LINKS FROM August 2007
"Letterbox is a plugin for Apple's Mail.app that takes advantage of your widescreen monitor. It rearranges the interface into three vertical columns – so the message pane is to the right of the message list, rather than below."
Hulu Translates To "Cease" and "Desist" in Swahili. Oops.
"Hulu means “butt� in both Indonesian and Malay. But that’s nothing compared to Swahili, which 80 million or so people speak in sub-Saharan Africa. In Swahili, Hulu means, among other things, both “cease� and “desist.�"
Tags: video television
"Which is the real logo?"
Consuming Less While Getting More
"The annual report found that for the first time since 1997, the average American’s media intake dropped in 2006. The 0.5 percent decline is not statistically significant, but does conform with longtime trends that show a flattening in media consumption
Tags: attention media nytimes research
NBC pumps up for 'Gladiators' redo
"The competition skein -- which featured players with names like Nitro, Turbo and Laser in its campy, early '90s syndie incarnation -- will be updated for the 21st century with new technology and twists."
Tags: sports television
"First and foremost you need to build an audience, build trust with them, deliver on a regular basis for them. There's no way people are going to come back again and again if your blog doesn't enlighten, entertain, and inform."
Segway World's Greatest Invention
"A spoof commercial produced in 2004 highlighting the Segway."
Tags: funny advertising video
"South Park' Creators Win Ad Sharing in Deal
"Comedy Central and the creators of the popular show, "South Park," have agreed to create a hub to spread the program and related material across the Internet, mobile platforms and video games."
Tags: television animation business internet video
"Philandering dwarves? Cherry pie allergies? Spatula-wielding neighbours? Trapped In The Closet has baffled and delighted its cult following. Chuck Klosterman salutes R Kelly's hip-hopera"
Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question
Why do so many Americans have trouble locating the US on a map? She's got all the answers.
the science of passive pleasure
"As our level of consciousness develops and while we tire of being able to have 'anything, any time, anywhere', I think there is more and more need for these unpredictable experiences."
Tags: culture insight psychology
All the billions spent to curb drug use have been in vain
"I know from experience that policy initiatives have never had any effect on levels of use or on addicts themselves"
"We just went our separate ways after school or work and, well, went our separate ways. Trying to force us all back together again because we shared school years has short-term value."
"In a way this bundle that constitutes mainstream music begins to establish a model that could be the future of recorded music  that the recordings are the “loss leaders� for everything else."
Tags: music design packaging business culture
"Today that same market is telling rappers to please shut up. While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap."
Tags: hiphop music business branding
Mozilla Firefox Custom Search Engines
"Create custom search engines for your Firefox Search Bar."
"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."
Tags: software business it usability
Facebook Grows Up: Can It Stay Relevant?
"At 19, Mark Zuckerberg came up with a new way for college kids to connectâ€â€and started an online revolution. Now 23, he's trying to build out his business without losing its cool."
Tags: business facebook socialnetworking internet
"Many savvy companies are starting to realize that a good name can be their most important assetâ€â€and actually boost the stock price"
Tags: business branding marketing finance stock
"The losing war on junk e-mail."
"In the past 12 months, Google doubled its staff, tinkered with its search engine to speed up results, and now answers more queries than Microsoft and Yahoo combined. But there’s one query we had to answer ourselves: How does Google work?"
Tags: google visualization search technology
Joybubbles, 58, Peter Pan of Phone Hackers, Dies
"Joybubbles was a blind genius with perfect pitch who played a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of "phone phreaks.""
Tags: phone phreaking history death
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
"We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad."
Tags: advertising marketing internet design usability research
Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not
"There's a mustache drawn on the photo of Marcel Duchamp, the font size keeps changing, and halfway through, the type starts going in a circle. Also, the majority of the actual entry is made up of Krazy Kat cartoons . . . "
The Good, the Bad, and the Odd in Curbside Culture
"In this new, occasional department, we ask design professionals to tell us what they see when they traverse the city. What tricks are advertisers using? Is pink the new orange?"
in a data-driven world- infographics are the new art
"Intro from the movie Stanger than Fiction. "
Tags: insight video movies visualization
Will the genius behind this campaign please stand up?
"If there was ever an indication that the industry has a diversity problem, this is it."
Tags: race advertising
Dave Gray of XPlane has a great infographic to explain specialists versus generalists.
Tags: visualization
"Paula's is filled with 14 whimsical fonts she drew while on an airplane and sitting by the sea in Jamaica."
Tags: notebooks design typography inspiration
Lawsuit: Music Publishers v. YouTube Doesn't Solve the Problem
"If people don’t know what rights they need to obtain and if there's no easy way to obtain them even if they do know, exactly what do rights-holders expect?"
Tags: music copyright business law
"This is the speech we gave at the 4As account planning conference in San Diego."
Tags: marketing future business web2.0 presentation
"What Om, Mike and Paul are doing is effectively creating lightweight professional publishing outlets; complete with all the offering a newspaper/magazine has, with the added benefit of less overhead and easier (if not frictionless) distribution."
Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits
"A new Web site reveals that many of the most obviously self-interested changes come from corporate networks."
"There are things in life more important than Arsenal soccer. Or so I’ve heard."
Tags: sports
"We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption."
"JobThread Publisher is a very simple, fast and easy way to setup a job board for your group, organization or site."
Tags: jobs
"For only $19.99 on Cafe Press, you can thumb your nose at the fashionsta flock while helping the environment."
'We have broken speed of light'
"A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light - an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time."
Tags: science
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch
"If you accept one pretty reasonable assumption, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else's computer simulation."
Tags: future technology nytimes
If It Says McDonald's, Then It Must Be Good
"Some food tastes better to children if they think it came from McDonald's, a small study suggests."
Tags: nytimes food branding psychology youth
Audio Kills The Radio Noir, Agency Broadly Redefines Medium
"THE AMORPHOUS, PLATFORM-SHIFTING NATURE OF the current media marketplace is driving at least one major shop to redefine a medium based not on its distribution, but on the fundamental nature of its content format."
Tags: marketing advertising commsplanning
"a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture"
Tags: documentary music copyright free
The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition
"The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time."
Tags: it business technology usability
"The foundational YUI Reset CSS file removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements, creating a level playing field across A-grade browsers and providing a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions."
Tags: css yahoo design hacks standards
"The project documents every instance of the phrase "is the new" encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device."
Tags: culture trend visualization
It's mathmatically impossible that men could have more sexual partners than women.
Tags: nytimes sex culture gender
How a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.
Tags: design typography cars betterness transportation
loss of context for me on Facebook
"I do feel the need to point out that context management is still unfun, especially for early adopters, just as it has been on every other social network site. It sucks for teens trying to balance mom and friends."
Tags: facebook culture socialnetworking trend
Little snips of good design.
Tags: inspiration design internet
Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention
"Consumer goods companies are using their products’ packages as 3-D ads to grab shoppers’ fickle attention."
Tags: nytimes marketing packaging advertising
Vote-swapping Web sites are legal, appeals court (finally) says
"It took seven years, but a federal appeals court has finally vindicated the creators of vote-swapping Web sites that let Al Gore and Ralph Nader fans support their chosen candidates in the 2000 presidential election."
Tags: politics technology law
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
"Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools."
Tags: visualization design
"A theory in evolutionary biology, which states that most sexually reproducing species will show little change for most of their geological history. When . . . evolution occurs, it . . . occurs relatively quickly."
"This is a great music video done in pixelization style- except that the pixels are dice. The song is Fuyija Miyagi's Ankle Injury."
Bob Keefe is not Fake Steve Jobs. But he is the "Intel Sticker Guy."
"The man who took the road less traveled by and, in a moment where he had the unprecedented chance to ask Steve Jobs any question ever, asked him about why Apple doesn’t put Intel stickers on Macs."
Tags: funny apple interviews
Facebook Rate Cards, and Social Networking CPMs
"Blended together, it’s a $6.25 CPM. Those prices, even as theoretical rate card prices that’ll get negotiated down by clients, look a hell of a lot better than Levinsohn’s old $.10 CPM."
Tags: advertising facebook media socialnetworking
Ad friendly video site to combat YouTube
Tags: advertising commercial video internet
How Apple's small things influence their big things
"It’s cool how Apple’s design language keeps evolving. One product design follows another. There’s a continuity this way, yet things continue to feel new. And it’s interesting how their small designs influence their large designs."
Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up
"At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet."
Tags: insight facebook internet community opensource api
The best search engine for icons
Research Note: Strategic Errors Mini Case Study - TimesSelect
"The NYT has lost two years of building edge competencies: learning how to turn stale, inert columnists into managers of living, breathing markets, networks, and communities; learning how to redefine brands . . . "
Tags: nytimes strategy business media2.0
"Mayor Bloomberg can't reach the target of reducing carbon emissions by 30% by 2030 without you. You can make a difference. We all can."
Tags: nyc green tips environment
lonelygirl15 is dead.
"The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show."
Tags: advertising business marketing
Fake Steve Jobs: "Now you've ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder. Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina."
Tags: funny journalism blogs apple
'Fake Steve' Blogger Comes Clean
An editor at Forbes has been lampooning Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, on a popular blog, “Fake Steve.�
Tags: blogs apple journalism technology nytimes
"Along the same lines, I got to thinking how the world was able to for the most part fix the Y2K bug . . . Yet in most other cases, impending disasters, like our dependence on oil, failing infrastructure and unsustainable spending, all go unheeded."
Tags: culture psychology behavioraleconomics
Cheap fashion: the trend may be over
"Prices have fallen dramatically in the past decade as products are sourced from countries with low labour costs, but clothes cannot carry on getting cheaper."
"It’s simply that new content startups understand the value of being lean and mean and constraint-free, whereas old media houses are too stuck in the mindset of big, fancy and infrastructure-bound."
Rethinking the fold in a webpage.
William Safire talks about how the title "strategist" is all the hype.
Tags: strategy politics business language nytimes
That's right, beer cozies for your 40oz.
"LiveSurface images are high-resolution, print-quality photos with pre-built layer masks, surface data (Vanishing Point planes) and image components (such as shadows) on individual layers."
"In times of war with each other and Mother Nature some things become more important. This project reflects the concept of fear, cold war, pollution and our desire for authenticity"
Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends
"The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent."
Tags: health research science nytimes networks
"Developed internally at Virgin America, the system is named Red and provides live satellite tv, movies, mp3s, games and plane-wide chatting. Yes, chatting."
Tags: airline virginamerica technology opensource community
"Could it be that the wired retired are the new digital trailblazers?"
Tags: culture technology insight demographics
A-Tisket, A-Tasket, Join the Mob
"Enter Picnic Mob, a multi-city, “non-commercial art experiment� created and curated by the computer programmer and thinker. Through its website, Picnic Mob organizes aspiring picnickers into small groups."
"The set-up is an innovative solution to a problem that big corporations have wrestled with since time immemoriam. Namely. What to do when you get too big? And how to avoid being a victim of your own success?"
Tags: advertising marketing business
"So I decided that next week I will only eat /drink things that correspond to that day's color. only red things on Monday, only orange things on Tuesday, etc. I will document this whole thing and will have a little photography project at the end."
"I’ve found if you’re looking to understand complex concepts like “stickiness of ideas�, it’s a good idea to check out how things work in the physical, natural world."
Tags: marketing insight ideas science
"An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart."
Tags: insight visualization data
Online Advertising: Facebook's secret rate card
Valleywag gets an exclusive look at Facebook's "non-existent" rate card.
Tags: facebook advertising
"True value creation happens when everyone who has an economic interest in media is made better off. Value is not created when when value is simply transferred from readers/consumers to shareholders - as has happened here."
Tags: economics media newspapers journalism