I think the idea of jumping to the next or previous page when using the keyboard shortcuts to navigate past the “end” of the current page is a great one, but why not take it a step further and make a Google Reader-style “endless page” for the image browser, which would load in the next page of items at the end of the current one via AHAH (?) when you reach the bottom of the page? Ryan himself says it in the video: “pagination is annoying”. Yes, yes it is.
Michael Wesch, creator of the classic Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us video, gives a talk about the anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress. Well worth your time if you’re interested in the anthropological/sociological dimensions of the Web.
Sometimes web design doesn’t happen on the web: witness user lamedust’s video from instructables.com:
What does this have to do with web design, you ask? One of the things I want to communicate through this blog is my belief that web design, properly speaking, is the architecture of channels of communication. Designing for the web is creating environments in which people interact, no matter how simple or complex that interaction might be. Yes, they interact with the content, which is why web design is so often confused with graphic design. But they can also interact with the content creator, and with each other, and these modes of interaction are far more powerful and far-reaching.
One of the key discoveries that this view of web design has yielded in recent years is that if you lower the cost of interaction to zero, and get the job started, anyone with even a passing interest in what’s being done can hop in, do a tiny bit of work (fix a bug in Linux or Firefox, correct grammar or spelling in a Wikipedia entry, tag a photo on Flickr, etc.), and then go on their merry way.
These modes of interaction create impressive results that aren’t attributable to any specific person, or organization, they’re “crowdsourced”.
What lamedust has done is figure out one of the (theoretically infinite number of) ways in which this design vision can be applied to non-cyber-space (otherwise known as the real world). Start a project, make it ridiculously easy for people to help, and make it so that their efforts can be aggregated. Voilà! Free haircut.