Month: November 2006

Evert Sto­bbe van SNS Bank over ‘Co-cre­ation economics’.

In-depth pro­file of game design god Will Wright. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est are the sources of inspi­ra­tion for his games and to read how one of the few indus­try lead­ing game design­er that has actu­al cre­ative free­dom is incred­i­bly iso­lat­ed at the same time.

Over two year old post by Matt Webb describ­ing all the aspects that go into explain­ing social soft­ware to non-experts and train­ing them in use and design. Lots of inter­est­ing leads to fol­low up on here.

Joshua Porter high­lights issues Digg is hav­ing with their design. They’ve changed an algo­rithm, and now the com­mu­ni­ty is push­ing back. Porter writes: “The issues are social ones, prob­a­bly unpre­dictable in any straight­for­ward way.”

“The wi-fi con­nect­ed umbrel­la with a built-in cam­era takes pic­tures and uploads them on to the pho­to-shar­ing web­site Flickr.com. Users can browse through pho­tos, as they would online, by twirling the umbrel­la to the left or right.”

Repos­i­to­ry of game design pat­terns that enhance usabil­i­ty or acces­si­bil­i­ty. By Eelke Folmer, via the IxDA list.

A large study on how peo­ple eval­u­ate a site’s cred­i­bil­i­ty shows that peo­ple pri­mar­i­ly base their judge­ment on visu­al design and use very few ‘hard’ cri­te­ria. This is espe­cial­ly true for sites of finan­cial ser­vices providers.

A thor­ough intro­duc­tion to CakePHP (a rapid devel­op­ment frame­work inspired by Ruby on Rails). Gave this a spin over the week­end, and I must say I’m impressed.

An old arti­cle con­tain­ing some not so rev­o­lu­tion­ary tips for build­ing web apps with PHP and MySQL. I’m main­ly tag­ging this so I remem­ber the authors’ book.

A rogue econ­o­mist spends years to analyse the time it takes for cre­ative genius­es to peak. Turns out there are rough­ly two pat­terns. Is it sad that I’m already opt­ing for the slow ‘exper­i­men­tal­ists’ slot?

Decent intro­duc­to­ry arti­cle on the DIKW hier­ar­chy and knowl­edge management.

Matt Jones is trig­gered by Kevin Kel­ly’s post on a cool tool to deter­mine how aware you are of your sur­round­ings. He pro­pos­es to cre­ate a mobile app that helps answer Kel­ly’s questions.

The orig­i­nal arti­cle by Eno where­in he pro­pos­es the Long Now’s cousin: the Big Here. How con­scious are we of our loca­tion and how does that influ­ence the choic­es we make for the future?

Crazy com­mer­cial site for new Nike golf ball with lots of cool videos of the ball shoot­ing through objects such as a mel­on and a cake.

Clas­sic user inter­face pro­to­typ­ing tool that allows you to sketch out a UI and link it in a more or less intu­itive way. Shame it’s a resource hog (it runs on top of Java) and still seems to have a few bugs.

Prob­a­bly the best (and free) tool avail­able for cre­at­ing con­cept maps.

Crazy com­mer­cial site for a heavy duty blender that’s actu­al­ly shred a coke can. Lots of fun­ny videos here, my favorite: the cochicken.

3D sketch­ing gets fed direct­ly to a fast pro­to­typer to cre­ate pret­ty cool look­ing fur­ni­ture. I would­n’t mind being able to cre­ate my own fur­ni­ture in this way! Via Bart.

Powazek starts a new ven­ture to break open the mag­a­zine pub­lish­ing world. He’ll start pub­lish­ing mag­a­zines that are put togeth­er by online communities.

Glad­well’s keynote speech on snap judge­ments at SXSW 2005. It seems he’s just as con­vinc­ing as a speak­er as he is in writing.

Steve Jobs intro­duces the Mac in 1984. It’s great to see the crowd go wild about tech­nol­o­gy that we would now call obsolete.

A wiki devot­ed to remote usabil­i­ty test­ing tools, tech­niques, etc.

Great lit­tle game cre­at­ed by Mat­tWebb that invites you to cre­ate con­nec­tions between words. The result­ing web of con­nect­ed things is real­ly cool. I can think of sur­vey tools using a game like for­mat such as this.

Excel­lent video by Ze Frank explain­ing how brands can be likened to “emo­tion­al after­tastes”. Good stuff.