I've been mulling over an idea from Space Syntax research (think Architecture and Urban Planning) that people tend toward spaces from which the rest of a building is more easily accessible (Peponis, Zimring, Choi, 1990). This, some suggest, is a reason why even during a fire, people tend to exit a movie theater the same way they came in rather than the clearly marked exits on either side of the screen.

Here are two examples of techniques for visualizing "more integrated" spaces.

I've been thinking about this as an analogy for the role of popular media outlets in an era of mass choice.

I've been following the current fire situation in Southern California a bit more closely this time around, having live there the last two years. I have friends who live in some of the more fire-prone areas near Malibu and Thousand Oaks, and I know that they have had a number of close calls over the years.

I was initially browsing for information at cnn.com, but could never find a good interactive map that would help me get a better sense of where the fires were or where they were headed.

Then a friend of mine (one whose house is definitely in a fire zone) pointed me to this blog posting with satellite pictures of the area with fire information overlayed -- all generated with Google Earth.

I have played with Google Earth in the past, but this was the first time that I have seen a compelling real-world application where it provides better near real-time information that is critical to people's lives.

There's something very disturbing about seeing an older satellite images of a forest with a big red dot right in the middle, indicating "this whole set of trees is probably on fire right now."

There was a simple, yet profound, article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday related to the difficulty of truly innovating during new product development -- "A Recipe for Creating New Products: Take two completely separate categories; Combine" (27 October 2007) [PDF].

A couple of highlights:

To rejuvenate established product families, brand managers thus typically combine features of one product with those of others in the same family. This of a cellphone-cum-organizer-cum-computer-etc.

They overwhelm customers with additional features taken from related product lines. Since they believe that each additional feature represents a point of differentiation form the competition, managers find it hard to step off this never-ending treadmill. Paradoxically, in an attempt not to overextend the product line, managers overextend the product's features, leading to "feature glut" and reduced usability for consumers.

Instead of using features from many but similar product categories, cross-breeding uses only two dissimilar and even highly remote product categories to spark the conception of a truly new product.

At first this thread starts as an exploration of a relatively simple dynamic in many massively multiplayer online games: instancing. Quickly, however, I find myself toying with the idea that we're in the midst of a big shift in the experience and idea of history -- a shift in the way that we construct and transmit new myths for an interactive media era. Bear with me...