This time of year, many people are thinking about choosing the perfect gift–ideally at the right price and without waiting in any lines. But it’s also a good time to think about gift giving more broadly and creatively.

Universal Gift Registry Cheer

For example, My Perfect Gift appears to be on a promising track with its expanded social gift registry concept.  Here, you can create not only online bridal and baby registries, but also an updatable personal registry suitable for any upcoming occasion.  The idea is that if friends and family members create their own wish lists and make them available for viewing by each other, then everyone in the circle will find it easier to buy the right present.

After setting up a registry, you install a browser application that allows you to place items from online retailers from around the Web into your registry.  If you’re coming up empty,  you can click in items from sample registries of items from Amazon, Macy’s and Target, and celebrity registries. There also are Pinterest and Facebook sites and a YouTube video connected to the website.

When I first heard about My Perfect Gift, I thought it was a great idea, and ideally, we’d all be registered with up-to-date lists to take the guesswork out of gift giving.  But once I visited the website and perused a few of the registries and ran down multiple pages of suggestions, I got a little overloaded on how much stuff there is to buy and list.  My caveat is that distributing a registry like this to friends is a bit of a social frontier. You might want to test the waters with your social circle before jumping in.

When you can’t decide — Let the computer do it.

Another creative startup is Mystery Gift Machine, which is an online platform similar to Kickstarter designed to make it easier to plan and execute a group gift.  Like Kickstarter, it uses the power of crowdsourcing to generate funds for a gift from a group. The organizer identifies the recipient and the occasion, and friends contribute money and ideas.  The “Mystery Gift Machine”  chooses the gift, making it a surprise for all–and who doesn’t like a little surprise element with a gift? This is one to watch.

Global Random Gift Giving

Some of the most innovative ideas around are about gifts to strangers.  Many were inspired by “random acts of kindness,” the mid-2000s global meme about the spiritual benefits of  performing selfless acts to benefit a stranger. Now the concept lives  on in efforts such as World Kindness Day, Gifts For Strangers Day and Gift A Stranger, a startup website created in Belgium that allows you to register to obtain a random address of a stranger so that you can send them a gift. An online map keeps track of the givers and recipients.

As you can see, Gift A Stranger still has the look of a startup after two years,  but I think I will stick around. I think they are onto something.

That’s where Mural Locator comes in. This database of murals aims to pinpoint the massive, colorful pieces of art in all their glory. Murals are submitted by users of the site, who just need to add the location, a short description and a picture.

There are similar sites out there, notably the more Europe-centric streetartlocator.com – but none that focus on such a specific type of art.

Mashing up murals

As you’d expect, the murals listed on Mural Locator are shown on a Google Maps mashup. Although you can zoom in on areas that interest you, there’s no way to search the map, which might become a problem once the number of murals increases.

And that’s the thing – at the moment, of the 500 or so murals listed, over 300 are spread across just a few major US cities. There are fewer than 20 in Central and South America, about 60 in Europe, and just a few dotted across South Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Still, although numbers outside the US are low at present, there’s a pleasing diversity to the locations covered. For instance, there’s only a single African mural, but at least it’s there. And with every continent barring Antarctica covered, this could become a truly global resource for mural hunters.

Heaven for muralophiles?

Some of the benefits of this cool tool are immediately obvious. If you’re a mural enthusiast (A muralophile? A muralista?), you can look up murals in minutes. You could easily plan a walking tour of New York or San Francisco with the site.

In fact, Mural Locator is a site you should file in your bookmarks, right next to Graffiti Archaeology, another innovative tool which shows how graffiti has changed over time. After all, outdoor art is shaped by the weather. It can be blasted away or painted over at the whim of properly owners. And other street artists may make their own additions and changes.

More for the Mural Locator

There are lots of of exciting possibilities for Mural Locator. How about an augmented reality app for your iPhone which shows you how the mural in front of you has changed over time? A Google Street View tool to show you how a particular mural would look on the site of your own house?

Wherever the site’s creators decide to take it, the connection to the physical world around us should continue to make Mural Locator so interesting. It remains relevant, even when you’ve closed your browser and shut down your computer. So much so that even if you’re just a casual visitor to the site, you’ll soon be paying more attention to what’s around you.

Go on – why not head on over and upload the location of a mural in your home town or city?

History used to be recorded on paper, in books, newspaper articles, photographs and journals. These days, those records live not on paper, film and tape, but as 1s and 0s on computer disks.

This digitisation of history means it’s more accessible than ever before – all thanks to the internet. You don’t have to go to the library or buy a book to read Barack Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech. And you can see exactly how last year’s Chilean mining drama played out by searching YouTube.

Changing how we report history

As if not content with the vast amount of data we’re creating as history carves its path through our lives, we can’t help looking back too. We’re adapting and updating historical records to fit our online world, and finding new ways to replay things that happened long ago.

Take the Washington Post, which is Tweeting the events of the American Civil War as if they were happening today. It’s probably the only time you’ll get to follow Abraham Lincoln online.

Across the Atlantic, the UK’s Imperial War Museum did something similar – albeit on a less ambitious scale – to mark last year’s 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

However, the Washington Post’s efforts go beyond Twitter.  There’s an impressive range of articles, photos and more under the banner ‘Civil War 150’, all to coincide with the war’s 150th anniversary. It’s a great way to encourage people to engage with the past – I wonder how many Washington residents can resist browsing these ‘now and then’ images of the capital.

The space age in the internet age

More recent history isn’t immune either. You can relive the 1969 moon landing through We Choose The Moon. Launched in 2009, again to coincide with an anniversary (in this case, the 40th) this is an interactive, day-by-day recreation of the whole mission – from blast off to splash down.

For those of us who weren’t around to see the moon landing ourselves, it goes some way towards conveying the suspense and exhilaration of watching that fragile craft touch down on another planet. I’m not sure it beats watching the grainy original footage. But it does a great job of showing the enormous efforts that led up to that moment.

Are we changing history?

We’ve become good at finding new, interesting ways to explore the past. But is there a downside? When we show historical events in new ways, do we risk warping our collective understanding of the events themselves? As we retell history, do we risk changing it?

Well, as long as you take note of who’s doing the retelling, probably not. After all, every historical record has to be considered in context, and taken with a dose of commonsense – no matter whether you’re reading the words of a journalist, listening to the voice of a politician or watching a film from a moon landing sceptic.

Historical accounts have always been subjective. The internet doesn’t change that simple truth at all.

Volkswagen ran a competition recently to see what kind of apps developers from around the world would come up with if they released a developer kit for flash. I took a couple evenings to see what I could come up with. I had a clear idea that something utilizing the geolocation capabilities would be a good direction to look into. Originally I was leaning towards a directional photo viewer using Flickr’s geolocation API and the photos would rotate around the app as you turn, though the idea felt too distracting for a user.

I ended up going for a tweet map, where the newest tweets around your location would display and you could drill down according to direction.  Here’s the elevator pitch:

Tweet Map – Heatmap of Conversation:  It would be a blast to go out for the evening and see the nearby tweets of special events or of people enjoying themselves and tweeting it. This app will not only allow you to view nearby tweets, but also indicates from which direction conversation is coming from.

I ran through a couple of concepts, and during that time it eventually become clear that:

1. The general direction of the tweets was more important than the individual tweets.
2. The tweets should rotate around the car as you turn. So that if you see conversation coming from the right side. It means directly “look out your right window”.
3. Less information onscreen was required to make the app less distracting.

Here are some shots of the final designs:

The root of the design concept is that the touch screen doesn’t feel like a computer, it just blends into the instrument panel. The design is based off of the new generation of the Volkswagon Scirocco, a European only hatchback model. This Scirocco direction also took into account the aluminum interiors one sees in Volkswagons.

You can see the app here and vote for it if you want. The Tweet Map is more of a proof of concept as I ran into developer restrictions with how many geo-location queries one can make in an hour. So the data is actually canned for the city of Braunschweig during the Germany vs. England world cup match.

Some of the other interesting submissions included:

It was a fun little project and it appears that the in-car application is heating  up in the next couple months, as Microsoft has indicated they’ll release their own SDK soon for Ford’s in car “Sync” system.  Its definitely an area that we’re diving into when we it goes public.