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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

November, 2005

Saturday Night Links

Well folks, it was a busy week with the design refresh and all. (Is it fair to call it a realignment?) I've been cleaning up some stuff and what not and I think everything is just about done. Today was also my big opportunity to finally catch up on a ton of reading that I've been hoarding. With that said, I've got lots of good links to direct you all to (with some notes by me of course), so enjoy.

Design

My interest in design keeps increasing, I'm just amazed that it wasn't until just about a year ago that I had really contemplated these things. Design plays such a huge role in every aspect our of lives and for a majority of mine I hadn't given it a second thought. Kind of makes me feel like an idiot when I state it that way.

Business/Advertising

Generation Y

I'm not quite sure why all these articles on generation y (roughly 10-24-year-olds) showed up this week, but they're almost always a good topic. These aren't revolutionary, but they do provide some interesting insights into a generation that has been shaped by digital technology. As a side note, I was recently having a conversation about the possibility of a link between the increasing casualness of communication amongst youth and how it relates to their generally casual feelings towards sex. It's definitely an interesting idea and probably something worthy of a more serious entry.

Web Stuff

  • Thanks to Joshua Porter I finally understand what AttentionTrust is. I'm working on a big entry about it, but essentially it's a way for you to record everywhere you go on the web and what you do there with the express intent of eventually being able to sell that information to advertisers so they could better understand/target you. A service like Root.net would help you do just that.
  • While I'm on the attention subject, Dirk Knemeyer's article for the new UX matters titled "Data -- The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle" is a great look at just what value this type of attention data has.
  • Aggregation seems to keep coming up lately and two new sites all about aggregating various bits of digital data popped up this week. MonitorThis gives you an OPML file with RSS feeds from across search engines with any search term you'd like.
  • SuprGlu allows you to aggregate various digital identities in one place, it's a kind of DLA, very related to what I wrote about last week.
  • This may be coolest of all: Tape It Off The Internet promises to be, "A global TV guide, Torrent tracking, your favourites and recommendations plus an innovative social layer to hang it off." Imagine TiVo/Netflix functionality using BitTorrent. Sounds amazing, let's see if it actually happens . . .

Funny

Even I can't take myself seriously all the time.

  • How about some great domain names? Like Mole Station Native Nursery's "molestationnursery.com" or Pen Island's "penisland.com".
  • Last, but not least, be sure to check out some 2001 forum posts from Mac aficionado upset about the boring new product release of the iPod: "Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where's the Newton?!"

That's it folks, have a good evening.

November 12, 2005
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.