Noise Between Stations

Zeldman beats up on drop down menus. You go brother. But why insult birdbath installers? That sounds like a nice job, working in gardens all day.

Elizabeth Albrycht on Corporate Blogging and Power: ‘I think blogging is one of those new technologies that makes the negotiations about power visible…. Power needs secrecy. Humanity needs openness. Ergo – blogging actually works on the side of humanity….’

Though I quickly corrected my broken TV problem by picking up a used model on Craigslist, I’m still fascinated by the projector option. Here’s a guide to a $200 DIY projector using an LCD panel and an overhead projector. Part of the appeal is having a school-like overhead projector in your living room, very retro. [...]

This time for $160 million, by aQuantive, who owns Avenue A. SBI had picked up Razorfish for $8.2 million less than two years ago, but also added MarchFirst, iXL, Scient, Lante, etc. to the mix. Would be interesting to do the math and see how much SBI actually made on the flip (sorry to put [...]

Once the HTML is finished loading, our script will search it for specified elements (h2, span, etc.) and replace the text inside of them with an img tag. This dynamic img tag has its alt attribute set to the original text, and its src attribute set to the URL of the PHP script that we [...]

‘Markets don’t buy products, customers do.‘ —Tom Peters A great argument for complementing marketing with design.

Michael nominates Oprah for president. Hey, if Arnold can do it, Oprah certainly can.

I’ve been thinking about ways to edit CSS from a content management system, and fascinated by Dean’s description of Automatic CSS mode in Textpattern… Automatic CSS mode, style sheet editing is taken to a sophisticated new level, using an editing interface and organizational method intended to make CSS parameters more readable and logical. Any existing [...]

We came back from vacation on Monday and when my wife pressed the power button on the TV remote all that happened was click, click, click… I’ll check in with my local repair shop tomorrow, but I thought it was a good time to figure out the brave new world of televisions. My current set [...]

I’m getting over my prejudice of chair-happy designers (why must every designer do a chair?). Niels Diffrient, designer of Humanscale’s Freedom and the new Liberty, describes the chair, in the new Metropolis, as ‘a psychological challenge: all architects and designers of note have chosen the chair as their ultimate note. it’s gotten to be hallowed [...]

Andrew Dillon, in his report on the fifth annual IA Summit, gives me props but is critical of the idea of navigation…. …I really enjoyed, again, a session on navigation by Victor Lombardi, which probably appealed to my academic sensibilities more than some of the other sessions. I have been a strong critic of the [...]

Karl Long posted his new DMI article, Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness: ‘I’ve tried to take the approach of connecting experience design to a business imperative, in this case customer loyalty…. This means some issues need to be addressed by the design early on before you start trying to collect more information or [...]

The fingerprint biometric device for $49 was inevitable, I’m just surprised it arrived this soon (should we thank the demand generated by the Dept. of Homeland Security for the accelated development?). I predict within two years someone will build this into a laptop, sitting beside the trackpad. Update: Josh points out that fingerprint biometrics are [...]

Peter J. Bogaards was kind enough to chat with me for the InfoDesign Profile series. One question I didn’t have an answer for was, Who is your role model? It’d be great to have one, but it feels like the world is changing too fast for anyone else to consistenty interpret the world in a [...]

Rashmi riffs on my presentation of information shape recognition, relating it to implicit and explicit memory. Her analysis is only speculation but seems spot-on based on what I’ve read. Implicit and explicit memory might play similar roles as local and global schemata, respectively, that Andew Dillon describes in his work on information shape.