Category: Links

Greg Wil­son describes a grow­ing trend in game design: dis­card­ing the HUD in order to increase play­er immer­sion. It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the decrease in per­sis­tent ele­ments in game design to the (un)importance of nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments in web design.

Paul Ham­mond revamps Matt Web­b’s attempt to find the inter­net’s favourite colour. This time it uses the Flickr tag fav­col. At the time of tag­ging, the col­or is #696464.

Excel­lent Flash demo of what can hap­pen when you inte­grate del.icio.us tag­ging in an exist­ing website.

Short but sweet piece on anoth­er project that tries to join tag­ging tools and sci­en­tif­ic research web­sites or “insti­tu­tion­al repositories”.

A tag cloud or weight­ed list or heat map done right. Would love to add one of these to my blog.

Matt Webb pro­vides a land­ing page for peo­ple who want to know: what playsh is, what the cur­rent state is, what the roadmap is and why the hell he’s even doing it.

Kunal Anand cre­at­ed a python script to visu­al­ize his del.icio.us tags. It looks great. I won­der what my tags would look ike…

A com­pre­hen­sive overview of issues that design­ers of glob­al local com­mu­ni­ties see them­selves con­front­ed with.

Anoth­er excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion by Dick Hardt for eTech. Build­ing upon his talk for last year’s OSCON he explains all the dif­fer­ent ways iden­ti­ty can be man­aged online.

Don­na Mau­r­er con­cise­ly describes four modes of infor­ma­tion seek­ing behav­iour and how to design for them.

Don Nor­man bash­es Google’s home­page. The fact that it’s sim­ple isn’t due to any design genius, he sais, it’s because you can do only one thing from it: search.

“Shoot me if you can is an urban game inspired by first per­son shoot­ing online video game. Replace gun with fun, and shoot the oppo­nent team with a cel­lu­lar phone equipped with a dig­i­tal camera.”

SF author Bruce Ster­ling’s speech for eTech 2006. Absolute­ly essen­tial read­ing on the inter­net of things, every­ware, thinglinks, ubi­comp web 2.0 and the pow­er of words in the dis­course around emerg­ing technology.

Richard Mac­Manus on Rojo’s new sort by rel­e­vance fea­ture: “any RSS Aggre­ga­tor that is mak­ing an effort to tack­le the ‘atten­tion’ prob­lem of 2006 is alright in my book.”

A work­ing bib­li­og­ra­phy on the inter­net of things. A rich list of links to inter­est­ing arti­cles on what hap­pens when real world objects get hooked up to the net.

Erick Schon­feld reports on a speech by Bar­ry Schwartz: “Too much choice makes peo­ple more like­ly to defer deci­sions. It rais­es expec­ta­tions and makes peo­ple blame them­selves more often for choos­ing poorly.”

“build the thing so that it stays the hell out of the way and lets the user get on with what they real­ly want to do.” — Kathy Sier­ra on what it means to cre­ate a good user expe­ri­ence or bet­ter yet: user enchantment.

In insane­ly cool ambi­ent rab­bit-shaped device that wire­less­ly con­nects to the inter­net and gives feed­back on your e‑mail, the weath­er or any­thing else you can think of. Must have.

Shirky pro­pos­es the con­struc­tion of a pat­tern lan­guage for mod­er­a­tion strate­gies in social software.

16 ways to “think in web 2.0”. Nev­er shock­ing or new, but a nice sum­ma­ry of cur­rent ideas float­ing around.

“Most fonts pre­sent­ed below are absolute­ly license-free which means that you can use them for both pri­vate, per­son­al and com­mer­cial pur­pos­es with­out any lim­i­ta­tions whatsoever.”

Jere­my Kei­th reviews Newsvine. He says he main­ly uses it to browse news sto­ry, as well as what oth­er peo­ple are link­ing to. He does­n’t like the com­ments though: “Most com­ments suck.”

Anoth­er great post from the Cre­at­ing Pas­sion­ate Users crew. Here they describe how any­one can become an expert, with enough time and ded­i­ca­tion — it’s not (just) about tal­ent. Res­onates with my expe­ri­ences in mar­tial arts training.

On why nerds don’t get MySpace, that they think “mar­ket­ing, brand­ing, adver­tis­ing, etc are eeeeevil” and that they “should be destroy­ing them and then redefin­ing them: mak­ing them […] more about the deep 2.0 prin­ci­ples that in fact, are revolutionizing

“what if we treat­ed the time invest­ed into the IA com­mu­ni­ty as a deposit into a com­mu­nal bank? Might­n’t we be more inclined to make a deposit if it might enable us to even­tu­al­ly make a with­draw­al?” — Rosen­feld on his vision for a new IAI.

Khoi Vinh pro­pos­es the use of wikis to revamp style guides for the web because “the best design solu­tions are in fact liv­ing sys­tems that can grow and adapt with chang­ing needs.”

Cool pre­sen­ta­tion on what makes a great web designer.

Jeff Veen describes how a top down approach to soft­ware adop­tion in the cor­po­rate are­na usu­al­ly does­n’t work. He describes how the AP wiki was grad­u­al­ly intro­duced into the organ­i­sa­tion through a few key users.

Prod­uct com­plaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but com­pa­nies fre­quent­ly dis­miss them as “nui­sance calls,” — anoth­er case for the impor­tance of good design.

Bill Scot­t’s eTech talk on how inter­ac­tion design pat­terns can be used to engage the user, to cre­ate rel­e­vance and loyalty.