February 2012
5 posts
The Internet is becoming a Metropolis.
I have noticed a trend in all recent redesigns of Facebook and Twitter: layers.
The growth of the Internet is comparable to the growth of a city. When we run out of horizontal real estate, we begin to build upwards.
The new overlay tweet design:
The new Twitter profile overlay design:
The new Facebook photo overlay:
We can learn a lot about online UX design by studying the history of...
The magic of Magic.
Magic is based in disbelief.
And, disbelief calls for an encore.
“Can you do that again?”
(And a slew of acronyms.)
WTF. OMG. STFU.
Huh?
Magic, once seen, evokes within us the desire to solve or disprove it.
We try to confirm the common teaching that magic is not possible.
So, we take a closer look, from various angles, at a slower speed.
We give it a thorough and...
January 2012
5 posts
December 2011
2 posts
November 2011
3 posts
My Novel. Page 13.
“The aircraft has now been cleared for departure.”
The plane began to gently rumble and back up. Light streams of rainwater shuffled across the window, hanging on for a few seconds at the edges then flying off into the chilly air.
The plane lifted off, and the streams multiplied in number and speed, sprinting across the hypotenuse of the rounded rectangular window.
And then the plane entered the...
My Novel. Page 12.
Jane used to visit Chicago at least twice a year, but ten years ago, realized it had become an emotional crutch – a way for her to escape the routine loneliness of New York City and sink back into her flirtatiously adventurous early years.
The early years: Back when Jane and her girlfriends were all hot and single… and knew they were. A smile combined with a soft playful squeeze of the bouncer’s...
October 2011
5 posts
What is culture?
I was recently asked, “What defines culture?”
And, I recently ran across a few short films that explore the definition of “home.”
With this, I came to the realization that what defines culture and home is the individual himself:
He chooses to be inspired (or not) by things.
He decides how to treat his surroundings.
Individual culture is just one stroke of cornflower blue...
September 2011
4 posts
Facebook F8 Conference
The 2011 F8 Conference is all about content. It’s relevance, engagement, and personalization level.
For work, I put together a very robust POV on what the Facebook changes are and what they mean for marketers. The conclusion was that exact same thing. Content and relevance will reign.
What’s interesting though, is we all know content is king. We’ve heard it since SXSW 2011....
4 tags
Photos of the inside of my stomach. →
August 2011
4 posts
The Inverse Law of Sanity →
When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as political leaders. But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity.
5 Key Daily Deal Sites [INFOGRAPHIC]
Comparing daily deal site characteristics revealed several common success factors, the first one being: we love food…nom nom nom. But seriously, these sites are successful because they have unearthed and are feeding into new customer expectations and desires.
Click for full-view
What makes daily deal sites successful?
Every site provides deals that are specific to the customer’s...
July 2011
12 posts
My e-Me is a Plagiarist.
Sometimes I forget whether or not I’ve verbalized my thoughts because my tweets, Facebook status updates, G+ posts, Tumblr entries, IM chats, text messages, and emails steal my own thoughts’ thunder. My physical voice has been replaced by pixels.
“Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its...”
– The Influencing Machine
“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then...”
– He’s Just Not That Into You
Google+ VERSUS Facebook.
Hangout/Huddle VERSUS Group chatting
Google+’s Hangout offers group IMing.
Google+’s Huddle takes it to the mobile sphere and offers group texting.
Facebook synchronizes the FB chat and Inbox features, so if you miss a conversation, the transcript is sent to your Inbox.
New Design
Google+ takes into account different devices and their connectivity with each other
Facebook is...
The Opportunity With TV-Tweeters.
Taking a closer look at the interaction between Twitter and TV, one can quickly notice that the online audience still falls quiet when something relevant or important comes up on TV.
Part of this is because TV still has the authority and credibility it was born with.
Think about it: it is still a big deal when we are, or someone we know is, on TV. When someone we know is on TV, we take pictures...
Novel. Page 11.
Jane was once dead, but now she was alive.
She had found freedom, joy and celebration in breaking away from the chains of her past.
For the past five years, the world had operated in a slow motion: a lethargic, depressed, dragging of everything – the heavy movement of birds’ wings, the slow change of the pedestrian light from “stop” to “walk,” the exhausted turn of the lock to her apartment...
June 2011
3 posts
Spam is smart. And, so are you.
We can learn a lot by studying bad things.
Spam is one of those bad things: We can learn a lot from its history, from a content strategy standpoint:
Spam knows how to discover what content is relevant enough to drive action within users. If you think about it, Spam has mastered the psychology behind what motivates users to click on an ad, a link, an email. Despite the terrible art direction...
May 2011
4 posts
Losing Ourselves. To. Technology. →
Philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been puzzling over the essential definition of human uniqueness since the beginning of recorded history. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of what he calls “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this:
The human being is the only animal that...
Overdose.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll die from overdosing on digital…
I like information.
I have open access to it.
It makes me feel good.
Repeat.
“Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is...”
– 1 Thessalonians 5:16 - 18
Twitter v. TV
We all know Osama Bin Laden is dead now.
But, last evening when I read the following tweet, Ding Dong! Osama’s Dead!, I assumed it was just a personal remark, rather than a fact, and I just continued along my merry Twitter ways.
Until I saw that tweet retweeted by two others. Then I thought it was some running joke I was just not aware of.
Then, I saw my good friend @CRUMP tweet: ...
April 2011
7 posts
Kids + Coloring = Fascinating?
Today, a friend of mine sent me an email entitled: Question of the day.
The question was: Why do little kids find coloring so fascinating?
Of course, I had no legitimate answer, but amongst blurting my immediate thoughts out, I discovered an answer of my own:
Little kids find coloring fascinating possibly because, to a certain extent, there are no lines. They can color zig-zag, up and down,...
What To Tell Clients...
…when they ask for a campaign that creates positive WoM.
Cut your budget in half, improve your product, improve customer service, and improve training. You can not create good WoM about your product without those. It is like asking for a good letter of recommendation from an employer when you haven’t produced good work, have a bad attitude, and don’t have the right skillsets.
This is the...