms.
The move comes just a week after Google introduced a big change to its core search algorithm that was intended to promote high quality sites. But many tech watchers were disappointed that the change seemed to benefit Demand Media, one of the net’s biggest content factories, while punishing many sites that say they create valuable original and user-generated content.
Google isn’t the first to come up with the idea of letting users blacklist sites. New search upstart Blekko has baked that capability in from the start, and has created a technology to let users limit their searches to select groups of sites. DuckDuckGo goes further and simply doesn’t include a number of content farms in its index.
Google says the new system might even eventually change search results for everyone, according to a company blog post.
“We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google,” said Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang, two Google search quality engineers. “In addition, while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.”
Users can undo their choices and will be notified every time they get a search page that would have had a result from a site that user blocked. The system does not, however, have a way for users to import a blacklist created by others — perhaps as a way to force users to give Google data on sites they care enough to block.
Non-English speaking users and people who use Google search sites other than Google.com will get the feature soon, the company said.