Period.‘ Jeff Dachis – in the March Fast Company – comes to terms with what went wrong at Razorfish. His passion was inspiring, he had amazing optimism and drive, but it wasn’t enough. ‘It’s hard to describe loving 2,100 employees so much you’ll do anything. You’ll buy $1 million of stock on the open market, like I did, to show you believe in them. That was a dumb move, straight up.‘
Category: Unfiled
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Can liberals take back foreign policy?
George Packer’s excellent A Democratic World in the New Yorker reveals why the American Democratic party hasn’t yet had a coherent point of view on foreign affairs and what they must do to get there. Juicy excerpts:
- the Afghan girl was telling [Senator Joseph Biden], “Don¹t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.” Biden described the encounter as “a catalytic event for me.”
- At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world… the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action.
- Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way‹not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of ³multiculturalism²) that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples.
- Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, said, ³Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven¹t embraced, because otherwise we¹re inviting a clash of civilizations.²
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Matt on alien cowboys
There are surprisingly few user-centered design presentations out there, so Matt’s Alien Cowboy is a welcome addition, nicely customizing the big ideas for a techie audience. Thanks Matt!
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Mark on conferences
One thing they don’t teach you in school is, what to do at a conference… Important work happens away from the auditorium: that’s the first lesson… And Huang, who cannot have been much older than I, was already talking about his responsibility for the direction people were taking in the field, for not leading people into barren areas because they were currently fashionable. That responsibility was breathtaking: here I was, all outfitted with my nifty doctorate and my office at the Experimental Station, and nobody had told me, “It’s time to stop thinking like a student.”
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Managing Content Management
My new article on B&A: Managing the Complexity of Content Management: ‘…Because of the high planning, purchasing, and design costs, there is a need to effectively manage the complexity of CMS projects. I’ve seen some organizations do this well and others not so well. Here are ten lessons in managing complexity gleaned from real-world, successful CMS projects…’
It’s also a step forward for me in writing this type of article better: being honest about the stupid problems we face, being positive about the solutions, not stripping out the colorful language, and including more first-person perspective.
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Espresso bargain
Illy’s offering a special deal on the FrancisFrancis! X5 if you sign up for a year’s worth of coffee deliveries. The coffee probably costs a premium, but hey, it is Illy. The X5 that usually retails for $450 is only $175, so if you remember to cancel the shipments after a year (isn’t that always the trick?) it’s a great deal, and you get to keep the stealth fighter of an espresso machine.
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Prototypical examples
What’s good about telemarketer’s calls is that they are so annoying, they become the prototypical example of bad marketing. I can now use the term “telemarketing wrath” as an analogy of when marketing goes too far, and even marketers will cringe in disgust. Same goes for Jakob Nielson: he becomes a handy reference for a particular style of design, such as “We could do a Jakob version of this…”
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The Great Powerpoint Compromise
At the IA Support Group last night we reviewed the Tufte-Byrne-Norman Powerpoint debate. One good point that was brought up was the life of “decks” beyond presentation and documentation, that people in corporate cultures communicate with Powerpoint, using it as a mental shortcut instead of Word and emailing decks around. Tufte’s perfectionism is too slow to affect this. Could a good compromise simply be putting the simple, main idea in the slide, and the prose in the notes, distributing it in notes format? That’s the tact I plan to take with my upcoming presentations.
Update: Paul Gould at MAYA Design illustrates exactly what I’m talking about. Link courtesy Beth Mazur.
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When it all comes together
The Autofill work that James is doing is a perfect example of how interaction design, information architecture, and programming can (and need to) all come together to make an interface work really well. He told me last night he has it working with a pull-down menu now. James, publish that code! :)
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Finally, a digital library
I haven’t bothered to follow the digital library folks because they don’t seem to produce anything useful. I’m not even sure what they mean when they say digital library. What I mean is being able to access everything in my library, but from anywhere, digitally. This is what I mean:
And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.
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e. e. spam
An email message included a gif of the ad and a bunch of funky serious-looking text, and was still detected as spam. But apart from the technical perspective the text is rather wonderful, like an e. e. cummings doodle…
drawbridges fatter booklet adsorbs haltingly endocrine fearful canalize formatting architecture executioner decorums doubters eructing consultant gists criterion cushions chars expounder consolation envisage disinters endures banditti daters grilled genuineness damp Sun, 01 Feb 2004 10:55:26 -0400 beholders effeminacy barometers dying gobbles forge bullheadedly disenchantment afire amber craw gastritises biography faction extravagances determinations harpies equalizing delightfully costumed envelopers fawning armorers carcinoma disclaimer grew drunkenness caved abomination appointing griddles admonitions bakers foreknew brutalize admiralties canonically agings flatfoot cluck duos exhibitionism guinea easterlies androgen cannonade fusiliers extendable farthings activities cattleman astride euthanized amalgam greeters eatable haircut commiseration allowances deescalates framed blizzard groggily enigma curry bubblegum calypso bookmark earthinesses gladdened flummoxes dehydration decorator grayness
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Classify Under “Freaks”
Chris Fahey’s notes on visualizing social groups is applied to high schools, but would work nicely on orkut etc.
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Semi-Monthly Ego Check
My RSS file is almost three times more popular than my blog page, which gets about 4300 requests a day, mostly from myself. In third place is my undergrad thesis on music censorship written over 12 years ago and which I originally posted just to have some content on my website. It’s included as a chapter in a book to be published this summer. Sometimes I think I haven’t written that well since, and sometimes I think my ideas haven’t been as sophomoric since. Assorted other goodies, like an essay on displaying photos on the web, get about 10 requests a day, which says something to me about the success (in terms of readership) of publishing on the web.
