The Newfangled Blog

Thoughts on the 2009 HOW Design Conference

July 2, 2009 at 10:45 AM by Mark O'Brien

Last week I was in Austin, TX. to present a few sessions at the annual HOW Design Conference. There were a few things that really knocked my socks off that are worth mentioning.
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Tags: HOW, conference, Austin

Another Advance Toward Conversational Synthesis

July 1, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris

In this month's newsletter, The Future of the Web, Part 1, I spent some time talking about how in the future, we will manage data using conversational synthesis technology. By "conversational synthesis," I'm envisioning tools that receive data from various sources and condense it into one easily manageable stream. The conversational piece refers to how these tools will allow users to query the database with natural language, creating new types of reports on an ad hoc basis and not having to parse through pre-configued report results and combine them to get the answers they really need. This kind of advance is going to take some work in various areas, so I'm not expecting this kind of experience anytime soon...
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Tags: conversational-synthesis web-development social-media

The Future of the Web

June 30, 2009 at 10:00 am by Chris

This morning I published our June newsletter, which is the first of a two-part series on The Future of the Web. In Part 1, I cover the future of websites, the "fractalization" of the web, what I like to call "holistic browsing," conversational synthesis, and more. I added a bit of a caveat to the introduction of this newsletter, reminding readers that "this and next month's newsletters are by no means a comprehensive overview of the possible future of the web. There are plenty of general themes and specific technologies that I won't cover, and among those that I do cover, probably some disagreement on the finer points."

I hope my take on the future of the web elicits lots of your opinions- feel free to tell me if you think I'm way off.

Tags: web-development marketing strategy business social-media

Mood Boards

June 30, 2009 at 4:33 PM by Steve G

At Newfangled we recently began using Mood Boards as a first step in the design process to establish the branding, design components, typography, imagery, and color palettes that will be incorporated in a site's design. Moods have proven very effective, but I have found that it is essential to clarify the distinction between these boards and the designs that will follow once a mood board has been approved.
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Clay Shirky on Social Media

June 26, 2009 at 9:00 am by Chris

The past couple of weeks in the news have truly highlighted how influential social media are as far as how we communicate globally and spread news. From the post-election unrest in Iran to the lightning-fast spread of the news of Michael Jackson's death, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are outpacing traditional news media significantly. Clay Shirky, in a recent TED Talk, shares his thoughts on how social media is influencing the course of politics and history. The video is about 17 minutes, but well worth your time to watch:

Tags: social-media video

Google's Own Tips on Meta Descriptions

June 16, 2009 at 12:03 am by Steve G

Some clear suggestions from Google's Webmaster Central Blog on best practices for Meta Descriptions.
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Digital Preservation or Conservation?

June 5, 2009 at 3:00 pm by Chris

Last week's episode of the Spark podcast featured a segment on digital preservation, a concept I'm interested in both from an organizational and practical point of view. The host interviewed Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. In the course of his interview, Ross mentioned "Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster," an animation about digital preservation, and the problem of bitrot, where storage media degrades such that software can't interpret the bitstream because some information has been lost. Ross also suggested that we should be storing entire databases of information (medical records, tax returns, etc.) for posterity because historians...
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Tags: digital-conservation the-future

Protect the Future... It's the law?

June 4, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris

This was an intriguing bit for all you futurists out there: Andrew Revkin, in his New York Times "Dot Earth" blog post, A Push to Stop Crimes Against the Future, quotes C.G. Weeramantry, a member of the council and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, who says, "We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come..."
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Tags: strategy privacy the-future

Describing the Internet

June 2, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris

How would you describe the internet? Is it a vast series of tubes? A superhighway? An organism? Where this gets difficult is that sometimes we lean toward more static descriptions of the information channels, like "tubes" or "web", while other times choosing descriptions that focus on the activity of the web, like "superhighway." (By the way, contrast the metaphor you thought of with those listed in this study from 2000, Making sense of the Web: a metaphorical approach.) I recently ran across two blog posts that are doing some more current thinking on this matter.
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Tags: technology

Win Without Pitching Webinars

June 2, 2009 at 3:43 PM by Mark O'Brien

Blair Enns, one of Newfangled's mentors, has an excellent two part webinar series coming up that I'd recommend to any agency that is interested in sharpening their positioning in order to increase their sales close rate. "Positioning Your Firm, Part 1: Strategy" and "Part 2: Language" are sure to be content-packed webinars with some valuable and immediately implementable takeaways.

All of Blair's webinars are free for members, and $99 for non-members. Blair hosts one webinar a month, and an annual membership to his site costs $395/year. Blair is directly responsible for the sales success of quite a few firms I've worked with, in addition to our own.

You can sign up for the webinars on his website: WinWithoutPitching.com.

I am also very pleased to announce that Blair will be guest hosting Newfangled's July webinar, which will be a 30,000 ft. overview of his Win Without Pitching sales process. You can register for this free webinar here.

Tags: sales, Blair_Enns, Win_Without_Pitching, consulting, webinar

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