The creative folks over at Hatnote, a website dedicated to logging every tweak made to famously fallible online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has gone several steps beyond simply listing every edit: They've created a site that transforms them into an visual and musical experience. Every time a user changes or adds something, a note is generated, accompanied by a ripple-like circular visual containing the article's subject. The tones are generated as bells when someone adds something, and strings when there is a deletion. The animated circles vary in circumference - based on the size of the edit - and are color-coded to indicate user type, from registered and unregistered to automated bots. Musically, the results equal the equivalent of something you might hear while getting a new age energy massage from a crystal-bearing woman named for a distant galaxy, though as the day progresses and more and more people log on we're sure it can become faster paced.
Ever since the invention of computers, people have been driven to use them for artistic purposes, such as this fellow who as far back as 1956 used a $240 million dollar military computer to doodle a recreation of, what else, a curvacious woman he saw in the pages of Esquire. Now it seems that we're taking it further than the creation of art, and instead seeing our very use of computers as a creative force. Indeed, visual interpretations of Internet activity are becoming all the rage. A few weeks ago the brains at MIT unveiled Immersion, which turns your Gmail history into a printable piece of modern art, and these guys have teamed up with a former NASA astrobiologist to create beautiful (if a little scary) graphics illustrating what WiFi would look like, if we could see it. And let's not forget this guy, who gently hacked into over 400 thousand computers to create a colorfully detailed map of their web usage.