While browsing Flickr, I recently found "The Unspectacular Doors of St. Louis" by Bill Keaggy.
Beautiful.
Writing is like this too, sometimes. Novels, short stories, and some of the best creative nonfiction is often about parts of experience and the universe which are entirely boring when encountered in real life. Such writing reminds us how special our world is. They remind us to keep observing, to keep laughing, and keep our sense of wonder, no matter how old we are.
Do you believe in serendipity? The last two people from the St. Louis area I recently found on Flickr were both part of XPlane, a visual thinking company. The first was XPlane founder/CEO Dave Gray. Bill Keaggy was the second. Weird. But cool. (this is one of Dave Gray's paintings)
(interview with Dave Gray on Supersized.org)
Dave Gray seems like an interesting guy. Artist, writer, consultant, educator. Here are some of his projects:
- Communication Nation, a blog about communicating, across various media and purposes, but not a news watch. I like his post on hypertext and electronic literature.
- Visual Thinking School on Squidoo, with accompanying flickr group.
- Visual Thinking Art, a group weblog he manages....."This site is dedicated to ideas, images, discussion and commentary related to visual thinking school and visual thinking projects. Please post your comments, thoughts and ideas."
- He also introduced me to some Moleskine Flickr groups.
- Scoble gave David Gray props after Evan Williams, former founder and CEO of Pyra Labs (which made Blogger) pointed it out to him. Speaking of which, Evan's latest project, Odeo, a web-based audio tool is very Web 2.0-ish.
Speaking of which, Scoble just recently linked to a very intersting health information search engine, which breaks your results into useful categories: Kosmix.
The web is an odd, interesting, interconnected place.
W00t.
Note: Bill Keaggy's photos of ordinary paraphenalia extend to the world of Grocery Lists. He is the founder of grocerylists.org.
When I was in St. Louis for the National Collegaite Honors Conference, I noticed that city was prime for urban renewal. I think it's starting to happen. Honestly, if *I* had the money, I would be starting a high tech business in St. Louis myself. Slow pace of life, nice climate, a great mass transit system, easy flights to the east/west coast, and great office space for a very low cost. St. Louis right now is a priceless opportunity for people with initiative. Dave Gray seems to be one of those people.