Monthly Archives: June 2008

Adobe Flash SEO Announcement Leaves Microsoft In The Cold

Ryan and the Adobe team just let the world know that SEO is no longer the elephant in the room when it comes to Flash goodness.

I’m obviously not in the loop and can’t add much, but it was curious that Adobe, by the looks of the announcement, is not collaborating with Microsoft. Google and [...]

Transaction Costs Make Or Break Great Ideas

I’ve long been a fan of Gary Vaynerchuck. He’s innovative and in many ways represents much of what is good about the new media / user generated content revolution. That’s why I was stoked to stumble on to Cork’d. I signed up for the service and immediately started kicking out my first wine review.
However, during [...]

Gates Through Rose Colored Glasses

I call bullshit. These are unprovable assertions based on purely imaginative history. The web has proven that cooperation and standards can emerge from billions of diverse voices. If anything TCP/IP probably had as much to do with where we’re at today as anything. Computers were just expensive word processors until the Web emerged. Most of [...]

Lower Transaction Costs Within The American Political System

Mark Schmitt paints a big tent two-party picture where issue oriented constituencies are able to effectively organize and compete by virtue of Clay Shirky’s lowered transactions costs.

The use of constituencies rather than parties is telling. The American political system’s implementation of Montesqueian separation of powers provides a durable, but extremely rigid political system by pitting [...]

Video Search vs Tagging

From RWW:

Realistic video search seems to be a long ways off from where I sit, but I’m not sure I buy how disruptive tagging actually is. Yep, I’ve read Shirky, I use del.icio.us regularly and I appreciate and argue for tagging in the applications and services I use. The problem is I actually loathe it. [...]

It’s All About The Audience

Mark Cuban sees no-model and a bleak future for video on the web, but I’m inclined to agree with one commenter at least.

Call it old media, or old software, but one thing is clear — neither seems to really know who the hell their audience / customers are. You see this reflected back in passive [...]

Iteration Is Not Inherently Good

What happens when you lower transaction costs to the point that making “interface” changes becomes an unremarkable effort? You get more change and less discipline. In some cases the results are positive and in others, not so much as Danah Boyd points out.

In the software industry we often pride ourselves on iteration and view the [...]

User Interface + User Experience = Brand

The realization that targeted branding is actually very close to user interface design was hammered home as I read through an old Danah Boyd post.
Danah Boyd on personalization within the context of tailored branding:

Bret Victor on context-sensitive information graphics:

One of the reasons Flash has been so important to the brand conscious on the web, is [...]

Annotated Screenshots + Hyperlink = A Cerebral Lifestream

I surf the web, my feed reader, twitter and a lot of the other information sources. Often I find I want to use a highlighter or otherwise annotate my reading material just as I would of done back in college (mabye a little less liberally with the highlighting). Jing is great for this and I’m [...]

Transparency Extended: Flickr Stream UI Screenshots

It’s amazing how much the world of software development is changing. What was once a clandestine affair now extends to early public alphas / betas. For those not quite so inclusive, a Flickr stream of UI screenshots lets the masses get involved.

Why screenshots of the UI? Like it or not, everyone considers themselves a UI [...]