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Department of Personal Responsibility

2007-01-28T01:34:00Z

At first I thought that this stunk so obviously of typical, uninspired viral advertising that it could serve as a signpost marking the ever-shifting border between conventional and guerrilla marketing. The “undergroundification” of conventional marketing has become, quite expectedly, formulaic, and this page seems to follow the formula to a tee. It only took a couple seconds of snooping before I discovered that exactly what made this site unconventional: It’s funded by the Department of Defense. ThatGuy.com is a viral campaign by the DoD intended to dissuade drunken and irresponsible conduct in military enlistees.

“The Defense Department is spending $13 million on Healthy Choices for Life, a series of TRICARE-managed pilot programs aimed at encouraging servicemembers to lose weight, quit smoking and drink in moderation.”

Some might say this is a respectable marketing effort for a government agency. Others might consider it a worthy cause. Still others, possibly named Jason, might be quick to point out that it’s the overall poor behavior of entitled and empowered American youths that creates the need for this type of campaign, and that no one should ever need to be told not to be a dick.

Want It: JUXTAPOSED Religion Curated Bookshelf

2007-01-11T05:56:00Z

Just brilliant. JUXTAPOSED: Religion is part of a forthcoming series of “curated shelves” by Mike and Maaike, and it just happens to tackle one of my favorite subjects. I like the idea of a storage device that is specialized for specific contents, even if those customizations are entirely artful and not particularly functional. The shapes and materials are chosen to evoke, not to perform.

Mike and Maaike are the designers behind several well-known products including the Xbox 360. This particular piece of awesome was designed for BlankBlank. It is available for purchase, but fetches a handsome $2500.

JUXTAPOSED: Religion Curated Bookshelf

This is a test entry

2006-12-18T06:11:00Z

If you’re reading this, know that it’s not for public consumption, it’s just a placeholder. Check back in a couple weeks when I’ll hopefully have my design finished, my old content imported, and something new and worth reading added.

I started with this excellent guide at http://mede.us/2006/12/1/mephisto-and-dreamhost. It got me most of the way there, but I found a few of the steps to be a little unfriendly to my newbie ears. I’ll try to address them here, if only to give me something to write about while I test out Mephisto authoring and work on a design.

Yada, yada, yada…

I also had a problem with ruby-dispatch failing. This kept the app from detecting changes I made to my database configuration in database.yml. Mephisto kept trying to talk to the wrong database with the wrong username and the wrong password. All it took to solve the problem was killing the ruby-dispatch process and restarting the server. I finally figured it out when Justin tipped me off to this thread at rubyonrails.org. Turned out the ruby-dispatch process just needed to be killed and the server restarted. I ham-fisted my way through a series of probably-uncomplicated-but-confusing-to-me terminal commands which, in hindsight, could have been as graceful as this:

ps axww | grep ruby

This grep will show you all the processes currently running, the names of which contain the string ‘ruby’. For each process, you’ll see a PID number and a process name. Take note of the PID for the ruby-dispatch.fcgi process and use it in the following command:

kill -9 [insert PID#]

This will stop the culprit in it’s tracks. Then you can use the standard script/server command to restart your server and hope as is fixed.

… Yaday, yada, yada…

Google Video Tests New Page Layout

2006-08-16T22:22:00Z

I can hear it already. Google Video is trying out a new page layout which happens to resemble YouTube. By that I mean the layout has been informed by what is becoming the accepted convention for video web sites. Since YouTube, due to sheer brute-force popularity, is the frontrunner in determining these conventions, quite a few people are calling from the mountaintops that Google is copying YouTube.

Google Video’s current layout is similar to Yahoo Video’s. Both have the feel of a very modern library archival article, as oppose to a social networking site’s content detail page. They feature the video heavily, with it’s fluid dimensions allowing it to flood the majority of the page. Description, owner, meta information, all play third fiddle because the page is not about the video’s story or it’s context, it’s about the video. The remaining page content is primarily comprised of some intelligently assembled lists of suggested or related videos to help move users around the site. Everything here is about the video.

The new layout does look quite a bit like what you might find at YouTube, Grouper, Ifilm, or Veoh. The video has much more conservative, fixed dimensions, allowing for a more consistant page layout. The meta information and description are given almost equal footing with the video, playing up the owner’s narrative as much as the video’s content. Finally, user comments are exposed on the page, giving a voice to the community. This is a page about a video as viewed through the eyes of it’s audience, not a card catalog.

This is pretty much the lowest common denomenator of layouts for video social sites these days. Just like there’s a pretty standard layout for printed dictionaries, restaraunt menus, and even blogs, a predominant video sharing site layout has arisen. Does this mean Google means to move their video offering more in the direction of video-centric social networking sites? Would that be a good thing or would they be removing one of the most pure sources of video aggregation remaining on the web in favor of Yet Another Video Networking Site?

To see the new layout in action for yourself, visit any video detail page (perhaps this one) and paste this into the address bar:

javascript:setCookie('np','old');window.location.reload();

AIM Pages and IM Spam

2006-05-17T10:10:44Z

Being the curious little monkey I am, I signed up for and test drove AIM Pages the day it was released. I was very impressed with the edit and customize interface and with the look and feel overall. I even thought that using your existing AIM screenname as both your username and URL was pretty great… Until I started getting IM Spam.

Previous to this past weekend, I’ve probably gotten a cumulative total of 4 unsolicited IM Spams in my life. Now I get one every hour, and I can only imagine that’s going to increase. So far I haven’t seen anyone else complaining about this online, but two other friends of mine whjo signed up for AIM Pages early on are having the same problem.

Stands to reason, and, frankly, I’m a little disappointed it didn’t occur to me before. Sure, spammers can screenscrape your IM name from anyplace where it’s posted in some sort of standardized or predictable format. In that light, AIM Pages is a well-formed treasure-trove of prevalidated usernames. EVERY PROFILE has a valid screenname right there with the same label. It’ll be interesting to see what AIM does to protect us from this in the future. The not-too-distant future, I hope.

Harvey Danger Offers Free Download Of New Album

2006-04-25T12:32:26Z

Seattle pop rockers Harvey Danger have made their latest album, “Little By Little”, available for download as a torrent or zipped mp3s. This comes on the heels of a Barenaked Ladies album released without DRM on a USB thumbdrive. In an eloquent, if longwinded, press release on the Harvey Danger web site, the band explains why they have opted to give it away, and foot the bill for bandwidth to boot:

“In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.” ... “Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary.”

I haven’t given it a spin yet, but remember being a fan of a couple of their older radio ditties. A close association with The Long Winters doesn’t hurt much either. So, give it a try, and buy the cd if you like it. Let’s prove them right.

harveydanger.com

PS – Thanks to Skampy for the tip.

Google acquires Measure Map

2006-02-14T17:47:11Z

Last year I was lucky enough to be asked to help design the landing page for Adaptive Path’s new blog statistics service, Measure Map. The work that I did can still be seen there and in some common elements throughout the site.

It was amazing to be asked to be part of an Adaptive Path project, and to work with the amazing Jennifer Robbins, but it gets better: This morning it was announced that Measure Map has been acquired by Google. Pretty cool, huh?

Congrats to Adaptive Path and the MeasureMap team, and special thanks to Jeff Veen for hiring me and Jennifer Robbins for being an amazing Creative Director and doing such a great job with the branding, iconography and the lion’s share of the layout work.

Check in with Jeff for the full scoop: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html

Cliptip: Music Videos That Don't Suck

2006-01-11T09:47:56Z

Why haven’t I found this before? Clip Tip is a blog that specializes in collecting and archiving links to high quality music videos, mostly from indie and european artists. The list of bands on the front page reads something like my iTunes Recently Played list, and I’ve never seen the vast majority of the videos.

Standouts include a beautiful video for Stars’ "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", and an animated Arcade Fire video for “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)”.

Thanks to Jonathan at Bloklantis for pointing this out.

My Friend Frank Hates The Word "Zeitgeist"

2005-12-26T17:47:00Z

And he’s got a point. It really does kind of stink of Web Nouveau marketing hype. I’m sure at some point “zeitgeist” stunk of magazine or television trends as well. If there was a call to use the term more often, it might even find it’s place on a list of Obnoxious Industry Terms That Have Lost All Meaning right in between “edgy” and “compelling”.

Google doesn’t care, though. The word means something and is an accurate description of what Google Zeitgeist does. So there.

According to Google, their Zeitgeist describes:

[s]earch patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google. For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search Google. This flurry of searches often exposes interesting trends, patterns, and surprises. The Google Zeitgeist page is regularly updated to reflect tidbits of information related to the search behavior of Google users.

So firstly, let’s face it: A zeitgeist of Google = a zeitgeist of the internet = a zeitgeist of the world.

What other channel receives and parses more information for a larger demographic? This is it if you want to know what the modern world is thinking. At the main page, called the Zeitgeist Report, there is an overview of recent and common Google searches separated by category and type. From there, more granular queries can be made. It’s all very broad and simple and gives a very digestible view of recent transactions at Google.com.

Will this change your world? I guess not, it’s didn’t change mine. But it’s very cool all the same, so stop hating.

Don't Be A Dick. Support Creative Commons

2005-12-22T23:25:44Z

Come on. I did it and I’m a total cheap skate!

Creative Commons is in need of financial support. For the uninitiated, they are a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a simple, standardized way for content providers to control permissions to their work. All of the content on this blog is protected by a Creative Commons license and anyone can easily understand what that entails. How? Click the link and it’s described there in simple, easy to understand, human readable words. Creative Commons has taken the initiative in protecting amateur journalists, photographers, authors, artists, bloggers, and the creative community at large and they’ve done it with aplomb. Let’s all help them continue.

Support Creative Commons

Firefox Extensions for version 1.5

2005-12-20T23:38:23Z

So Firefox 1.5 is a significant improvement. They’ve included a few features that probably should’ve been there all along, improved the preferences panel, dramatically shortened startup time, and solved memory and cycle leak problems. Downside? Some extension developers have been slow to update their products, and that’s left a few of us without our favorite extended Firefox features.

So there are a few options here. You can wait for authorized updates from the developers. They’re all coming, trust me. Or you can find versions that people have modified to work with Firefox 1.5, and hope they’re stable. Some features can be replicated by other extensions that have been officially updated and you can try those out. Some people have advised modifying the config info for their actuall Firefox installation to make it think that it’s only version 1, thereby causing it to not reject extensions that are not allowed for later versions. This will cause Firefox to allow ALL version1-ready extensions and frankly, makes me a bit nervous.

I choose instead, to modify the extensions directly. This is a more granular process and effects each extension individually. This way, you won’t unknowingly install extensions that aren’t rated for your Firefox, it’ll have to be very deliberate. The odds of anything catastrophic happening are very slim. Worst case, you may have to startup in safe mode and uninstall any unstable extensions. All the same, I’m not in any way advising or taking responsibility for damage caused by what I’m about to tell you.

How to modify your Firefox Extensions to work in newer versions

Extensions come wrapped up with config files written in XML. Modding the extension is as easy as editing the version node in that file.

go to the download page for the extension
Right-click and download the extension to your desktop
Open the xpi file with a package explorer such as WinRAR
Open the file called install.rdf in a text editor such as Notepad
Find this line: <em:maxVersion>*</em:maxVersion>
Change the line to: <em:maxVersion>1.6</em:maxVersion>
Save the file back into the xpi
Double click the xpi to install

Aardvark in Firefox 1.5

2005-11-29T16:33:18Z

I recently installed Firefox 1.5 RC3. It’s stable as a damn rock and most of my extensions either updated or worked immediately. Most of them. I was very disappointed that Aardvark wasn’t working. Firefox 1.5 disabled most incompatible extensions, but left Aardvark in play and in my right-click menu, it just didn’t… work anymore.

Well, it finally got to be too much to bear. As much as I adore the SlayerOffice MODI2 dom inspector (also availble as part of Steve’s outstanding Favelet Suite), but it just doesn’t match the ease of use of Aardvark. I finally went and google for an answer, and sure enough, there was one.

From Wordpress support: Download a working updated .xpi from here: http://ka2er.free.fr/files/aardvark.xpi

Superchrist

2005-11-18T12:18:54Z

“They could be a great people, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them [my] only son.” – Superman Returns trailer

There has been a good amount of concern and criticism about the upcoming adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in Chronicles of Narnia series, but I’m wondering if christian ideologies might be finding their way into the cinema under cover of blue tights, rather than in the form of a CG lion. I wonder if there was any concern over this line when it was first uttered by Marlon Brando in 1979’s Superman? See the trailer here: Superman Returns Trailer

Attention as a Commodity

2005-11-09T10:32:11Z

On some level, the ultimate promise of the web has always been truly personalizable marketing. The web offered the first portal through which truly unique advertising experiences could be provided to each user, and could be more accurately targeted to that user’s interests and habits, hopefully increasing the chances that she will click on the banner or add to her shopping cart. The missing link here is the mechanism by which the advertisers collect information about users to use in tailoring these custom ad experiences. To this end, information hungry vendors have been finding cleverer and sneakier ways to record our browsing, viewing, listening, and consumption habits—to record where our attention is being spent.

AttentionTrust seeks to retain that information as a user’s own property. The argument is essentially that if companies are benefitting from this information, that it has value. If it has value, is a commodity, and has an owner who must be compensated. This seems to me like a new take on an old debate. This is less a privacy concern (although proivacy certainly factors in), and more of a fair trade issue.

Herman Simon once said:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”(via Bokardo).

This view clearly denotes attention as a quantifiable commodity, which AttentionTrust President Steve Gilmour has dubbed “Attention Metadata”. It could be easily argued that the sale of Attention Metadata would benefit advertisers as much as users. Rather than spend money on developing clever ways to encapsulate and then analyze searches, browsing habits, click patterns, or even email messages ~~- and then spend money in court defending these practices -~~ the money would go more directly to the users, who would provide cleaner, more useful data. The user, in turn, would get a more personalized ad experience, increased transparency as to who has what information, and some sort of compensation.

I have enrolled with AttentionTrust and I’ll be very excited to see how far they can take the issue.

Measure Map home page design

2005-10-24T18:44:58Z

I’m very excited. The first piece of work I’ve done for Measure Map is now live.

measuremap.com.