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A pretty cool manifesto (slightly dated but still on topic) on the transformation marketing will have to go through if it wants to remain relevant in an open source world.
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An introductory piece on making the most of your personas. Good overview / checklist.
Month: August 2006
Geotagging on Flickr: flaky
Flickr launched its geotagging feauture a few days ago. Today I came across a few raving posts on TechnCrunch, so I decided to give it a go.
I’ve been geotagging my photos using Plazes for a while now (has it been more than a year already? This photo seems to prove as much.) I enjoyed doing that but it was always a bit involved. Also, geotagging becomes really useful and fun once lots of people start doing it. That wasn’t really happening yet so I’m excited about Flickr integrating it.
My first impression of their map-driven interface was positive. It’s tucked away in the organize section though; I wonder whether they’ll include some bits in the individual photo pages soon. For instance: a little map showing the location where the shot was taken and an easy way to add geotags (maybe even allow others to do it for me?) I’d like this mostly because now the map isn’t really social (in the sense that it shows an aggregation of geotagged shots, just my own.) Update: I found the social flavored map here; a bit underwhelming, but fun.
However: although Flickr proudly sports “gamma” at the top of its logo, the technology still lags behind. It’s beta quality at best. Newly tagged photos don’t appear on the map after a reload; perhaps Flickr doesn’t like me changing the tags outside of the map interface? Update: editting geoprivacy settings on batches gives back strange results too, these photos should show up on the map somewhere near Baarn, but they don’t. Weird…
Also, I think not being able to “snap” a batch of photos to a city I found through the search interface is a usability issue. Adding photos to locations I haven’t identified in Plazes (and thus don’t show up as hotspots on the map yet) becomes arbitrarily. Call me a metadata nut, but I really want to add my photos of Jurjen’s pretty street Zwartehandspoort in Leiden to the exact street, not drop them somewhere in the vicinity of the city Leiden.
Conclusion: a promising addition to everyone’s favourite social photo sharing site, poised to make geotagging ready for the big time, but not exactly there yet due to some technical and design issues.
Another update: after rummaging through the help forums, I learnt that indeed, Flickr doesn’t automagically pick up on newly geotagged photos from other services (such as Plazes.) You need to re-import them (as described in this post). This sucks big time, Flickr seems to think that only photos that have been tagged inside the system matter. Think again! (Of course all this is probably simply due to technical limitations, which is no excuse, but still…)
links for 2006-08-30
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Sony introduces a device aimed at teens that allows voice, email and IM over WiFi. It reminds me a little of Nokia’s 770. Interesting to see where this niche is going…
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Spool argues that not underlining hyperlinks in your design is cruel to users. I can’t help but agree (most of the times)…
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Robert Reimann maps Donal Norman’s book Emotional Design on the work of Alan Cooper. Nice and practical look at creating solid personas.
links for 2006-08-29
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I enjoy making sushi now and then. Uramaki are some of the trickiest to pull off. This friendly chef makes it look too easy!
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Nintendo does not deem the new Zelda suitable for kids. This news item mostly points to the knowledge of earlier Zelda titles as a likely reason.
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Coates can’t wait to get his hands on the new Mac OS X Leopard. Many of the new social features can be realized right now with a number of tools, but the point is of course ease of use through integration.
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Stunning photos of libraries around the world taken from a must have book, safe for work and absolutely gorgeous (if you’re into books).
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An excerpt from the upcoming book Communicating Design by the other Dan Brown. Accessible piece on how to set up a competitive analysis.
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“Captain Obvious” Powazek gets worked up about the poor navigation design on the web today, and rightly so. For all those stubborn designers, here’s a good overview of what you should take into account.
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Mann recommends you dial back the amount of labels you apply to your action lists. Good IA advice for personal productivity.
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Slightly superficial piece on the direction Apple is apparently headed with the next version of OS X. Sure it’s social software, but they still seem to think in terms of walled gardens.
links for 2006-08-25
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Peter Molyneux warns against the new Wii controller — physically controlled games are too tiring, he says. That may be the first thing Molyneux mentions I wholeheartedly disagree with. What’s more, physically controlled games such as Dance Dance Revolutio
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““The trouble with normal is it always gets worse” That’s what horsepigcow.com is all about for me. Making certain that normal doesn’t get worse.”
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Merholz discusses Tufte’s new book, chapter by chapter. This post is on chapter 3 and leads Merholz to ponder the ways in which we can tell stories through diagrams and the need for unambiguous notation.
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“are we as a culture starting to construct toys that are too effective and end up hurting people?” — Coates ponders the addictive nature of WoW.
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Elaborate site dedicated to graffiti in the city I live in: Utrecht. Via Bart.
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Emoticons for in your car’s rear window. Nice idea.
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Pretty cool piece on how Gmail and Firefox have come to effectively replace Apple’s paid for .Mac service. With links to some handy tools.
links for 2006-08-24
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“Guitar Hero II will feature two rather awesome headline tracks — Freebird and Sweet Child o’ Mine” — hell yes, definately I game I need to get.
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Publisher of interesting-looking Shaolin Cowboy created by the great Geof Darrow.
links for 2006-08-23
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Fiat wants to create the new 500 brand together with its customers, presumably. Nice example of a co-created marketing experience. Via Iskander.
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“ubiquitous capture is a process that means staying mindful, always having the collection tools you need nearby, and then using them.” — Mann on maintaining good habits and getting back into GTD.
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“A leapfrog is the most ambitious an organization can be, and few organizations are actually equipped to make such a massive change.” Exactly why I chose the name for my own company. Sort of. Via Peter.
links for 2006-08-18
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Weinberger raves about a new feature of LibraryThing. Worth checking out.
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Article on NGC show that studies martial artists’ capabilities using a crash test dummies. Sadly no armed styles were tested.
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Disturbing and fascinating article on the ways in which the Israeli Defence Forces uses contemporary architectural theory and philosophy in their war with Palestine. Particularly chilling are the descriptions of their “micro-tactical actions”.
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Saffer argues that you should only bother with personas if you compose them of research into user goals and motivations, not shallow demographics.
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“Sometimes to do the right thing, organizations have to be tricked into doing it.” — Saffer compares designers to the trickster figure. I feel like Loki once in a while too, so I can relate.
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Keith enjoys V for Vendetta on DVD. Darn, know I might just have to go out and rent this anyway.
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Handy for the occasional mind sweep: the full trigger list from Allen’s GTD.
links for 2006-08-17
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Website of “a pervasive surveillance project”. “Imagine that you are walking down the street when you hear a beep from your phone. You see a message reading: “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?”” Intriguing, i
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“Buy more shiny nokia phones, or something. It’s like living in the future.” Heathcote admits to loving his new Nokia E70, sort of.
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Quite a thorough look at ways to elaborate on personas in order to make them more useful for use when designing more information-driven consumer-facing websites. Includes a link to a useful toolkit.
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Post by Identity Crisis author Jim Harper on how fake ideas allow Sunni to safely travel through hostile territory controlled by Shiite. It puts the whole online federated identity debate into perspective.
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Webb contemplates ancient British burrows and their implications for the concept of ownership.
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Cooper explains how personas came to be: “The problem is that while logic is a powerful and effective programming tool, it is a pathetically weak and inappropriate interaction design tool.”
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This is an excellent piece on the parallels between the evolution of online games and the practice of information architecture. There’s a lot to contemplate here, among those the impact of open standards on the formation of online communities.
links for 2006-08-15
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Cool stuff; an old project of mine still appears to be online. I designed this game (an episodic multimedia whodunnit) while freelancing at Plinq for Dutch broadcaster KRO.
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Mann reminds us of the fact that folders have a dangerous side too. All this GTD stuff has started to make me think Allen’s work is like IA for a specific persona: the knowledge worker.
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A piece on doing GTD with an early version of Backpack. Still quite informative. Jason Fried’s comment on moving items between pages is quite interesting too… When is “shortly”, Jason?
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A review of the intruiging indie RPG Lacuna Part I. Recently rereleased as a 2nd edition. Maybe I should buy it and give it a spin.
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A howto on listening to your iTunes library while away from home.
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On how to set up your iTunes library so multiple machines can tune in to the same music and stream them to multiple sound systems.
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Insightful post by Zijlstra on the dynamics of social software; specifically how objects, people and their descriptors interact. I’ve actually succeeded in applying this model to a concept I’m developing for a client.
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Cool custom made designer plush toys.
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“a research project that focuses on the accessibility of electronic games for gamers with disabilities”
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Thought provoking presentation by Matt Webb about what an open, instrumented, user-transformable and iterative city might look like. One way to read it is a counter-cultural internet-lover’s view of architecture’s future. Does that make sense?