Nothing is Linear

Head on over to the new old blog

2012-01-04T10:12:00.003-06:00

Hello readers of this blog. I decided to consolidate so I am now posting at blog.danielsjourney.com -- head over there and update your subscriptions, etc...thanks!

Shit Crayons

2011-04-15T09:40:00.000-05:00

Ian Bogost makes a scathing critique of social games:

Several years ago, Chaim Gingold gave us the useful concept of the Magic Crayon. A magic crayon is a tool that facilitates creativity in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. A magic crayon lets its users breathe life into things.

Some would like to think that all crayons are magic ones. That just any old thing can conjure. But that's not true. The magic crayon has a shadow side.

Some barriers are benign, but others are insidious...

Inspirations like that are not magic crayons, but shit crayons...

Even if creativity comes from constraint, there's constraint and there's incarceration. A despot in a sorcerer's hat does not deserve praise for inciting desperate resilience.

Life is too short to make shitty software

2011-03-15T00:27:00.000-05:00

The other day I wrote:

"What we do is make software. And software is best made by humans who understand each other (and by extension understand the people who use their software). Unless they’re miraculously made up of such humans, organizations make shitty software."

And I just had some more thoughts about that:

I don't want to make or work on software that sucks anymore. Life is too short to work on something that is shit to begin with. Just because a piece of software improves your process or workflow over the paper version you used in the 80's does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software is better than its competition in X, Y and Z ways does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software just like its competition except in that one way you need it to be different does not mean it's not shitty software.

If we are to take our craft seriously, to consider ourselves worthy of our work, to join in a lineage of artisans and, most importantly, enjoy ourselves while we work and work in a way worthy of the life we have been given, then we must make software that is a delight to use, that makes our customer's lives not just seem to be easier, but actually brings them joy in their lives.

It's not good enough to add the features they want or fix the bug they are complaining about or improve the workflow that is still--despite your wonderful technology--a total mess and waste of their precious time.

The problem is most of our "users"...and what a terrible word for these people, these people we have a (for the most part) unseeing yet terribly intimate relationship with...but "customer" is also a horrible word! A customer is someone you exchange money for goods with, not someone who interacts with your product every day and alternatively praises and curses you in abstentia, who scours the internet for advice on how to use your product, who navigates some joyless "customer service" experience in order to better use your shitty product. Usually, the only way the term "user" applies to those who use our software is in its similarity to "drug user"--they have no choice but to use our product, despite a more abundant life calling out to them from outside the boundaries of this myopic experience.

...The problem is most of The People Using Our Software are within an even larger set of boundaries: rules, expectations, norms, mores, groupthink, culture, ignorance...part of the reason we make shitty software is because we live in a frequently shitty world.

The other day I was riding in a group ride on the service road along I-30 in east Dallas and I was looking at all the shit along the road there and I thought of this video:

America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

I don't want this to be a Jerry Maguire mission statement, I don't want this to be a Fight Club deconstruction of society. I don't want to make any more movie references. I just want to make great software and I want to be empowered to do so.

I'm not even going to proof this post. I'm just going to put it out there as it is, incomplete and probably more than a little incoherent...but I'd love to hear what you have to say about this, too.

Good Writing is Good

2011-03-12T13:22:00.001-06:00

Maciej Ceglowski is one of the proprietors of Pinboard and also an amazing writer. His recent post describing technical aspects of the great exodus from Delicious (to Pinboard) has too many gems to capture them all, but here are a couple in case you need convincing when it comes to reading technical blog posts:

Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.

...

We had always prided ourself on being a minimalist website. But the experience for new users now verged on Zen-like. After paying the signup fee, a new user would upload her delicious bookmarks, see a message that the upload was pending, and... that was it. It was possible to add bookmarks by hand, but there was no tag cloud, no tag auto-completion, no suggested tags for URLs, the aggregate bookmark counts on the profile page were all wrong, and there was no way to search bookmarks less than a day old. This was a lot to ask of people who were already skittish about online bookmarking. A lot of my time was spent reassuring new users that their data was safe and that their money was not winging its way to the Cayman Islands.

That post led me back to idlewords.com to which I was already subscribed, it turns out, but I clicked a random link and read Dabblers and Blowhards a brilliant critique of a book I have actually read:

It's surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar. The closest he comes to a clear thesis statement is at the beginning "Hackers and Painters":
"[O]f all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers."
To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.
Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

...it goes on in similar fashion, you should go read it, especially if you've read Hackers & Painters.

New danielsjourney

2011-01-21T19:00:00.003-06:00

Usually a redesign of a one-page site of mine doesn't warrant a blog post, but this story is a little bit more interesting, mostly because of the work it built on. I haven't really told the story of a design before. I'm curious how this will pan out.

I was in my RSS reader last night after an ill-advised after-dinner coffee and saw Naz's post on Weightshift about the personal page...meme? Can we call it that? I had long since moved to a single-serving homepage w/ some text and an image. In the meantime about.me made it a big deal. (Nevermind that Dallas-based Magnt had a better offering since long ago.)

But let's face it, Naz's, and his imitators', looked better. And most importantly, he posted the source on Github. That meant that seconds later I had my own copy of his source on my computer and started replacing his images and text with my own.

It used a script called backstretch to position and size the image, also on Github, which I also forked and modified for my uses. Since I had already decided to use a wedding picture, I wanted to try and at least create two layers so the field grass could superimpose the text box. The original backstretch script could only accomodate one image which it threw far into the back of the document model. That was easily fixed in just a couple lines of code.

That got me thinking about the awesome Github 404 page. Maybe I could parallax the grass! Well I tried applying the parallax plugin to the elements in question and no dice. I tried a new page that didn't use backstretch and applying the parallax plugin there--still no dice. Last night I decided to stick to just the two layers--if someone had a window sized just right, they would notice the grass popping up over the bottom of the box.

Of course this morning I couldn't let it be! I read most of the parallax code and while it was pretty much what I expected, its need to accomodate for all manner of circumstances made it overly complex to just copy and paste to fit my needs. I ended up just hand-coding some simple code that moves the grass in the direction you move your mouse, after doing a single left-right sway once on page load just for good measure.

I'm far too pleased with the end result. Now I am considering trying to get the foreground grass to actually bend as it moves...in the meantime if you haven't you can check it out.

WWIC: Why Wasn't I Consulted

2011-01-06T12:41:00.000-06:00

Ftrain: The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Paul Ford has been writing on the web longer than most and as usual this piece is excellent:

What sums it up best, to me, is this image published on the blog Kotaku (if you know where the image originates please let me know). The image was posted as a comment on a blog post linking to an article about British computer-industry millionaire Clive Sinclair marrying a younger woman. Here is the image:

Consider what that cartoon means in that context: It implies that the commenter feels—with some irony and self-awareness, I'm sure—that his opinion, in some way, is relevant to the question of whether Clive Sinclair should marry a particular woman. This is, for many obvious reasons, completely insane. And yet there was an image already sketched and available to that commenter so that he could express this exact sentiment of choosing not to be outraged at a situation he read about on the Internet. WWIC in action.

Tableau

2010-12-21T11:55:00.001-06:00

Via BERG: "John Kestner’s Tableau is a nightstand that drops photos it 'sees' in its Twitter feed into its drawer, to be discovered by its owner."

John Kestner is part of the Information Ecology team at the MIT Media Lab, so of course I'm going to gush a bit, but check out some videos of his other projects as well as the rest of his portfolio.

I'm particarly interested in things like the Daydar personal productivity framework.

Good design is as little design as possible

2010-10-06T23:01:00.000-05:00

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

There might be more than one school of thought in design, but there is only one school of thought that is right.

Graboids

2010-08-06T22:57:00.002-05:00

Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo.

Minutes to learn. A lifetime to master.

2010-08-04T17:43:00.000-05:00

Take a step and a half backward. Tilt your head to one side. Un-focus your eyes. Close one of them. Scrunch up your face. This sort of dance may seem ridiculous. And yet it's absolutely critical to the process of creation; contemplation. You see this choreography from sculptors at work. We need more of it in software development.

And these instruments ought to be accessible to children as well. Look at the piano for example. An uninstructed child will discover on their own that the keyboard's x-axis relates to pitch, force relates to volume, and if their little legs are long enough they can experiment with sustain. Minutes to learn (albeit badly). A lifetime to master. That's a good goal for new computing tools: intuitive enough to jump in on, but with room to evolve real skill and elegance.

Stewart Smith on The Setup

Multi-Linear

2010-07-31T22:56:00.003-05:00

Multi-Linear Narratives: Letting the Player Lead the Game

Entering a city, a house or any other interactive environment, different people have unique desires which the ideal environment both receives and responds to. This is not so with many games, however. In the most interactive of environments, players are often led, railroad style, down a prescribed path toward fixed ends. In this talk, award-winning game designer Brenda Brathwaite explores this problem and offers some solutions through the use of multi-linear narratives and the role of the un-storied mechanic in creating an experience players believe they crafted.

From the description for an upcoming talk being given by legendary game designer Brenda Brathwaite in San Francisco. If you are within range of my voice and San Francisco, you should try and make this talk and report back to me in detail. (From the comments on the blog it does not seem to be as gender-specific as it may first appear.)

What you really need to go watch as well is her talk How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design.

My interests are returning to game-design, the multi/non-linear nature of which was the inspiration for this blog (it started as a notebook of links and ideas about how to create ARG's and other non-linear narratives). I thought it appropriate that this important figure in game design is speaking about multi-linear narratives at the same time I return to that area as a place of intellectual interest.

One of the original figures from this blog:

Bacn and Toast in Realtime

2010-07-20T13:53:00.001-05:00

I don't have much to add to this at the moment, although given my current involvement with the real-time web obviously I have some thoughts on the matter, but I found this analysis of how social applications are built in contrast to how action-oriented Google applications are built to be rather interesting, particularly this part as it relates to real-time features:

Quora is a dozen people running dozens of experiments in how to optimally use bacn to get people to return to Quora, and how to use toast to keep them there. Bacn is email you want but not right now, and Quora has 40 flavors of it that you can order. Quora's main use of Bacn is to sizzle with something delicious (a new answer to a question you follow, a new Facebook friend has been caught in the Quora lobster trap, etc.) to entice you to come back to Quora. Then, once you're there, the toast starts popping. Quora shifts the content to things you care about and hides things you don't care about in real-time, and subtly pops up notifications while you're playing, to entice you to keep sticking around and clicking around. Some toast is so subtle it doesn't even look like a pop-up notification—it just looks like a link embedded in the page with some breadcrumbs that appear in real-time to take you to some place on Quora it knows you'll find irresistible. For every user's action, bacn's and toast's fly out to others in search of reactions. (Aside: if I were Twitter, I would be worried. Real-time user interfaces are more addictive than pseudo-real-time interfaces; what if Quora took all of its technology and decided to use it to build a better Twitter?) Social apps are action-reaction interaction loops; Google apps are designed just for action.

It's All About Meaning

2010-07-17T13:34:00.003-05:00

All those other things—authority/fame/money/metanarrative—just validate the meaning (or create meaning where there was none). When someone says something is important, what they really mean is that it has meaning. When people do things that we consider absurd or stupid, those things are creating/validating meaning for those people.

This is a similar structure to Lacan's objet petit a*, but in place of our ideal self is the meaning, and in place of the other is the Meaning Validation Device™.

This is important to remember when thinking about motivation—we are ultimately motivated by the meaning.

This is why stories and empathy are so important.

Jamy Ian Swiss at Gel 2009 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

* There are a lot of definitions of what the objet petit a is, the above is my most simple explanation of the definition that best suites my purposes—we seek out an other who reflects back on us our ideal self.

On shipping

2010-07-17T13:19:00.000-05:00

And the next time someone produces an antenna with a weak spot, or a sticky accelerator, you’re more likely to feel their pain, listen to their words and trust their actions than the braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives.

You've either shipped or you haven't. At first this post seemed really pretentious, but its main point (above) is spot on. People who haven't actually finished something are the most likely to criticize those who have.

One of the things that has really been holding me back lately isn't the shipping, it's the fear of what might not happen after I've shipped. Attention is scarse these days. So is decent software.

Nearness

2010-02-20T13:05:00.003-06:00

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.
Nearness explores interacting without touching.

More here and here.

Bad Buzz

2010-02-15T08:35:00.006-06:00

Based on my casual observation of the situation, it seems to me the bad things about Google Buzz [2] [*] were the result of just a couple basic product design decisions that probably felt natural and ingenious to the product designers, based on their usage of Google products as a whole. Of course being Google employees, their usage likely differs significantly from other Gmail users, say nothing of their trust in the company as a whole.

While building software for yourself is a good idea, especially for small businesses or startups, it is dependent on you being a lot like your customers. Once you are building products for yourself inside a giant organization that internally looks a lot different than the outside world, that is when having empathy [2] for your actual customers becomes increasingly important. Especially when you have the resources to actually go and find out, scientifically, what your users are like.

Google is still just a search company, and that piece of their business and experience they get right every time. But they are also increasingly a product** company, and getting a lot of exposure through their products. I suspect that these products are primarily developed by (relatively) small teams of very smart people, whose intelligence has led to a certain self-assurance but whose myopic experience has led to a certain naiveté about how a product will be received in the "outside" world. Buzz feels a lot like Google's version of Clippy. Let's just hope Google is able to turn the user experience ship early and go back to creating products born out of novel innovations and not just internal versions of other company's products.

* There were a ton of intelligent critiques of Buzz and I hoped to link to a few more of my favorites, but I failed to preserve the links or re-find them in a cursory search. Although just now I found this well-written (if wordy) analysis that I think says the same things I just did but in a more business-like, thought out way.

** Their search engine and results presentation is also a product, but for the purposes of this discussion I've categorized it separately.

Postscript: FWIW, I disabled Buzz after about 15 minutes of testing. Had there been a setting to keep it out of my inbox without having to create a filter I might have tried it for a day or two, but the email inbox is sacred, and their intrusion into it was enough of an offense for me to make a quick and final judgement in terms of my own usage of the product.

Just in case you thought I'd forgotten about funny Twitter things

2010-02-14T11:34:00.003-06:00

Puppy Tweets will turn your Pooper into a world-class twitterer

I can't be sure, but @pavdog having had an account since March 18th, 2008, surely he is one of the original dog tweeters.

Corner-of-the-Street

2010-01-28T21:44:00.005-06:00

Down by the corner of the street,
Where the three roads meet,
And the feet
Of the people as they pass go "Tweet-tweet-tweet",
Who comes tripping round the corner of the street?
One pair of shoes which are Nurse's;
One pair of slippers which are Percy's. . .
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

Milne, from When We Were Very Young (1924), from tonight's story time.

"Chief Taste Officer" -- I like the sound of that -- maybe "Benevolent Dictator of Design"

2010-01-20T01:09:00.006-06:00

Hire a GOD of UX, not a pixel pusher.

Maybe call them the Chief Taste Officer. You’re looking for someone who is equal parts Steve Jobs, Don Draper, and Seth Godin. Assuming such a person exists (and that you can hire them) they will be responsible for Quality, top to bottom, and they’ll have the power (hiring, budget, creative authority, whatever it takes) to make it happen.

This is a pretty tall order. It may even be impossible. Apple was able to do it, but only because Steve Jobs is a genius who wanted his baby back, and Apple was circling the drain so Jobs was given the time and authority he needed to remake the company.

Can you reinvent a software company by hiring a pixel pusher?

Also:

We’re not all solo auteurs. Collaboration, compromise, and constraints are inescapable when building complicated products. The secret is to make sure that even as work is distributed, ownership of the work’s quality isn’t.

If you’re a software company, your people should have titles like these:

God of Bringing in the Money
God of Servers
God of Programming
God of the User Experience

Show me a company without a designated (and opinionated) “God of UX” and I’ll show you a company that makes crap.

Pop Quiz: Who is your God of UX?

No legendary design on the web?

2010-01-01T18:03:00.004-06:00

Why there are no legendary web designers got me all in bunch earlier today, had to share here. In reply to:

The web is a low resolution, low fidelity, crappy medium.

A quick gut check: Would you ever hang a web design on your wall?

...etc...you can go read the rest of the piece if you want, I replied:

Couldn't disagree more. There are plenty of web designs that I would project onto my wall (or maybe display in a digital frame)--printing them would be impractical because of the low resolution you have at the center of your argument. Also, those sites I would choose to use as art would not be the content-centric ones you mention (although there are some that make the aesthetics of text true art). If all you think of when you think of the web is TechCrunch and CNN then no, certainly not. But there are some amazing artists doing work designed and delivered on the web. Similarly, there are some very famous artists who used low-fidelity technologies centrally in their art.

Your other arguments fall apart equally as fast--looking at a painting is a solitary experience abstracted from our sense of touch and smell, and yet the visual arts is one of our primary artistic forms.

Also, it's 2010! If you are bashing the web based on bandwidth and screen resolution, where were you in 2000, or 1995?

2009-12-28T11:36:00.000-06:00

The dirty little secret about simplicity is that it's really hard to do.

2009-11-11T17:10:00.000-06:00

You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route.

When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler.

Everything that’s potentially worrying about the real-time web

2009-10-27T11:04:00.005-05:00

Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web by Paul Carr

...what were we all doing? Filming and tweeting and checking in rather than just putting our phones away and enjoying the gig. Why does the world need two thousand photos of the same band on the same stage, all taken from a slightly different angle. That kind of 360 degree imagery might have been useful on the day Kennedy was shot – not least because it would have kept Oliver Stone quiet – but for a Weezer gig?

...And yet this real-time mentality – pictures/tweets or it didn’t happen – continues to seep into every aspect of our lives, both personally and professionally. Whereas once we might attend a conference to watch the speakers and perhaps learn something, today our priority is to live blog it – to ensure our followers know we’re on the inside...

Real-Time is a Collaboration by Kevin Makice

The second key assumption is that the real-time web is an individual activity. It isn’t. Individuals are involved, but the appeal and value of real-time content is in the sheer number of people participating and the wide range of personal experiences they capture.

...With new information comes new skills and opportunity for reflection. We see this happening all the time with the evolving strategies of Twitter use...The value you see today may not be the same value you will see tomorrow. People change.

It would be a mistake to adopt a utopian view and discount Carr’s critique. However, I believe that what will ultimately emerge from real-time web is a Zen awareness in the here and now. The current flaws in this beast can and will be overcome.

And from the comments to the original TechCrunch article:

Too long, please translate into 140 characters. #

It's a Shrodinger's tweet phenomemon. #

I have a two part response to all this, and hopefully it won't take me weeks to compose it, but it will take longer than right now, so for now, I leave these without comment. These will become links to the follow up posts, however:

-- (Everything that’s potentially worrying about) Attention and the real-time web
-- (Everything that’s potentially worrying about) Love and the real-time web

Left vs Right Infographic

2009-10-21T19:05:00.005-05:00

As much as I detest binary analysis of...well, anything, this infographic struck a chord:

This is via the wonderful Information is Beautiful, which comments

This kind of visual approach to mapping concepts really excites me. I like the way it coaxes me to entertain two apparently contradictory value systems at the same time. Or, in other words, I like the way it f**ks with my head.

"It shouldn’t surprise any of us that they stopped caring."

2009-10-19T10:49:00.001-05:00

Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. They’ve learned to ignore our pressures to always get the latest versions of everything because our upgrades frequently break their software and workflow. They expect unreliable functionality, shoddy software workmanship, unnecessary complexity, broken promises from software marketers, and degrading hostility from their office’s IT staff.

From the frequently brilliant Marco Arment.

I have original posts brewing around here, promise; they just take a lot longer to finish than the quick quote-and-link hack.

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

2009-10-13T14:09:00.003-05:00

It’s not your job to create content for Google...Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.

Derek Powazek on SEO

Spray-On Usability vs Cult of Design

2009-09-15T10:26:00.006-05:00

An older but still very applicable post from daringfireball.net:

It’s not something every programmer can learn. Most programmers don’t have any aptitude for UI design whatsoever. It’s an art, and like any art, it requires innate ability. You can learn to be a better writer. You can learn to be a better illustrator. But most people can’t write and can’t draw, and no amount of practice or education is going to make them good at it. Improved, yes; good, no.

Conversely, some people who are good UI designers aren’t programmers. But the rock stars are the guys who can do both, and they are few and far between.

...Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users.

I actually disagree with Mr. Gruber on his last point. I'm not sure the designers of really great user interfaces have a profound respect for their users.

I think a designer's relationship with his or her audience is like that of an honest believer's relationship with God: respect, sure, but mostly punctuated by fear, frustration, doubt and an infuriating love. When one spends hours moving dots on a screen for the pleasure of an invisible other one has entered the realm of religion. I think being able to not only live in that tension but thrive and make good decisions while in it is the aspect of design that makes it more an art (or a priesthood). That we actualize our thoughts and feelings with text (code) that becomes objects is no more relevant to our real calling than if our tools were paints and brushes.

(This rabbit hole brought to you via @stephenanderson.)

Should There Be a Unified Set of Styles For Web Interfaces?

2009-08-25T15:10:00.007-05:00

I comment on "Should There Be a Unified Set of Styles For Web Interfaces?":

The main issue is that we need more voices for sanity in our web application design. I think our current issues are natural growing pains from making an application framework out of a technology originally created for documents.

I think you should contribute a sane voice...

This is something I've thought about writing about here, so just as good someone else did and started a good conversation about it.

The fight for simplicity

2009-08-12T00:48:00.003-05:00

I spoke to simplicity before, but lately it has become a bit of a mantra of mine, accosted from all sides, it seems, by complexity. I've made some observations:

Complexity is a powerful tool to disguise ignorance; in fact, complexity can transform ignorance into brilliance in the eyes of your foolhardy audience. "If you can't convince them, confuse them." Complexity engenders confusion, and people would rather agree with absurdity than appear confused and thus ignorant. This is closely related to the wisdom of crowds.
Similarly, complexity can overwhelm our beauty sensors. Human brains will almost always confuse the novel for the beautiful, so we pile on the novelties in attempts to convey beauty. It's not until we have a steaming pile that we realize that none of those things were beautiful.
Alpha geeks and entrepreneurs (often) love complexity. It's the reason they are in the business. Simple solutions bore them. They are going to be drawn towards the more complex solution without consideration of alternatives. (By "complex solution" I don't necessarily mean in regards to technical details.) You want to work with the smartest people possible, of course, and it may not always be as obvious as the famous unwashed Linux administrator who refuses to work with anyone else in the company, but there is a reason there has been a lot of work around new models for successful thinking, pushback on being overly clever, a movement for building less.

These aren't postures we adopt knowingly. It's not like anyone cognitively enjoys complexity or clutter. We're not all striving to be collectors. We inch our way into it, one user interface element or one line of code at a time. And some of those elements and lines cannot be avoided. But when they can be, they should be.

In the almost two months since I started this post, i've been collecting links that relate to simplicity, most within the realm of web design and user interface design, as that is an area I read the most about:

30 examples of extreme minimalism in web design. As advertised.
Marco Arment with a simple compare/contrast.
Your app vs successful apps. A simple explanation of user interface simplicity.
Practicing product minimalism.
Managing UI Complexity by Brandon Walkin is a extremely well written post well advertised by its title. It contains many great tips for simplifying the user interface of applications. He mentions a common design problem I've often encountered:
The [user interface] reflects the developer’s model of the task rather than the user’s model.
Approaching a Minimum Viable Product and Minimum Viable Product: a guide.
Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.

More on Twitter (queue sighing)

2009-06-24T01:42:00.005-05:00

I'm quoting myself, in a comment on the brilliant and humane Brain Oberkirch's blog:

I was in total agreement when I first read this post; for some reason I came back around to it (because you've been too quiet--too busy I bet) and now I have an additional thought about all this twitter-handle-as-identity. There is a weird paradox about twitter in that I can learn the most about you, and the least about you, over twitter.

If you are a stranger I can learn that "Oh, I'm really interested in you!" or "Oh, I'm not really that interested in you."

If you are a friend, I can learn "Oh, you like asparagus too?!" or, "You're at the hospital? What can I do to help?"

It comes back to the low threshold of the information, its ambient nature. I can choose to ignore it quickly, or retain it and take action on it equally as fast.

Back to your original point, it is the stranger case. I meet some people at a conference, I follow them on twitter. Within a few hours or days I have an idea if this is going to go anywhere. While going to their site and emailing them or subscribing to their blog's RSS feed might have taken a significant amount of attention and energy, a quick "follow brianoberkirch" sent from my phone is low cost and allows me to quickly start making very small decisions about what the future might hold for this initial, awkward, short social transaction.

Love this graphic

2009-06-22T00:14:00.005-05:00

From the amazing iso50. (Don't miss his amazing Layer Tennis match.)

I just used the word amazing twice in a row. Ah! Now three times in a row!

This has nothing to do with anything except really amazing design

2009-06-21T23:01:00.005-05:00

This takes design well into the realm of art: A Wes Anderson Film Festival (hypothetical)

Images stolen straight off of the iso50 post about the conclusion of the project. The project's author, Alex, is an author at the site. More links to posts about the project behind any of the last few links.

Via Dallas' 404 blog.

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

Zero kerned fonts make illustrations of words

2009-05-26T14:43:00.006-05:00

nonlinear
Originally uploaded by dealingwith

Aierbazzi font. See also, Bagarozz:

I designed Bagarozz (this is version 2.0) to study possibilities offered by ordinary fonts to create illustrations in a simple way through combination / processing of some preset shapes (keys).

"There will be a rise of new creative leaders in the world, fueled by rich humanity."

2009-05-25T20:35:00.002-05:00

John Maeda: Creative Leaders Get Their Hands Dirty

In the last few decades, technology has encouraged our fascination with perfection — whether it's six sigma manufacturing, the zero-contaminant clean room, or in its simplest form, "2.0." Given the new uncertainty in the world however, I can see that it is time to question this approach — of over-technologized, over-leveraged, over-advanced living. The next big thing? Dirty hands...

(em mine) (via his twitters)

I've noticed this a lot. All you must do is notice the rash of new bike builders that have popped up around the country...the whole maker thing...DIY...gardening...We have definitely moved through authenticity and on to simplicity, and if that is how things are trending, I can't wait to see what the next thing is.

Speaking of bike building, besides fastboy's flickr stream, this video is one of the most aesthetically pleasing documents of the process:

Geekhouse Movie from Geekhouse Bikes on Vimeo.

Tracking Moods on Twitter

2009-05-22T10:05:00.002-05:00

It's no We Feel Fine, but it's just this kind of internet-to-meatspace with a DIY aesthetic that makes my day. Hope vs. Despair looks at our collective mood on Twitter. It is a simple way of tracking people’s feelings – about the economy, their pork chop sandwich…whatever’s top of mind. The measuring device tracks tweets every 30 seconds, looking at the frequency of smiles and frowns, specifically :) vs. :(

Hope vs. Despair Originally uploaded by Big Spaceship

2009-05-08T00:34:00.000-05:00

street poems :: dublin 2009 from ze frank on Vimeo.

2009-05-02T10:55:00.001-05:00

via conej

2009-04-26T12:26:00.000-05:00

Tweenbots!

2009-04-11T20:33:00.004-05:00

Tweenbots

...Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination.

...The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged.

...The Tweenbot's unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions.

WiiSpray

2009-04-07T14:51:00.005-05:00

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.

The foundational basis for the project goes well beyond replacing real graffiti as an art form. Moreover, WiiSpray
is to be seen as an interface to give graffiti a new virtual level surpassing tactile boundaries of the tangible world.

WiiSpray

via @erinmiddleton

Flutter

2009-04-04T20:18:00.002-05:00

Suggest-o-matic

2009-04-02T02:37:00.002-05:00

I'm typing this in Suggest-o-matic (SOM), the very simplified culmination of many years of thinking about content management, or what I refer to as "creative management", that is, how we store and reference all the content we create over the course of a life.

Right now, SOM is mostly like an automated reference librarian, who looks over your shoulder as you're writing your paper and suggests things out on the interwebs that might have to do with what you're writing about.

This is its very first iteration, what I am calling a 0.1 protoype ...my intentions for the future are:

create multiple links for any given query (right now it can only automatically create one link based on what you've clipped from your query)

improving on the UI

ability to favor any number of site searches (I'm most interested in searching my old content for articles, images, etc. that I might have already created on the subjects)

an automatic post-to-my-blog-or-whatever dealio

a run-on-any-page, white box + selected text Suggest-o-matic

serious natural language chops, so that special syntax is no longer needed to fire off a suggestion

serious AI on results, so that SOM can sort and manage the relative links automatically for you

Update: Need I mention that IE is completely unsupported at this point!?

Twouble with Twitters

2009-03-23T01:49:00.000-05:00

SXSW

2009-03-20T14:21:00.014-05:00

(repost, now with more video)

Updates

SXSW inspired a lot of cognitive dissonance. I'm not even sure I can get it all out into words. It's clear in my brain. I don't have a lot of time for really cohesive blogging anymore, but I'll try.

Part of that dissonance might be related to that last thing. There were a lot people at SXSW with plenty of time to blog about a lot of things and have very important thoughts. And by "very important" I mean asinine and pathetic. That combined with a huge emphasis on panels and "core conversations" inspired a lot of hate.

At the same time, I was again really inspired by SXSW this year. If there was one overriding theme to the entire event, it was this: Things suck, but you're awesome. Most presentations (and yes I tried to stick to the proper presentations) ended with some variant of this (and Kathy Sierra's really did).

Saturday I mostly played in the Lego pit and hit up BarCamp, but I did make it to Designing the Future of The New York Times, which I went to, of course, because of the brilliant Khoi Vinh, but found myself far more impressed with his colleague Tom Bodkin (here's his bio w/ pic on the SX site). His years of experience in a much richer design process and culture spoke rather profoundly, I thought, to a room full of mostly design hacks (myself, of course, included).

My first two ~~panels~~ talks on Sunday were excellent. First was Being a UX Team of One by Leah Buley, which was totally humbling and inspiring at the same time. Lots of great stuff that I want to do but am not doing yet in my UX practice. She has a few preso's up already on slideshare, including this same one given last year. The second was Jared Spool's talk. I've seen Jared speak before so I knew it was going to be good. It was. Apparently other people knew it was going to be good too. About two rows in front of me was a who's who of web design.

Somehow I missed this on Sunday, which was dumb of me. After giving the keynote a miss to go visit Mellow Johnny's with Jay I wandering in and out of sessions until stumbling into Gary Vaynerchuk's Q&A in the big room. I was so glad I did. My opinion of him did a 180. Previously, I wasn't a fan (go here to decide for yourself). But seeing him speak live to that audience I realized, he's a motivational speaker, and my kind of motivational speaker at that: a no bullshit one. Plus he could get Eeyore excited about life.

Monday there was some more good stuff going on, but all I really cared about was the Bruce Sterling session. I did go to Presenting Straight to the Brain, which was good, Kathy's stuff particularly. I have strong opinions about that stuff, though, and I can't believe no-one is poo-pooing panels and telling people to emulate rockstars. Mid-day I got to hang out with @thedandee some more which was a good thing. Eating, as well, since I hadn't eaten in about 24 hours. After lunch we both went to the aforementioned and inspiring talk by Kathy. Then, Bruce. He was awesome.

I'll be huffduffing all the talks I went to plus all the ones I wished I'd gone to, for those who want to catch/keep up but want a filter. I'll probably fill in some gabs with quick vid or pic posts here as well.

Update 1: Leah Buley has posted the presentation as well as the design templates she showed off in said presentation.

Update 2:

Update 3: Khoi Vihn's SX recap. And Mike D, from the comments: "Jared Spool? Fantastic. I’d rather watch him talk about peeling carrots for an hour than listen to five social media consultants introduce themselves for a half hour and then open up Q & A."

And finally, the most interesting bit, Carissa's take on the weekend:

Oh and have I failed to mention my new record that you can download for free?

<a href="http://danielmiller.bandcamp.com/album/lobjet-petit-a">This Town by Daniel Miller</a>

Holographic Ring Interface

2009-03-05T12:00:00.001-06:00

Holographic Interface - round interface - Ringo from Ivan Tihienko on Vimeo.

(This had been sitting in drafts since January, probably because I was going to add to it, but I'm just going to publish w/o comment now.)

Kropilak

2009-03-05T10:35:00.007-06:00

Via kosmograd.com:

The web site of Branislav Kropilak now features larger scale images of the beautiful parking garages series, and the stunning billboards series of photographs.

...I am increasingly becoming convinced that there is more truth in these 'found' architectures than any of the works that feature in contemporary architectural magazines...these images invite us to consider the signs themselves as pure structure, signifying nothing but themselves.

I'm always fascinated with anything that can recontextualize objects without actually moving them or adding to them.

Via the links of one of my more brilliant IRL friends, Steve Collins.

DIY, Corporate-sponsored ARG stuffs

2009-03-03T08:58:00.004-06:00

This guy has a fun job. More here.

Jon Stewart Shakes His Fist at Twitter

2009-03-03T08:51:00.000-06:00

Siftables Music Sequencer

2009-02-26T11:59:00.000-06:00

Siftables Music Sequencer from Jeevan Kalanithi on Vimeo.

Little bit of a Crush on this Work

2009-02-03T22:40:00.003-06:00

significant whitespace
Originally uploaded by shaderlab

significant whitespace
Originally uploaded by shaderlab

Go check out all of it...

Charts!

2009-01-30T11:35:00.004-06:00

Edward Tufte ...the guru of Information Design
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches on Smashing Magazine
flowingdata.com ..."FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better – mainly through data visualization."
A friend pointed me to this portfolio (Scroll down to "experimental".)
This guy is getting a lot of press lately
and of course don’t forget about indexed
via one of the above: these look yummy
BIG tree maps

These all came across my desk in the last week—something about attention and having attended the Tufte seminar Monday—and I thought I would catalog them here and share…

Video via @stephenanderson

Scott Brown on Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling

2009-01-23T14:03:00.007-06:00

I have a ton of backlogged stuff to put on this blog, but this one is quick and easy, and if you read this article without irony, it could be the "about" page for this blog.

Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it's kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk: The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the "hero's journey," Joseph Campbell's so-called Monomyth. (Which is just so ... well ... mono.)

more...

This is how the future gets made

2008-11-03T17:20:00.002-06:00

Nectar Hackathon 2.0 from Nectar on Vimeo.

I found this little time-lapse video extremely inspiring for some reason.

I need to look into Nectar a bit more, I think it might be along the lines of where I was going with SWIM...

Bringing “Massive Multiplayer Trans-Reality” Games To Android

2008-11-02T12:39:00.001-06:00

The Joy of JOYity: Bringing “Massive Multiplayer Trans-Reality” Games To Android Phones

When you download the app you can play one of three games (YouCatch, Roads of San Francisco, City Race Munich) or design your own. In Roads of San Francisco, for instance, you have to go around the city picking up clues. When you get to a destination, a text or picture message tells you where to go next. It is a Scavenger Hunt with a story line. You can also design your own Scavenger Hunt games and play them with large groups of people.

Another game that comes with JOYity, YouCatch, is a version of Manhunt. Players in the same city sign up for a game. Everyone acts as both hunter and hunted at the same time. The game assigns you a player that you are hunting, while assigning you to someone else as a victim. Everyone’s location is periodically flashed on the map. When you get within 25 feet of your victim, you press the scrollball on the phone for the kill. But every time you press the button, your location is shown to all the other players as well. The last person standing wins.

Video reviews at the link.

In other news, I can log into Blogger like normal again, which is nice.

Touchscreen fun on SNL

2008-10-28T11:02:00.003-05:00

via SvN

ZuiPrezi and Kitchen Budapest

2008-10-10T17:29:00.014-05:00

...because it is so freaking cool. And it hits me on many levels: I've always hated most presentations, let alone PowerPoint, that atrocity.

Slides are transparent photos you slide into machines. They are not the ideas.

The ideology of ZuiPrezi is based our natural knowledge on how to coordinate ourselves in space; traditionally all information we have had to process and store used to be linked to physical space. That is where our minds have developed good skills in orienting ourselves. Despite all this digital information today is mostly presented to us as a moniker of printed matter. Of course printing has served us well to store (and shape) information for the the last six centuries, however, with the wide appearance of computing we saw the same old pattern: old forms got translated to new media without exploring its full potential. Most of the computer systems which present us with information today use the old paradigm of prints and slides: arranging information on a framed 2d static space. We could argue that these (at least their forms) are merely the side effect of Gutenberg's galaxy.

#

This sample presentation give a high-level overview of what it is about.

Here you can find another video and many sample preso's, including a walk through where you can play with the wonderfully intuitive creation interface.

This came out of Kitchen Budapest, a technology incubator very much like what I had dreamed Integration Research would become. Check out a ZuiPrezi presentation about Kitchen Budapest, and/or read more about them on their website (and be sure to check out their awesome "press" icon).

The Living Room

2008-09-27T10:50:00.004-05:00

The Living Room is about the coolest thing I've seen all month. From 6 Angry Men:

...we use the sound, light and temperature as input. We use an Arduino – which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform – to measure the light and temperature. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors...

The state of your living room is projected on your wall. The wall gets filled by organisms that live there in an abstract world. The wall is their habitat. So if it’s dark and there is no sound, some creatures will fall asleep.

If your room becomes more noisy, the organisms will wake up irritated because there’s no light and they want to sleep. Each organism has 9 different conditions, which condition you will see depends of the balance between light and sound. It’s a living wallpaper.

via mindhaven.com/blog

Not So Much With The Blogger, So Elsewhere

2008-09-20T10:36:00.006-05:00

Blogger hasn't let me log in for weeks. There is a work-around I found in the support forums. Obviously. I'm posting here. But between the clunky interface (apologies to Adaptive Path) and the seeming disregard Google has for the product, it is finally time I think more seriously about moving this blog to a new location. It is the only Blogger blog I have never moved off the platform, and with no denial of the irony, is the only one that has therefore stayed stable and archive-ready for these 7 years.

Still, the trick to distributed content storage is being able to see the end of the tracks and getting off the train before they pack up the servers and turn the power off at the data center (not that that is going to happen here...it's just a metaphor). LiveJournal is now a Russian company. I can't log in to Blogger. It would seem that, yes, "the blog" is dead.

Speaking of, I keep meaning to work on SWIM so that the version available for download isn't a steaming pile of security-less bug-infested referential-integrity-less shit (overstating the problems), but I actually have more interesting content-tools-related plans involving the above-linked product and/or other content tools and a clever algorithm. If I can just get any time to work on it. I'm a bit busy with the day job at the moment.

All that to say, I will forward all feeds, have some very cool ways to slice the content, and expect all this by the end of 2009. :)

Elsewhere in my newly coined nonlinear category on my Живой Журнал:

...Most products are made the wrong way. The industrial design is done before the interaction designer and visual designers ever see the device, so the device feels slapped together; what’s on the screen has nothing to do with its form. Or maybe the product strategy causes the device to have too many features until it is overburdened with unnecessary functionality and controls. Or maybe the product is lifeless and has little personality aside from a list of options.

...from a post about Kicker. And

"I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them. Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology."

...from a post about "John Maeda taking over the presidency of RISD, 'ambient awareness' being talked about in the NYT, and all the noise about chrome"...all of which I have a lot more to say about, but need a bit more time to put it all together.

The "IR" tag might also be of interest to nonlinear types, which is another "temporary" category for all the stuff I would have blogged at the long-dormant Integration Research. Yeah, I still have plans for that site, too...

The "UX" tag is also stuff that should probably be over here...

Twitterlesung

2008-07-29T08:55:00.002-05:00

Twitterlesung. ...I like when a somewhat disruptive technology that almost revels in its place as a mediation (or, in Twitter marketing speak, a "communications utility"), spills into the real world. We are no longer tribal by geography, so our tools help us be tribal despite geography (and attention constraints). But we still need to gather around the campfire and re-tell. It's again all about narrative.

Now we're getting somewhere

2008-07-14T07:14:00.001-05:00

http://twitter.com/z0rk

I'm telling you, dogs on twitter is the new fad!

2008-07-11T09:44:00.003-05:00

From Geek And Poke

See Also

Also: adocu, one word twitter clone.

Real Snail Mail

2008-06-21T22:47:00.003-05:00

Our snails are equipped with a miniaturised electronic circuit and antenna that enables them to be assigned messages from hardware located within their enclosure. The moment you click 'send' your message will travel at the speed of light to our snail server where it will await collection by a snail agent.

Once associated with the tiny electronic chip on the snails shell your message will be carried around until the snail chances by the drop off point. Hardware located at this point collects the message from the snail and forwards it to its final destination.

The worlds first webmail service using real snails from boredomresearch. There's even a blog.

via Kester

Amy Hoy: Technique or skill?

2008-06-11T11:34:00.003-05:00

Technique or skill?

Writing headlines that get dugg vs Writing headlines that get remembered

Mastery of video game controllers vs Mastery of video game / problem-solving concepts

Convincing people to pay for your stuff vs Creating stuff people can't live without

Google ability vs Research ability

Being able to survive in a given business vs Being able to survive in any situation

Knowing how to blog vs Knowing how to write

Knowing how to prepare a lesson plan vs Knowing how to educate

Knowing how to speak properly vs Knowing how to weave a compelling 45-minute narrative

Being a CSS ninja vs Being good at learning multifaceted rule sets

Writing good Java code vs Understanding programming theory

Making pretty with Photoshop vs Analyzing the world to come up with impactful new things

While this blog is initially about novel interfaces, primarily for narrative delivery, it is also about how we interface with life and allow novelty to change the way we do so. Much of that ability has to do with an intellectual flexibility that is highlighted in Amy's list of distinctions. Hers is often excellent writing on these very topics, so if you haven't already, head over to slash7 and read...

More Twitter Crossposting

2008-06-09T20:53:00.006-05:00

From my decidedly less business-like LJ:

Twitter is unreliable, even as a service to humans. It's been all over the internet for the last month or two, as their site has gone down as much as it's been up recently, due to higher use. In terms of application development using Twitter as a platform, they recently throttled the API limit form 70 to 30 calls an hour, and apparently (~~I haven't had a chance to get caught up on it, but am hoping to today~~), changed a bunch of the API calls themselves.

All of this is fine if one understands that Twitter is a young service built by people with no sense on how to make their offering scale. "Send updates through Twitter" already has different expectations attached to it than "Send updates from your cell phone"...

I'm still really interested in Twitter and developing Twitter apps, but I'm in it from a higher level. I'm not worried about business requirements just yet.

Still, if one wants a quick-and-dirty mobile interface to their application, it still can't be beat...

The problem with having an API in the first place is having to support the API from then on. And if Rails is really the reason for performance issues, it is an interesting paradox, because I wonder if there would even be an API if Rails hadn't made it so simple to implement...and then I wonder if the service would be as popular as it is without the many API clients out there.

Update: If you are a real glutton for punishment, or love talk of API's and/or Twitter, this is an interesting discussion.

Beautiful And Original Product Designs

2008-05-26T14:12:00.002-05:00

Smashing Magazine: Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Successful product design manages to reveal useful functionality beyond its appealing form. No matter how excellent a design looks like, most customers aren’t likely to spend money on something they won’t be able to use. On the other hand, most people are likely to buy something useful despite the design it has.

Yet the key to a truly successful product design lies in designer’s ability to combine both beautiful design and functionality making it obvious to the customers how the product can be used and which benefits it delivers. However, one can combine the beauty of design with the utility it is supposed to provide.

Most products fail to pass this test and never reach the production stage; some products do manage to get to the stores. In the overview below you’ll find an overview of some beautiful and original product designs which will hopefully make the cut and will be available in the next years. Some of them are already available today.

I have to find some time to check these out in more detail myself, but some very interesting interfaces here...

Forgive the Crossposting about Twitter

2008-05-25T13:28:00.002-05:00

there was life before Twitter, but the way we're all talking about it, you'd never know it.

favrd

2008-05-16T11:18:00.001-05:00

favrd

Textism: Oh, look, another web app

So I spent the last few days knocking this together. It works on three principles: first, that anyone who wants to can have their vote counted; second, that things people find interesting are more important than people who find things interesting; and third, that by any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks – unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about – must and shall be filtered out of view.

There’s some fancy albeit inchoate weighting logic going on under the surface, and I’ve got a few vaguely neato features in the works, though it is as they say very beta. It will I hope grow, and, as more people are added to the voting ranks, be a reliable source for funny, weird, obnoxious, entertaining, inspiring, webcock-less, tiny little fragments of life.

Twitter as Tribal

2008-05-15T00:16:00.002-05:00

Michael Lopp on Twitter:

The act of one human being choosing to follow another is a big deal. As long as nefarious intent is not in play, the connection creates what the social science nerds like to call an affinity map; by drawing a line between you and me, we can infer that we’re somehow connected. How are we connected? Who knows? Maybe you like nerd culture? How about gel pens? We’re not really going to know until we test that link by asking a question.

...I’m eagerly watching Twitter evolve and organize itself. I’m dazzled as third parties are giving Twitter memory and context. But what I care about, and what has value to me, is the tribe of people in my ecosystem. Twitter is the best social network out there;, it’s a great social search engine;, and it’s a short strategic hop from being a terrific next generation address book.

My tribe is not your tribe because you’re not using Twitter how I do. You wrote an Academy Award winning screenplay, only follow a few people, but have thousands following you. You sell shoes and follow each of the thousands of people who follow you. You are a major airline, but sound surprisingly human.

Twitter’s value has nothing to do with the technology.

Breaking news, Twitter style

2008-05-07T23:03:00.005-05:00

News of a possible explosion rippled through the popular online service Twitter on Tuesday, in a preview of what’s to come in the realm of breaking news and citizen journalism. Twitter is a so-called microblogging site that allows users to send and receive short messages.

At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: "Explosion in Falls Church, VA?"

Breaking news, Twitter style

What is so interesting about Twitter is what it is further exposing about what the web has been showing us for the last 15 years, that is a social experience of hyperconnectedness, attention, and most of all, mediation.

My Map

2008-05-06T16:04:00.001-05:00

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

The Top 22 Twitter Posts of February 2008

2008-05-05T17:45:00.004-05:00

I favorited 373 tweets in February 2008. These are the top 6%, in no particular order:
in the case of the bucket of fetuses last night, a dream is not, in fact, a wish that my heart makes emilybrianna
Macys lady: Didn't you find any nice purses? Me: They're a bit mature for me. Her: What about Coach? Me: *points to robots on current purse* ShuffShuff
In this moment, no one in this mall would judge me if i domestically violenced my boyfriend. EffingBoring
I love it when you're searching for X, Google says "Did you mean Y?", and then gives you zero results. It's very French. scottsimpson
Every time you sniff and say somebody has "too much free time," the part of you that used to love making things for pure joy dies a little. hotdogsladies
Apparently it's not 'money' to cry at a strip club. lonelysandwich
Havent had sex in sooooooo long. Its gotten to the point where i masturbate thinking of other times i masturbated. irc
.5(self-deprecation) + 1.5(nerd terminology) + 2(unspoken shared experience) = twitter success echuckles
Sticking post-it notes on people so I can remember who I would sleep with sober. DieLaughing
Sometimes my heart suddenly catches fire for the beauty of life. (Classified in the DSM IV as a "hypomanic" state of Bipolar II disorder.) serafaery
Today's lunch special: "Jamaican me crazy! jerk chicken (or tofu)" Which I suppose is better than "miso solly! soup" jimray
Announcing that all major research projects from now on will now be referred to as "Bubblegum Wrappers" so as to lessen the terror involved. ShuffShuff
John: "The Shining is about a Daddy who likes to drink who pretends to write all day." Jonas: "That movie is about us!" I hope he's wrong. AmyJane
"Are you making fun of me?" "No." "That's your yes voice." cleversimon
whats a @scobleizer? He just added me. Thats a silly name Makenna
Drove past a bus today whose destination was, according to its display, "Walmart's". Say, when does the bus for literate people come by? EffingBoring
Why is there a pinata in the den that looks like me? And why was it filled with printouts from my poetry blog and then beaten with a rake? fireland
I just recently got into Star Trek. It's relaxing to watch and listen to people who are polite to each other and enjoy their jobs. eliohouse

Etc., etc...

When I first read this post I thought it was fav'd tweets across all users, but even just as one (slightly obsessed) user's fav's, it is an entertaining proof that Twitter is the ultimate gym for our collective fast-twitch wit muscles.

The Photoshop Guys Revealed

2008-04-25T18:40:00.002-05:00

The Photoshop Guys Revealed

Troy Hitch, 37, and Matt Bledsoe, 39 — the guys responsible for YSAP and its sequel — met a few years ago while producing a radio ad in Cincinnati, which is 10 minutes from Covington. Bledsoe was the ad's creative director and Hitch, a polymath, was doing the voice-over (he's also the voice of Donnie and a real Photoshop expert). They quickly became buddies, started writing funny bits together, and partnered up at a creative agency Hitch later started, Big Fat Institute.

Great article, and a model for the kind of work I'm really interested in. Would like to find the time to explore it some more and make some more observations...for now just the link to the article--more links can be found within.

I Want You To Want Me by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

2008-04-22T21:17:00.002-05:00

The interactive installation "I Want You To Want Me", by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world's long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56" high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine's Day.

Twitter Account on Ebay

2008-04-12T23:14:00.002-05:00

Twitter Account and Followers For Sale:

I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven't been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven't been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I'm thinking I'll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.

It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be.

http://twitter.com/andrewbaron

The winner of this auction gets my account with all of my followers. The account is in my name now, but the winner of the auction can pick any other name that's available on Twitter for the transfer. For example, you could have http://www.twitter.com/x where x=any name thats not already taken. You can change it yourself at anytime too, one of the cool features about Twitter settings.

So basically it's like getting a new account with your own name, but having a pre-installed audience.

I have a bunch of other interesting Twitter links to post as well, but this one was time-sensitive. I always like when commerce is used as a social experiment...

...A bit more on the Starbucks "ideas" thing

2008-04-12T15:24:00.004-05:00

...I mentioned a little while ago...

Well, it turns out the entire thing is run on a salesforce.com product--i.e. "My Starbucks Idea" is a branded, hosted solution via the Salesforce.com Ideas product.

Brilliant. I also like the classic four-word tag-line.

...so glad I went to five...

Yes it's a Microsoft ad, but it's also good...

2008-04-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

The Break Up
by geertdesager

Very little offered, nothing expected in return. I can get behind that...

2008-04-10T13:45:00.001-05:00

Textism: Did you really

...there was just something so, ugh, web whatever point whosit class-conscious about it. I mean, I like Maggie Mason and the stuff she does a lot, and even she might agree that that ‘just landed in LA’ on the twitter.com front page has got to be up there among the most unctuously precious things ever. Hey you, mister startup: please don’t try to sell me your fancy new gizmo with the same sort of air-quoted, I-didn’t-say-it-you-did fabulousity with which the dolts at Vanity Fair service the celebrity trade.

You’ll agree that everything deserves a second chance. A few months ago Twitter started slowly making sense. I’m not sure I concur that, as some have said, the constraints of 140 characters will force anyone to think or write in a meaningfully new way, but there’s something attractive about this throwaway stream of rants, thoughts, links, asides. Fragments of the lives of others just drift in, make you smile, or wince, or roll your eyes for a second, and then disappear. Very little offered, nothing expected in return. I can get behind that...

Muji Non-linear Day Planner

2008-04-10T13:22:00.002-05:00

Muji Chronotebook Non-linear Day Planner

The new Chronotebook day planner takes a different approach to laying out your tasks and events—instead of representing your day in a boring sequence of lines or on a grid, it displays time on an axis, like an analog clock. Each page represents either the AM or PM, and you write your plans like spokes on a bicycle wheel.

Oh Dear Lord of Buzzes both Chemical and Medial

2008-03-19T22:59:00.007-05:00

From Ad Age:

Starbucks is also dipping its toe into the world of social networking. Mr. Schultz acknowledged that the chain has "never had any online presence to speak of," but hopes that will change with the launch of mystarbucksidea.com.

Chief Technical Officer Chris Bruzzo said the new site will present a variety of ideas for Starbucks, allow visitors to vote on those ideas, post comments and make their own suggestions. Votes will be tallied online, and ideas will be assigned a value in points.

From Brian Oberkirch:

I keep hearing horror stories of brands insisting on launching their own social networks. The short version of this post: don't do it. We really don't care. Really. We. Don't. Care.

And, um, Starbucks? It's called Get Satisfaction.

Seriously people.

Announcing: Sugarfilled

2008-02-22T17:41:00.004-06:00

I have a new project, sugarfilled, a brand umbrella and consultancy that is essentially the combined forces of Carissa Byers and myself. Between the two of us, we have all the creative and technical skills any small business or team might need to create their image, online and off. Brand ideation, logo design, photography, copywriting, web design, and web development. Lots more can be found out at the site, which I must add is still a work in progress...there are lots of goodies yet to come.

This blog will become more active and a place for me to jot down thoughts regarding the social and psychological aspects of the web and branding in an always-connected, always-consuming world. The name and description have been updated accordingly. (As for how long it will stay on blogger I can't say. I do have my own CMS dog food to eat. This blog has just happened to live on Blogger since forever.)

To those who might be reading this post on Sugarfilled, hello! This is one of the blogs that the sugar feed is drawing from.

Why Are Brands in Decay?

2008-02-21T09:17:00.001-06:00

Just very well articulated is all. This blog may have a lot more of this kind of stuff on it henceforth, as the threads of hypernarrative, storytelling as a cultural practice, and the "cultural" bits of commerce and business all begin to intersect, both in my own experience and within the general trend of online idea exchange. e.g. the fact that most ARGs are really just marketing campaigns.

Also, this is one of the sources pulled for the Sugarfilled feed.

More Twitter stuff!

2008-02-13T10:16:00.004-06:00

A fairly comprehensive list of what Twitter is from "A MSc research on the one thing Twitter asks; what are you doing?"

Twitter is more a network than an application. If you ask around you will notice that most people are using different interfaces on different platforms and clients. Because of the API connecting to the network adapts to your preferred way of working.

Twitter
Is easy accessible
Is live
Forces you to focus
Is broken conversation
Is open conversation
Is spam free, like RSS (subscription based)
Is a network
Is synchronous / asynchronous
Is a black hole
Is a time capsule
Is a centralized network
Changes public / privacy
Is a knowledge base
Is very unstable
Is making it very difficult for search engines
Is platform independent

...And some recent Twitter apps and news I've bookmarked:

Qwitter helps track how much you smoke in order to help you quit
Commuter Feed puts traffic reporting in the hands of the people
Twitter Karma lets you know which of your Twitter connections are mutual
Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular (New York Times): "Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels." This is a Twitter app waiting to happen, there are already sites in .jp that help capture cellphone novels.
Tweetgift lets you send virtual gifts to friends over Twitter
plusplus bot lets you rate things quickly over Twitter

I have exactly three Twitter apps on my todo list, but one I would love to have now and not have to figure out the vagaries of: Stayawayfromme allows you to be alerted whenever someone you do not want to run into reports that they are at a particular location. There are more social problems with this app, however--primarily, it requires mutual agreement on the exclusion and could be subverted with no effort (i.e. it could also be "Stalkme"). For now, I'm "tracking" a couple key location names, but I'm not sure if I'll receive the updates if I have the person blocked as well. Ah, the complications of technologically-enhanced social graphs!

2008-01-04T09:34:00.003-06:00

What is this game?

via conej

Yes for now this blog is about Twitter

2007-12-10T19:05:00.003-06:00

Random Twitter effect

2007-12-10T12:39:00.002-06:00

Mysterious reverse historical poetry of sorts via @ replies.

This exchange occurred during the recording of the last track (number 8 on the record) for Happy Sounding Sad Songs.

Ambient? ("...Technologies" ...cont)

2007-10-25T21:26:00.001-05:00

The word ambient is rather ambient itself. All you have to do to find how ambiguous the word is is do a flickr search for it.

Ambient Technology

2007-10-25T17:12:00.003-05:00

This oft-neglected blog might appear to be solely about ARG marketing/gaming and digital art, but this thing I've labeled as "nonlinear" since 2001 is finding a new presence thanks to Twitter, Last.fm, etc. And this thing is getting a new name; I've been calling it Ambient Technology.

I do credit Twitter for getting us all talking about this. The first good description of this compelling ambient was Christopher St. John's post Trains, Twitter and MUDs:

Twitter provides a sort of continual background feeling of connectedness, even if the surface messages are often trivial...the act of reading can become unconscious. You just sort of "hear" the messages in the background instead of attending to them in the way you'd read a blog posting or even an IM.

Looking at Twitter from the outside, I can see how it seems strange to care about the minutia of other people's lives. But it's exactly the stuff you'd get if you worked in the same office with those people. The constant background hum of all sorts of information, from who's pregnant to who's on a business trip to Portland to who's broken the build...if you've made the decision to have a geographically distributed set of friends, it seems like a very practical solution.

I had already grabbed the term (textual) ambient from Matt Webb just a short while prior, but CKS put just the right amount of narrative around the concept.

{Since then, I have been a huge Twitter advocate, convincing two different clients to use it, and having almost childlike joy when finding someone-I-really-respect-but-don't-get-as-much-IRL-time-as-I'd-like-with has jumped on the tweeting bandwagon. (Never mind the almost dirty-sounding slang that has come out of Twitter culture.)}

So today this thread appears before me, thanks to boboroshi's post discussing the extant problem of multiple social sites/graphs.

{A popular subject, one a couple of local friends are working on, and one that those of us at The HopeShow experience every day with the number of sites we visit every day--and we're slacking!}

So I am introduced to Leisa Reichelt's disambiguity.com and her excellent presentation on Ambient Intimacy at the Future of Web Apps, and her excellent post on Ambient Intimacy.

Through that I am introduced to the word phatic and the idea of phatic communication, a linguistic structure first developed by Roman Jakobson.

I also discover how much thought the Last.fm people have put into the idea of ambient technologies. They use the word osmotic, which I also like.

The other term I've used is Low Threshold Technology. I use it interchangeably with Ambient Technology based on context.

This is a research blog and as such I don't have much to add to this conversation...yet.

{I have been commissioned to write articles for an unusual publication in another country, and I am going to work this stuff into those pieces and either point to them or republish them on one of my various locations on the web. I'm sure I will have more tidbits and will probably choose to post them here (I have been toying with re-centralizing my web publishing, a cycle I seem to go through twice a decade).}

In the meantime the take home is this: If you are in the business of stealing my attention (which most of us are in some form or fashion), you can do as much of that as you like, given each theft is very small. The shortening of our collective attention span is not a bad thing, simply because it is not a matter of shortening our attention span. It is a matter of freeing more of our attention for what is important and/but allowing as much of what is important through without using up too much of our attention.

(Ah yes I do have much more to say in this area. It has everything to do with media and business, which is my passion and my bread and butter. But...later.)

links tagged attention, links tagged twitter

A New(ish) ARG

2007-09-17T00:24:00.000-05:00

1-18-08.com

...something to do with this movie, which looks pretty badaaaaasss!

...but as always I don't have the time to explore the ARG... :(

http://ethanhaaswasright.com/
http://ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com/
http://mix.jetsetshow.com/forum/topic/search?q=cloverfield

2007-08-17T14:25:00.000-05:00

Alternate Reality Games: Design, Development And Implementation (Part III)

2007-08-11T11:19:00.001-05:00

Icetruck.tv looks like a normal Youtube knockoff at first glance. It has friendly soft blue icons with rounded edges that just scream, "let's watch dramatic chipmunks all day long." But beneath the unsuspecting veneer lies one of the greatest viral marketing campaigns to hit the internet since Al Gore invented it so long ago.

The Icetruck site is actually a webvertisment for Showtime's Dexter, about a serial killer who works as a forensic analyst to help catch murderers. If that doesn't sound cool enough, it stars Michael C. Hall from Six Feet Under. What more do you need?

TV Squad: Dexter promo to die for

Apophenia: personalized viral marketing

Sharkrunners

2007-08-06T09:21:00.001-05:00

In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.

Ships in the game move in real-time, so players receive email and/or SMS alerts during the day when their boat is within range of an encounter.

area/code

sharkrunners.com

Photosynth

2007-08-02T22:04:00.001-05:00

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos. More info: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

via St. Vincent, of all places :)

Jonathan Harris TED talk

2007-07-16T18:33:00.001-05:00

an interesting talk by Jonathan Harris, known from impressive information aesthetic works such as universe & love lines & feel fine & ten by ten.

lifted directly from the infosthetics post (infosthetics blog previously gushingly linked to here)

The Ultimate Search for Bourne with Google

2007-07-16T18:26:00.002-05:00

The Ultimate Search for Bourne with Google

It's interesting to see a media giant and a technology company as partners in a viral marketing campaign that blurs the borders between advertising and real content.

information aesthetics

2007-01-26T10:08:00.001-06:00

The last two posts via the amazing new-to-me blog information aesthetics!

2007-01-26T10:05:00.000-06:00

Several prototype applications for Jeff Han's famous multi-touch display.

Le Grand Content

2007-01-26T10:04:00.000-06:00

steve.museum

2006-10-16T16:46:00.000-05:00

http://www.steve.museum/

ok, first off, when did "museum" become a TLD?

second off...check out the Flash tag cloud. i literally "ooo"'d. except: are they really spacially sorted intelligently, i.e. are more related tags closer together. and: when you click on a tag it goes zooming by! ack! nothing else? no "stop here and examine further from this point"?

at any rate, this is one of the closest things i've seen to the original concept of SWIM.

Traction and As We May Think

2006-10-16T16:07:00.000-05:00

At first blush, Traction Software looks like a cheesy "blog" "enterprise" play -- i.e. repackage blogs to make them more palatable for Office Space managers.

Fortunately, I had, by happy accident, a chance to be demo'd Traction not once but twice. I say fortunately because I had already seen the Traction site and made the snap judgment mentioned above, and because it took both those demos for all the lightbulbs to go off (about half each time).

Without that experience, it will hard to understand how on-target they are, since they are all enterprisey -- which means little access for individuals. But they do have a blog of some intelligence.

And during the second demo the sales guy went on a tiny tangent about the philosophy behind Traction, mentioning Vannevar Bush and referencing As We May Think and Memex as source material.

Can't summarize those links. Have to follow them if you want to follow this thread.

I like when people think before they build. I wish Traction success. They very well may be the closest I've seen to getting the Semantic Web, or maybe just what Hypertext has wanted to be all along. I wish they had a more consumer-accessible version or offering so they could get a bit more of a memic foothold in the user-generated content space.

Heheh...I said "space." Ding a bell.

SIPs

2006-10-16T16:04:00.000-05:00

Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases is like spontaneous orgasm for a wordofile like myself. [Lots of musing about how Amazon, and to a still lesser extent Google, are successfully bridging meatspace with digital knowledge stores...and the reasons for their success or failure, and the future of our increasingly hyperlinked society.]

Amazon.com: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
perpetual slum, cataclysmic use, unslumming slum, high ground coverages, planning for vitality, secondary diversity, fashionable pocket, mixed primary uses, border vacuums, cataclysmic money, involuntary subsidies, street interruptions, disorganized complexity, orthodox planning, dwelling densities, incidental play, city diversity, primary diversity, sidewalk life, primary mixture, visual interruptions, gray belts, net acre, effective district, city public life