Noise Between Stations

February 2008

  • Summary Summary: The Dip — Be the Best in the World

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    1 min read

    The Dip by Seth Godin describes a personal approach to achievement by following a strategy of quality in a world of micromarkets. I’ve read the summary and have tried to further summarize it: You start by finding a micromarket where you can be the best in the world, whether it’s personal financial planning for new…

  • Konigi Launched

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    1 min read

    My friend Michael recently launched Konigi, a site for researching websites. It’s perfect for those times when you’re designing a feature and you want to review all the prior art. There’s screenshots and screencasts and a bunch of community features, but Michael has a lot more interesting things planned, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

  • Digital Service Design: A User Story, and An Overview

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    1 min read

    Here’s a story of how someone might wind up needing this book, and a one-page overview of it all. Read this doc on Scribd: The Right Idea 02

  • Alignment Diagrams as Business Tools?

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    1 min read

    The first book from Rosenfeld Media, Mental Models, is hot off the press (get 10% off with discount code FOSMEX10). I bought a copy this week, and was struck by how widely the alignment diagrams in the book could be used. In case you haven’t seen an alignment diagram, it basically groups similar mental concepts…

  • Digital Service Design: A Book in Progress

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    1 min read

    I recently went looking for and failed to find the book I think so many of us would appreciate and enjoy right now, one that captures the excitement, the emergent processes, and the innovative techniques for designing digital services, particularly for the Internet. There are great product development books, great Internet strategy books, and great…

  • Is Play Important?

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    2 min read

    Business design people talk a lot about the importance of play at work, the sort of improvisation that — because it is both fun and challenging — encourages us to persist at an activity by generating new ideas. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent essay in the New York Times, Taking Play Seriously, focuses on the scientific…

  • Storyboarding Instead of Writing

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    3 min read

    I’ve been doing a lot of “writing” lately, but in an attempt to emulate great, bestselling computer books that are highly visual and concise, I’ve been thinking about layout first and writing second, because we want to learn and not necessarily read. I’ve started mocking up the piece on index cards to get a feel…

  • The Familiar Product That’s Always Surprising

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    1 min read

    When one of my students started designing a product extension for Orbit gum, I didn’t get the appeal of Orbit (it’s huge among college students, but as I don’t own a TV I’m immune to the marketing). But lately my project manager at work keeps bringing it in, and each pack is a new flavor.…

  • Jan Chipchase’s Presentations are Online

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    1 min read

    And they’re nice.

  • Location-Aware Ads Have Arrived

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    1 min read

    From the New York Times, In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users… CBS plans to announce on Wednesday that it is trying one of the first serious experiments with cellphone advertising that is customized for a person’s location. Its CBS Mobile unit is teaming up with the social networking service Loopt, which allows its subscribers…

  • The Failure of Failure

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    2 min read

    Much has been written about the importance of failure in design. To improve things we need to try new approaches which sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Straight forward enough, at least to designers. But business managers won’t go near that. “Yes, I need to fail!” Bull-shit, you ain’t gonna hear that in many management offices.…

  • Kevin Kelly on Eight Uncopyable Values

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    2 min read

    Kevin Kelly established himself as an Internet pundit with true foresight with the 1998 New Rules for the New Economy which is still a classic, if showing a little age with its dot com bravura. Now he’s working on a new book piece by piece on his blog. The latest chapter examines the future of…

  • Which Blogs Should I Read?

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    1 min read

    Friends of mine in the industry who aren’t taken with blogs sometimes ask me which ones they should look at just to stay current. I looked through my RSS reader and picked the five I thought would be most helpful. They are Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin) TechCrunch O’Reilly Radar How to Change the World (Guy…

  • Do You Desire My Brand Characteristics?

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    1 min read

    Years ago I told my friend Mary about a desirability testing technique developed at Microsoft using product reaction cards, and tonight she showed me a neat twist she put on it. After testing the design of an online social networking tool, she listed the words chosen by test participants alongside the words used to describe…

  • Maybe Mass Marketing Works After All

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    1 min read

    When it comes to viral influence, does the influence of a select few “key influencers” matter more than “the rest of us”? Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research says no, as Clive Thompson writes in Is the Tipping Point Toast?” in Fast Company. Watts says: It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare…