Category: Unfiled

• Persuasion and the authority approach

  Scoble has a good post on persuading through authority and not through bias. ‘Then I got to the Ford dealer. First off, he admitted that Ford had had a quality problem in the past… If he had tried to play the “my stuff is the best and the rest is crap” line, he probably would have lost the sale. Instead, he played “I’m an authority and I’m looking out for your best interests” and that hooked me. He got the sale.‘ Basically it’s about being honest, offering overwhelmingly good service, and not bashing the competition.

  

  Some interesting comments there too, including a link to Stanford’s new Captology blog featuring BJ Fogg et al.

  4/29/2004

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• Brooklyn Design Expo

  Brooklyn Designs 2004 will feature designers and manufacturers of contemporary furnishings that include: furniture, lighting, linens, rugs, and decorative accessories for home, office and garden. In DUMBO from April 30 – May 2. $10

  

  4/29/2004

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• The Gherkin and the Shard of Glass

  Beautiful looking and oddly nicknamed buildings going up in London.

  

  4/28/2004

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• Recently: search method, mouse design, design theory, and web genres

  Seeds of a search method, marsupial mice named Joey, design theory from Doblin, and the golden genres of the web.

  4/27/2004

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• 23rd St. CSS

  If you’d like to see my background art without all this useless text obscuring it, use this blank HTML page and hit reload repeatedly.

  4/27/2004

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• Hotel Room Camera Obscura

  As constructed by Marc Rettig, beautiful and ghostly. ‘…On the wall, the Marina Towers. Upside down, of course, because we’re inside a camera…‘

  

  4/27/2004

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• MBA POV on Design

  John Byrne points to University of Toronto’s School of Management’s alumni mag issue on design (.pdf), with a few insightful articles.

  4/27/2004

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• Google Gaga

  Sippey comments on the Google IPO hype, exactly what I was thinking about this morning. Yesterday I came across it in the New York Times, the Nightly Business Report, and NPR. This morning it was in the Wall St. Journal. I wonder if they all feel they got the story, or if they’ve been duped? ‘Deciding whether to IPO‘ my ass, if Google took money from Kleiner Perkins they will IPO, the hype is just spreading the word, building excitement, and raising the eventual price. Google is spinning the media like a top.

  4/27/2004

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• 10 Classics from Cognitive Science

  PeterV links to 10 Classics from Cognitive Science, several of which look applicable to digital design. And there’s this one that is just darn cool: ‘Do systems larger than single individuals qualify as “cognitive?” In this article, Hutchins argued that they do. He supported his claim by analyzing remembering by commercial airline cockpits, considered as cognitive systems. He proposed “that rather than trying to map the findings of cognitive psychological studies of individuals directly onto the individual pilots in the cockpit, we should map the conceptualization of the cognitive system onto a new unit of analysis: the cockpit as a whole.”‘

  4/23/2004

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• Photo rights

  The UK — including its infamous yellow press — is pissed about CBS showing pics of Princess Diana’s dead body, while the US is pissed about the release of images of war coffins. The irony is unbearable.

  4/23/2004

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• The QM2 is in town

  

  In the New York Times:
  A Queen Arrives, and Even in Jaded New York, Jaws Drop

  4/23/2004

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• IA/ bigger, better, faster

  IA/ moves to a faster server, upgrades Drupal, and sports a fresh new look.

  

  4/23/2004

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• Worth while

  Desperately seeking interesting business blogs to read, I came across Worthwhile, a group blog including authors David Weinberger and Tom Peters that strives to ‘put purpose and passion on the same plane as profit.‘ Amen. Also found An Entrepreneur’s Life with a sizable blogroll, and I’m off…

  4/22/2004

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• eWeb Edit Pro, now with XHTML, Styles

  Ahhhh, content management applications, those wonderful places where “business users” author text and where content smacks right into presentation, with the results falling short of peanut butter and chocolate. Inserting a WYSIWYG tool into the CMA – like eWeb Edit Pro was often the way to make editing easier but at the expense of clean, consistent, standards-based HTML. Now it not only supports XHTML, it supports styles too (admins can remove unwanted buttons like bold). Nice.

  A similar product is editlet.

  4/21/2004

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• IA Library Launches

  The Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture today launched the IA Library. It’s a collection of faceted, searchable, juicy resources for your learning pleasure, 173 items strong and growing.

  4/21/2004

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