Category: Links

Garrett describes a neat trick Adaptive Path uses to get as many designers involved on projects as possible without it dissolving into chaos.

Coates discovers a hidden ‘feature’ of iPhoto that allows you to free up considerable amounts of disk space.

Greenfield mercilessly criticizes Maeda’s book. Scratch that one off my wishlist…

Rosenfeld’s checklist of useful research documentation to ask of clients.

One of the coolest projects to come out of the Utrecht School of Arts EMMA program for some time gets some much deserved exposure.

Upcoming.org gets a much needed overhaul. Too bad we have to say goodbye to old-school accounts here as well, but I do like the new geographic set-up.

Alper’s thoughts on improvements of college lectures. Interesting thoughts, but I think his old-school college still has to catch on with new ways of teaching. Lectures are horrible teaching in many respects; one person’s talking, the rest are sleeping.

Pretty looking Flash based clock.

Open source strumming interface using the Wii’s peripherals. Awesome stuff. Can’t wait to see the explosion of new game interfaces that the Wii’ll unleash in the coming year.

Mark Wieczorek urges GTDers to reduce their contexts to the absolute minimum possible.

Gene synthesizes a lot of stuff I’ve been chewing on for a while in a smart way. I like his honeycomb approach to social software aspects.

Old but good post that started some useful theory building on aspects of social software. Matt Webb and Gene Smith based some of their stuff on it.

Cool three-day event that seeks to join the worlds of wireless mobile locative tech and music production. Can’t be anything but a bunch of fun.

Robinson is working on streamlining Blue Flavor’s deliverables. Some nice thoughts on how to go about setting up a framework for creating deliverables (although I doubt I’d ever want one myself).

Iskander wordt geconfronteerd met de verschillen tussen Twitter en Jaiku: microblogging versus presence.

Gene Smith on “research […] that looks at how social influence (knowledge about what other users are doing) affects the popularity of items in an online music store.” Food for thought for social IA’s.

Verslag van Hugo Raaijmakers (die ik even sprak in Quark’s Bar) over de social IA workshop (van Gene Smith) op de 2007 IA Summit. Aardig overzicht, curieus dit te vinden op Marketingfacts.

Interesting post by Brian Fling on Blue Flavor’s high level process. Not sure if the chain metaphor really works to explain what he’s aiming for, but some nice ideas nonetheless.

A presentation containing some nice examples of games that exploit the unique properties of the mobile platform, some I wasn’t aware of.

A pretty complete article on organizing face to face open card sorts.

Jaiku’s getting a lot more traffic after a mention on a big tech blog. Good on them.

Can’t never have enough patterns at your disposal. Chris Messina uses Flickr to collect lots of screenshots of interfaces – quite a few of which are social in nature.

Aram Bartholl has people walkign around the city with WoW style name bubbles above their heads. The result is weird, but not as effective as I’d expected. He should’ve dressed the people carying the poles Kuroko style.

Boyd thinks the next wave on the web will be locative stuff. The web becoming more and more connected to the physical reality.

Julian Bleecker writes about his über cool device that records time, motion and touch in a slowed down manner. He calls them Flavonoids. He’s going to make weird mobile games with them.

Cool ideas by Bleecker on where we could take mobile gaming — moving into everyday life, on the go.

Shirky on the Second Life hype: “If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.”

Useful post by Joshua Porter on the mechanics behind the success of del.icio.us’s tagging: “don’t try and make [tagging] the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value preceeds network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.”

Another piece on lack of standards in mobile gaming. This really needs to be addressed before the industry can take outside of Asia.

Very smooth social colour palette sharing community site thingy. Via Hansl.

Leuk verhaal over initiatief van twee collega-HKU docenten die met dichtgetimmerde Mac Mini’s en GarageBand basisscholieren kennis laten maken met muziekproductie.

The Utrecht School of Arts has set up a new course on design for ubiquitous computing / everyware. To my knowledge they’re one of the first to do so in such a matter. Site is in Dutch.

Hinton’s IA Summit 2007 presentation makes the case that IA is not a discipline but a community of practice. Structured like a network, overlapping with other communities, centred around the domain of infospaces.

“AttentionTrust is a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their Attention data. Until now, only companies on the other side of our clicking captured the value.”

Virtual worlds aren’t about escaping, says Boyd; typically, users will model their real-world networks in virtuality.

Boyd talks about how to people whose social circle is structurally discontinuous Twitter and services like it are of limited value. Also some points on how this isn’t about conversation but rather broadcasting your activities in an invasive way.

Some useful bits on setting up your wireframes to be modular.

Some more useful tips from Porter for starting bloggers.

Nova ponders on expanding the arena in which mobile gaming happens (off-line and asynchronous).

‘“User experience” is a neutral term, in and of itself. It’s something that just exists, that just happens. Labeling it as a good UX or a poor UX or a manipulative UX is needed to clarify what type of experience we are talking about.’

Nova rightly points out the lack of standards in mobile gaming. Gonna give course soon that focusses on this stuff…

Hooo boy, this GTD web app kicks butt. I’ve been giving it a spin since reading this post and I must say (apart from a few interaction design issues) it’s very nice.

Slighly vague theorising about applications that might predict future locations. Sort of like a recommendation engine for space…

Rachel Lovinger explains and promotes the role of content strategist. Not sure any but the largest organisations will have a place for this specialism, but I can see it being useful in some cases.

Short how-to of a very interesting body-storming technique to come up with multiple strategies for a client. Saw this at the IA Summit 2007 in Las Vegas.