Link Drop Today

Apparently this week on Link Drop Today I had big brands in my sights, everyone from Apple, MTV, AOL, AIGA, and Facebook all made appearances. Interestingly Twitter wasn’t part of the listing though Social Media as a category was prominent. I like doing these mind maps at the end of the week to see what patterns of interest had my attention over the last week and make connections that I wouldn’t have been able to notice otherwise. One theme that I probably wouldn’t have noticed is all the location based ideas, and different ways of classification—how people sort and order information.

What if every company had an API?

Matt Daniels brings up some question worth considering about in What if every company had an API? Aside from technology companies, what brick-and-mortar companies could benefit from releasing their companies dna. One example cited is Starbucks with what they’re doing with a concept tea house. He quotes Snarkmarket “What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API—a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you’re leveraging Starbucks’ insanely optimized supply chain.”

Expanding Typeface While Small: RE — C

I’m really liking RE — C Type Family by Emil Olsson that I first saw on AisleOne. There’s a lot of refined quality that stencil “like” typefaces tend to ignore. While RE — C looks nice when big I think its true quality is shown when the type is reduced in size considerably. When small all the negative space inside each letter expands to make the typeface very readable. Now all I need to do is find a project to use such a face…

Shyness and the Need to Reshape Relationships through Passion

On the design mind blog from Frog they’ve posted about a topic that I’ve rarely read about on any design site—shyness. In their post they’ve pointed to an article from John Hagel where he states that the only way a shy person can thrive “where participation in many, diverse flows of knowledge and long-term, trust-based relationships determine success” is through passion. There’s a couple other points to consider too. Breaking out of complacency allows a person to “to grow and succeed in a constantly changing world”.

The 7 Somewhat United States of Facebook from Gigaom

The 7 Somewhat United States of Facebook

Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.

Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.

Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.

Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.

Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.

Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation.

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul from Read Write Web

In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? “God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren’t that popular either,” Warden writes. “Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot.” In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.

In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.

The bulk of Warden’s posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Satellite View of the East Coast after Snowmageddon

NASA’s photo of the day from Tuesday February 9th was the Satellite View of the East Coast after Snowmageddon.

Why Brands Should Strive for Imperfection

While the post about how the decision was made to keep a certain scene in an ad is a bit disturbing Why Brands Should Strive for Imperfection—using science that no one could argue with as opposed to a clear direction, what this story shows is that people are drawn to human stuff as much as aspirational motivations.

Wireless Circular Pads!

What got my attention with the post about The Pool is that each of the 120 pads don’t have a master computer or router but react to the action of what’s being jumped on.

A Statistical Stab at Graffiti

While it’s easy to take tagging for granted on the street one person has kept her eyes on what’s been going on inside a library of all places as the WSJ story A Statistical Stab at Graffiti talks about. She’s been capturing the images on flickr and has been entering them into a spread sheet. Predictable feelings of love at the beginning year tend to pop up early in the school year while near finals things turn a bit darker.

MTV No Longer About ‘Music’

While it shouldn’t come as any surprise that MTV No Longer About ‘Music’, they’ve finally done something with the logo as has been mentioned all over the interwebs. They’re still a company that is envied for their system of growing people from within but like every media company has not really been effective living in a post tv world. Will a new logo do much to change that culture, probably not.

Facebook is Worse than AOL

There’s a couple points to take note of in Tomorrow Museum’s post about why Facebook is Worse than AOL. I suppose context is everything. I came across a post somewhere this week that people use different features of myspace and facebook and think that is the only thing that a site like that can be. For metal heads they’re more likely to see just other metal head related stuff. For someone interested in events they might turn off all the other features and stay in tune that way. Me, I use Facebook to host all my blog posts. In any case being all things to all people with some level of customization isn’t bad, but the idea of public exclusivity is something that isn’t going to be coming back to FB anytime soon.

What are social media really good for?

While it’s pretty hard not to read about a press release of a company doing something with social media, Ana in What are social media really good for? brings up some great questions about it—like is a brand extending themselves with pr stunts and using social media as a means to build the business/service (she uses the word marketing, I prefer to think it’s something more meaningful). She does note that those companies that are top of mind tend to be providing a service to their customers as opposed to just pushing product.

AIGA Design Archives

The AIGA recently updated their online Design Archives. The site’s architecture is a great example of being able to filter gallery’s into a number of helpful viewing sections. Probably one of the most difficult things in design today is the simple idea of classification. For those categories they’ve broken it up into Discipline and Format which allows a lot of ground to be covered. My only gripe in terms of gallery viewing is that I wish they had included a next button when the image is large. Currently I have to close the large image before proceeding. I’d also be curious to see a What’s Popular section that allowed me to see what people are clicking on or sharing. But as a start the site is an excellent resource that I’ll start looking at more now that the site has been redesigned.

iPad UI Conventions

While the iPad hasn’t been released just yet, there’s still a lot of speculation of what the actual experience will entail. This flickr set has tried to display all the different iPad UI Conventions that were on display when the iPad was announced.

This week’s Link Drop is smaller than usual because of my late week travels to Dallas for a talk. With that said there were a couple distinctions between technology and the surrounding area of NYC. Leading up to flying out of NYC most of the stuff I was being drawn to had to do with visualization and data. Once I got back yesterday most of the links were somewhat related to the city—go figure.

Love Me, the Poster

Love Me the street marking that I’ve seen for year(s) is now a poster. I’ve seen the mark in all sorts of sizes and even mused a while back about a shirt. While there doesn’t seem to be a shirt yet the post is actually a smarter thing to have. The poster also comes in black and costs $60.

CNN Magic Wall Makes Twitter Breakthrough (Maybe?)

While HuffPo makes an attention worthy note about CNN and Twitter, the bigger deal that I didn’t read about in CNN Magic Wall Makes Twitter Breakthrough was how they analyzed all those tweets. CNN broke it up into a number of different sections but didn’t really go much further with the numbers of people that tweeted that feel into each category. Looking at it a bit closer there’s no real break down of how a tweet with the hash tag of #SOTU would fall into any of those categories.

365 Days of Happiness from JAGDA

I found a great iPhone app via Snow Magazine that displays design work from the JAGDA. Lots of nice work to check out. Here’s some more info from the app page (^_^)365(O_O) JAGDA × HEIDELBERG.

CO2 Emissions Visualized

A lot of diagrams these days look interesting until they’re looked at closer to reveal that they’re just an illustration. What’s compelling about the diagram posted at Junk Charts about the amount of CO2 emissions by country, both in aggregate and per capita is the relationship in scale. Some countries hold steady while others literally explode. While the minute detail is lost, the shapes make for some fascinating growth images. via Reuters: Felix Salmon

Kathryn Bigelow interviewed on Charlie Rose

This set of interviews from Charlie Rose was pretty good from last year. The people include Kelefa Sanneh, Quincy Jones, L.A. Reid, Roger Cohen and Kathryn Bigelow. While if you have an hour to spare I’d watch the whole thing, I’m pointing to the interview with Kathryn Bigelow whom directed the Hurt Locker. Starting around the 31st minute she def. brought me into the story. I don’t see a lot of films but when the Hurt Locker became available to pay and watch digitally I wanted to see it right away. Her interview stuck in my mind.

Could A Graphic Language For Touch Help Educate Mobile Users?

Mobile Behavior in their post Could A Graphic Language For Touch Help Educate Mobile Users? points to the above icon set as a means for visualize different interactions between information and physical objects or spaces. While trying to make one set of standard icons just like Bluetooth or USB symbols that are recognized, I’m not a huge fan of standardizing other interactions. Things are still evolving and while common patterns are helpful I wonder if the exercise is a bit of a never ending loop. 100% cognition for something that needs to have instructions is going to be difficult to attain.

The Extraordinaries

One Floor Up found a great iPhone app called The Extraordinaries. Essentially it’s a directory of very quick volunteer opportunities that a person can do. The app is easy to navigate with a couple options between popular activities, groups to follow, browsing, and search. Once a person finish’s a quick activity that is noted in the app. While the catalog of items isn’t that large at the moment, I suspect as more organizations find out about this app they will create micro activities that fit the format. It’s a great idea to get people involved in a non committal way. Once a person has started to get involve with a small project there’s a likely chance that they will move on to bigger things.

Scouting Red Hook II

Scouting NY has created a great post on their observations of building titled Scouting Red Hook II. There’s a ton of contradictory signs surrounding the building which leads them to wonder “what the hell is going on inside”.

My crash course in programming

Sometimes process diagrams don’t need to be that complicated as this image from Brendan Dawes shows.

Toward the Virtual City and The Crisis of Place

After reading the review of Toward the Virtual City and The Crisis of Place from Walking Off the Big Apple, I think it will be the next book I read on my goal of reading 52 book in 52 weeks. At the end of the review there’s an interesting take on tech. today in the city.

Location-based mobile applications, computer simulations, geo-tagging programs, Street View maps, and other forms of augmented reality threaten to turn the city into a computer game, replacing our traditional bonds of place with strategic plans to conquer them. Special places that once upon a time may have had some personal meaning become winning check-in points for someone else’s venture capital. Engaging with strangers in simulated reality, walking to meetups while texting or talking or consulting the glowing GPS to locate oneself, may open exciting avenues for sociability and connection, but we may lose the city in the process.

That’s something interesting to consider as I tap away on my iPhone as I walk on my way…

Hey Brooklyn Interview Podcast Site

Considering how cold it is today I’m not going to venture anywhere. If the weather near you isn’t that great either and am looking for something to listen to while doing something else, Hey Brooklyn might be a site to check out. While all the interviews are based on creative people in Brooklyn, the more interesting thing for me is that each of the people being interviewed can carry on a conversation. A couple people that I’ve listened to include a stylist, the guy behind casual cookoffs known as the takedown, and a a photgrapher…

The list dilemma: to do, done, stop doing or none?

January is finished and now that we’re into February its time to get to business. While everyone in January is considering resolutions now is the time to put them into action. With that said there’s a lot of different ways to keep track of things—i.e. the List. In the post The list dilemma: to do, done, stop doing or none? Zaana Howard lists off a couple lists that might give you pause. There’s the Stop Doing List, the Mistakes List and the more traditional Done List and To Do List. Each has a couple thoughts about their effectiveness.

Listening to a couple helpful comments about what they liked from Link Drop in the past I’ve made a couple changes. I’ve decided to bring back my mind mapping of topics that I came across while collecting sites and posts for the past week. Connecting those dots helps make connections to patterns I might not have seen with out stepping back.

Looking back now there were two distinct periods, the time before the iPad hype and afterwards. A lot of the early week finds were somewhat related to senses whether it be food or wine and technology of devices that only allow for one type of content. While its been fun to speculate whether the iPad will change things or not, it’s really hard to take much of it seriously until they’re distributed in the wild. So while I did mention it quite predimonantly this week, I probably won’t be talking too much about the iPad until one is in my hands (or so that’s my assumption).

A Season in Deleted iPhone Photos
Considering how much time our mobile devices are with us, it’s not much of a surprise that over time the photos taken with it show a visual timeline of experiences. The above film taken by Christine Whuang shows each image from last summer disappearing as they’re deleted. She described it as “a weird catharsis in watching all these photos fly by and disappear into nothing.”

Process for the World’s ‘most expensive’ ham leg on sale in London
If you’re a vegetarian you might want to skip this post, but if you’re a food lover you might find the process for the World’s ‘most expensive’ ham leg on sale in London interesting. 50 pigs were feed “on a diet of acorns and roots to give the ham a distinctive flavour and and cured for three years”. Apparently the experience has a “melt-in-the-mouth texture”…

Navigating Your Wine
Candy Chang’s above photos shows a great implementation of paring food and wine together. The icons are informative, distinctive and have a sense of humour. As Candy noted in her post that the duck icon has holes in it, probably because it’s a game bird.

Streaming Beach House’s New Album
NPR’s First Listen is streaming the new Beach House’s album until its upcoming release on January 26th. It’s def. worth a listen, and a contender to be on my list of top music for 2010. Will that hold out for the whole year, it’s hard to say…

Trade School in NYC
Trade School might be on to something really smart. For thirty days people can take a class, the only fee is a student exchange of basic items and services for the person teaching the class. I expect that this type of model of trade to spread quite quickly.

Souvenir of Breath, Heartbeat and Goodnight
While I’m not entirely sure what the translation of Alice Wang’s post about Souvenir’s is about, I was drawn into the three images she displayed. There’s a great monotone value to them. Thinking about what next to say about the images as I was looking at them, the file names of the jpgs gave some clues as to what they might be about. The bottle was titled Breath, the second image Heartbeat and the lamp is Goodnight.

Persuasive Signup
Mike Laurie of Made by Many has a recorded a good description of a Persuasive signup experience he went through using Facebook Connect and other dialogue boxes. Posts like this are helpful as sites and business become more comfortable exploring social features of connecting people to their services.

The Art & Science of Evidence-Based Design
David Gillis in his post The Art & Science of Evidence-Based Design talks about how Teehan+Lax comes to design decisions. There’s a number of good definitions to check out about how they go back and forth to determine refinement and ultimately the design.

The Right Printhead
BLDGBLOG’s post on the Right Printhead piqued my interest. It’s about Icon’s latest issue on fiction being used to explore architectural ideas. Thinking about that me considering the broader idea of design fiction. While those idea weren’t covered in Icon maybe someone else should. In any case there’s a good break down of the actual stories written in Icon by China Miéville, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow to Ned Beauman, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Oron Catts, and Will Self among others. It’s been a while since I was compelled to actually buy a magazine, this might be one of those times…

I’ve got to say this. The UK web design scene is often just self serving, indulgent bullshit perptuated by friend…
While Brendan Dawes does bring up an obvious point of the online world, it’s not just in the UK. The sometimes unwarranted work that is described as “rocking” or “awesome” happens everywhere and before the web it was happening in most of the western print world. Most people can see for what it is, especially on blog posts now—so at this point I’m not really sure if there was ever an honest time when it came to promoting work. People need to filter for themselves because people can’t really trust what they read nor should they.

Platform + Apps = News Consumption
There’s a lot of quotable ideas in the HuffPost article In the App Economy, Newspapers are Apps by Maya Baratz. “In Media, If You’re Not a Platform, You’re an App” is a core concept that people might miss because people aren’t apps, but the way one person passes along info is unique to how someone else shares info. Another mental shift is that everyone wants to be the Platform when it’s probably better to be considered an app. Rarely do enterprise goals work out…

Getting Past Viral: Stop Spreading Viruses & Start Giving Gifts
Big Spaceship’s post about Getting Past Viral breaks down a couple reasons people send info out. For me if I find the information valuable I’m pretty sure someone else “out there” will likely benefit from reading it too. Big Spaceship mentions a couple reasons that I hadn’t really considered but can’t fault: Contributing (1-to-Many), Broadcasting (1-to-World), Gifting (1-to-1/Few).

The ability to take away our books is a current reality, not a future prospect.
A post like this is great to read before the actual canvas thing is released tomorrow. It reminded me of how surprised I was that apple tv locked my ability to surf the net from my tv. In my mind they basically distributed a bricked iTunes box. Hopefully this new canvas allows for more freedom but what’s brought up by Matthew Burton in Should we let Apple decide what we read? makes you kind of wonder about a monopoly.

Airport Apps: Mobile Utility for Those Traveling Up In The Air
If you’re about to spend some living time inside an airport you might want to check out MobileBehavior’s post about Airport Apps: Mobile Utility for Those Traveling Up In The Air. There’s a lot of iPhone apps for flying that you might not have been aware of or had the time to search out.

iPad Photos from Daylife
Undecided whether I want to buy one or not, and if I do, would I go with the low fi or 3G enabled one. Until that moment arrives here’s some of the photos of the iPad from Daylife.

Spaces for Ideas: The Beginning
A blog post about designing the perfect sketchbook titled Spaces for Ideas: The Beginning.

If it could cover these points the designer might be able to make it.

It’s a Lonely World Out There
Ever the realist, he built his table for one.

This and other gems of reacting to Dwell photos can be found at http://unhappyhipsters.tumblr.com

How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Interesting post from Tomorrow Museum about how the no multitasking aspect of the iPad could be seen as a benefit as opposed to what a lot of other people are saying.

Canada Finally Gets Something Apple Related Before Everyone Else
When it comes to Apple products (or hulu, or any internet media…) Canada usually gets the short end of the deal. For whatever reason they’re always the last to get new products which is insane considering the proximity to the US. In any case this Incase Maple Leaf Slider that Popwuping mentioned is pretty sweet. Next time I’m in Toronto I’m going to pick one up.

Maggie Nesciur: The Walker
This photo series has been going on for a long time but I only came across it today when it was passed along by a friend. There’s very few weeks that go by that I won’t have a walking related post of some sort. Everything that Maggie Nesciur describes on her walking experience was relatable—even if you don’t walk it’s def. worth hearing and watching. It will at the least make you more aware of your surroundings.