Jason Nunes

Jane Dowling and I did some UX strategy/design work for them a few months ago. Challenge Post is such a great idea–”a public marketplace for companies, non-profits and individuals to create contests and award prize money for solving problems.” Challenge Post founder Brandon Kessler is one smart and savvy dude. There’s a great article about him and Challenge Post in The Industry Standard. Check it out.

An awesome article on the BBC

Some highlights:

He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.

Personally, I’m relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

Wow. The pace of change in technology is such a constant that I sometimes lose track of how much things have changed. This really drives it home for me. Anyone else remember having one of these boat anchors clipped to your belt, that mechanical whir reverberating through your hip bone (maybe I just had junky ones) as you listened to “Message in a Bottle” on your bus ride to school? Or am I dating myself?

I was a Teenage Superhero
When 15 year old tomboy Miranda comes home from school to find her parents abducted, and her house trashed, she and her nerdy little brother Jeremy are in for the shock of their lives–back in the day their boring, dorky parents weren’t boring or dorky at all–mom was DynaGirl, Amazonian super heroine and fighter for truth, justice, and the American way, and dad was Dr. Braincapacity, evil genius, mad scientist, on the FBIs most wanted super villain list. Now it’s Miranda and Jeremy’s turn to take up the family mantel and save the day (not to mention their parents). But when they learn who has abducted them–Captain Eternal, masked, caped, square jawed paragon of justice, (and mom’s old flame)–becoming super may be a little bit harder than they thought…

Found this on FFFFOUND.

Tickles my inner physicist, and my inner cutlery addict…

Motionagrapher reminded me of these 2 classics that use the operating system to create beautiful animations.

A beautiful music video…

And the history of text on the web…

Inspiring stuff.

Lilly Allen’s latest Video for her song “Fuck You” is really fun.

Something else we can thank the iPhone for perhaps?

I think he’s on to something… no wonder I’m such a fan of the POTUS

Are we seeing the first step towards healing that age old schism? The nerds vs. the jocks?

I love the work of Travis Louie, a painter who specializes in Edwardian and Victorian style portraits of monsters and oddities. …and he went to Pratt, which is just blocks away from where I’m typing. Cool.

Fantastic article by Thomas Baekdal about where we consume our media, and how to reach people in the emerging social media (and beyond) age… (and it’s got pretty (though unscientific) info graphics too…)

Baekdal makes some great points about how we are shifting out of the traditional interruption model of message delivery because the media consumption mix is changing radically. (This relates to the Clay Shirky talk I blogged about earlier)… His info graphics make his points.

1900 – Read all about it!

1960 – We will be right back after these messages

1990 – Tune in Tomorrow

1998 – The dawn of the Internet

2004 – I decide what to do!

2007 – Me too

2009 – Everything is Social

and on into the future

2020 – Traditional is dead

From Amit Agarwal, a great summary of what the differences are between 1.0, 2.0, & 3.0.

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 – That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

Amit has collected a bunch of different industry presentations that make these various points.