Link Drop Today

Found via MattRod’s Twitter stream, the above video from SlateV talks about their low budget ad that managed to get some insane number of viewers for a mere hundred bucks. How long can this last?

According to Hitwise as mentioned on the Next Web, Facebook now has become the bigger entry point in terms of the web, not Google. It is worth noting that most links coming from Facebook are from trusted recommendations while Google is search.

While this commentary of Magazines on the iPad from Felix Salmon won’t be the last in the debate of the iPad and magazines, it does cover a lot of ground in the disconnect between Wired.com and the magazine. What seems kind of sad to me is that Wired the iPad does a disservice to treating the reading experience as an extension of paper, not something new. Of course I haven’t even read the magazine with an iPad so my opinion could change, but by the sounds of it, Wired’s system is purposely dividing itself in a manner that isn’t warranted. It looks like an ugly split between the paper people and tech people.

The above images visualize the seasonal colors of images on Flickr. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg created an algorithm that plotted color from photos. Summer was at the top and moved clockwise.

I like how in James’ post Twitter in Four Parts he describes it as a personal AM radio station—something that I find hard to dispute with all that I’m taking in from Twitter. He breaks the post into four points: reading, writing, distribution and usability. All things to consider as things start getting pushed out there.

While things like this status board look nice, the great thing about Panic’s post is the description of some of the features and implementation of the actual board. So far the board is making everyone at Panic just a little bit more on target.

The features:

E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
Important Countdowns
Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
The Panic Calendar
Employee Twitter Messages
Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!

Looking at their list, the only feature that I’d remove would be the Email Queue. I’m not sure how it would help someone with their work—maybe if the board displayed the number of unread emails or something about the number of emails in the day that a person working on the project must read.

Even more unique are some of the tech specs that talk about the type of screen and types of code to implement. While not mandatory this type of post shows how tech detailed they are with their thought process.

I found the above diagram through celine celines blog who in turn found it at the post Life Below 600. While I can understand what’s trying to be said here (and I tend to scroll a lot), I think if you can’t deliver a good payoff above the first 600 pixels why would anyone scroll down any further?

There’s a good collection of short clips in the What Movie UIs Say About the Future. Looking at films like Minority Report, Ironman and even Microsoft’s newest products offers a glimpse of some people’s imagination. While I don’t agree with all the assessments in the post it contains enough stuff that it’s worth the read and look.

When a person looks at a map they think of it as something tangible, hard to argue with. Lines have been drawn so it must be accurate. The above map that Greg points to illustrates that in WW1 that wasn’t always the case. He describes the maps action “as surveying the opposing edges of dug-in/fortified landscape to outline an amorphous contested zone”. Because of the nature of war and the fact that the soldiers were always on the move meant that the map wasn’t always accurate. Greg also describes in the post that he in turn is talking about that there was some friction between those creating the map and those that had to use the map.

By any measure the Fitbit is a really great piece of technology, or so I’ve read as I’ve never used one myself. As an idea it received great acclaim from TechCrunch. But as the blog Graphpaper goes into great depth of the writer’s experience one thing becomes clear—personal management of data. It’s not so much a beef about the product as the process.

In short, you just can’t lead a normal life with Fitbit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Fitbit experience, a lesson about the future of personal informatics, it’s that we simply won’t have accurate and reliable personal systems until the devices themselves are immune to these everyday emergencies and accidents and inconveniences.

I couldn’t help but feel the same way using RunKeeper for my iPhone. I still use it from time to time to track my walking, but even to press a couple buttons before I head to work seems a bit too much effort for what I’m going to get from it if I stop doing it for a day or two.

But by far the best response to Chris’ post was from Tiffehr. “I gave my FitBit to my dog. It actually works phenomenally well for him — I can see his data generated while I’m at work, including dog-walker visits and naps. I can monitor his weight and diet by setting up a very simple ‘menu’ of hand-entered foods”.