Jeremy Ashkenas

An entry in Sunlight Labs’ annual Apps for America competition, Know thy Congressman is a bookmarklet that slaps an info-poster of political and biographical information about a legislator onto any web page.

Say you’re reading a newspaper article that mentions an unfamiliar politician. Highlight their name and click on KTC...

“This app is indispensible.” — Wired.com

My on-and-off project for the last year — it’s an old-school spatial-hypertext writing space, but also attempts to be informed current trends in writing on the web. You create fragments and shards of text, rearrange them, and link them together to write your essay or story. I used it to write my thesis.

Hypertextopia has seen the publication of several short stories and essays, been featured on Metafilter, and used by a community of hundreds of authors.

Writing into a computer has always been a troublesome practice, confined into ever smaller fields and forms, and tarted up with glyphs and graphics. It’s relaxing to sit in front of a pristine infinite scroll of electronic paper, and bang on the keys until something falls out.

Like a typewriter, your text is saved into the machine in front of you, and will always be there, waiting, the next time you open the page.

Brown University’s Alumni Magazine has a long tradition in print, going back to the turn of the last century. It regularly wins national awards for excellence in journalism and design. But their website was falling apart at the seams, and a sudden spurt of traffic broke its back.

I designed and developed their new site, using Joomla as a content-management system. Their number of pages read per visitor has doubled.

After playing with why the lucky stiff’s new pair of Shoes, and trading lil’ apps around on his list, I decided that it was time for the fledgling Shoes apps to have a real home. Thus, the Shoebox.

The Shoes community has embraced it as a home, and uploaded most of their apps to the site, for sharing, commenting, and improvements.