¡Soy el diseñador anónimo de la experiencia del usuario! ¡Soy poderoso! ¡DISEÑARÉ!

I’m tellin’ ya, this story has legs… and arms… and knee caps… and… I’m just happy to know that my little dark comedy still seems to be relevant.

From the beeb:

Mastromarino described his crimes as “disgusting and embarrassing”

Three men who admitted conspiring to sell on body parts harvested from corpses in the United States have been given at least eight years in prison.

A Philadelphia court jailed Louis and Gerald Garzone, who ran funeral homes in the city, from eight to 20 years.

The scheme’s mastermind, Michael Mastromarino, was handed 25 to 58 years – to run concurrently with a similar sentence already received in New York.

The body parts were sold to biomedical firms without the consent of relatives.

They were then used by unsuspecting doctors in medical transplants.

Overall the operation generated $4.6m (£2.3m) for those involved.

Alistair Cooke

The court in Philadelphia – where the Garzone brothers last month pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy, theft and abusing corpses – heard from 40 character witnesses before sentencing.

Many said the accused had made a mistake, and all three defendants apologised in court.

“Words cannot express how sorry I am,” Michael Mastromarino said. His crimes were “nothing less than disgusting and embarrassing,” he added.

Mastromarino is already serving between 18 and 54 years in jail, a sentence handed down by a court in New York, where he ran the body parts operation.

His company, Biomedical Tissue Services, took body parts from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Among the corpses used was that of veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose bones were sold for $11,000 (£5,400) after he died from cancer in New York in 2004.

In Philadelphia, Mastromarino paid the Garzone brothers – who ran two funeral homes and a crematorium – more than $245,000 for at least 244 bodies between February 2004 and October 2005.

After buying the corpses, Mastromarino would send a “cutting crew”, led by former nurse Lee Cruceta, to Philadelphia to dissect the bodies.

The body parts were sold around the country for surgical procedures including knee and hip replacements, as well as dental implants.

The authorities have only been able to identify 49 of the 244 bodies sold by the Garzones, since the process entailed falsifying names, ages and causes of death to disguise the fact that some parts came from bodies too old or diseased to be harvested legally.

And I SUCK at it.

How about you?

Amazing videos from Australian photographer Keith Loutit.

I am a Sydney based photographer. These photographs and short films were made in ordinary places, probably not too unlike where you live. Combining a variety of techniques including tilt-shift and time-lapse photography, I aim to present Sydney as the Model City, and help people take a second look at places that are very familiar to them.

Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

A friend asked me about where I think advertising is heading.

Here are my far to hastily dashed off thoughts:

I would say that things to talk/think about in terms of future trends in advertising are:

• mobile advertising (right now very similar to the early days of the web… banner ads, etc., but it’s going to be HUGE)
• video ads (no one has really figured out how to make money on video… the standard model–pre and post roll–sucks, and there is a lot of experimentation with lower third style ad placement etc., Google is monkeying around with adwords in Video, but the industry is still waiting for the big new idea.
• branded entertainment There is a lot of experimentation with advertainment (folding advertising messages in with entertainment–also known as branded entertainment or content) and my gut tells me that that’s where some interesting new ideas are going to come from, but nothings hitting big yet.
• enhanced behavioral targeting new ways to behaviorally target web ads (for example, showing more and more detailed ads as a user refines their search for a car) right now behavioral targeting is pretty simplistic–based on keywords, etc.–but if the advertisers can get users to opt in and allow their entire browse history to be used, the targeting can become much more focused.
• Google radio & tv ads (ad agencies should be terrified of this…)

So, if web 1.0 was about experimenting with traditional business models (selling products–Amazon) online, and one of the big underlying stories of web 2.0 was the fact that Google basically became an alternative to the traditional ad industry, to me web 3.0 is going to be about several things in terms of advertising:

• Targeting using algorithms–using a user’s browse behavior to present the user with the right content in the right context automatically (so ads are going to be valued much higher than they have been because they will be targeted much more precisely. (the old TV/Radio interrupt model will die))
• Ads being presented to users across a variety of platforms–computer, TV, radio, mobile, etc.
• The lines between ad and content becoming more and more blurred
• Ads becoming even more interactive (perhaps we’ll see more alternative reality games as ads.)
• And continued opening up of advertising (TV and Radio) for those who can’t afford to advertise under the current model.

So what do you guys think? Where do you see trends headed?

Like Found Magazine for audio. Awesome! In their own words:

Welcome to Tape Findings. This site is an archive of one of a kind cassette tape recordings and other odd sounds that I have discovered throughout my years searching thrift stores and garage sales. I hope you find them as fascinating as I do. Enjoy!

To me, the whole lean back / lean forward description used to describe the difference between the TV vs. computer experience is not so slowly falling apart.

People are watching full length episodes of TV programs (or even movies) on their computers on Hulu, Joost, and ABC.

Current and F’N MTV are constantly blurring the lines between what’s sposed ta be consumed on the computer, and what’s sposed ta be consumed on the television set.

And, now, on the internets, data feeds are starting to be consumed just like we used to watch the idjit box. (and some of them are pretty idiotic, actually…) You can just sit back, pop-open a beer, and let the rich, data-rich goodness of the internet wash over you. (or do what I do, and scream and yell at the screen, just like I usedta with the telie…)

Election.Twitter.com is my most favorite feed to sit back and scream at:

It’s like a giant 90s chatroom filled with constant flaming comments flying back and forth. If you have any faith in our country at all, election.twitter.com will drain it all right out of you.

But then, when you’re sick of that, there’s always the rainbow vomiting pandas of Flickr. (the background image is from one of my new favorite internet artists/commentators/cartoonists/monologuists/??? (the guy’s work defies descriptions I think)

It’s the ’08 equivalent of watching a fishtank. Sit back, and watch the friendly pandas vomit out the best that Flickr has to offer…

Originally, in the lean back/forward world the sole purpose of computers was to convert data into information… now they are turning it into entertainment. What a wonderful, horrible world we live in.

What are your favorite data feeds to watch?

Nerdbots!

Great article from Jakob Nielsen, on when to use which user experience research method:

He breaks the product development cycle into 3 stages:

1. Strategy
2. Optimization
3. Assessment

He breaks down the different research methods on 2 dimensions:

1. Behavioral to Attitudinal (what people do to what they say/think/feel)
2. Qualitative t0 Quantitative (psychological/sociological to mathematical/statistical)

And then talks about where the different methods fall, and when they are most often used.