Article Newfangled Workplace Culture: A Day in the Life published on April 14, 2009 Since coming to Newfangled from a big, corporate TV news station, one of the biggest changes for me has been the company culture-- mostly the schedule, the pace, and the general attitude toward employees. Read Now About
Article Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse! by Christopher Butler on April 14, 2009 I've been finding myself having the same conversations repeatedly in the past few months, usually prompted by a client wondering why some service they're using doesn't recognize a particular element of their site. In most cases its usually a matter of a third-party SEO-related service (like grader.com) not "seeing" their blog, H1/2/3 tags, inbound links, etc. Of course, the simple answer, as it would be with any third-party tool, is that we cannot guarantee the performance of a tool we didn't build, nor can we guarantee that what we did build will perform according to that third-party tool's standards. (This is the same kind problem we see when new browsers are released and sites build before break when viewed in them.) But I think there is a more nuanced answer to these kinds of issues that can be summarized by that old maxim, "don't put the cart before the horse..." Read Now About
Article Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, Yahoo and the Coming Sensor Web by Christopher Butler on April 13, 2009 Read Now About
Article Your Profile is Not Private, and other Seemingly Obvious Things… by Christopher Butler on April 13, 2009 It seems obvious, but it apparently took a California court to rule that you can't cry "invasion of privacy" when people circulate what you've posted to your MySpace page. When I see things like this, I think, why on Earth would you think that what you post on your profile is private? It's a social network profile- people are supposed to see that content! But, in fairness, issues of privacy are not so cut and dry are they? I've been exploring this issue in some recent posts... Read Now About
Article Fast Cheap Intuitive, Part 2 by Christopher Butler on April 10, 2009 A few weeks ago, I posted about my first time using Lulu.com to create a book, which was actually just a compilation of articles that I had been planning to read online. After seeing a post by a Google employee about how he'd used Lulu to create a book of web articles so that he could read those articles more comfortably in print, I decided I had to try it out. It was a quick, easy and cheap success. Lulu's application is really simple and well designed, which makes the user experience really great. I decided to create a second book and employ some design improvements to make it nicer to look at and easier to read... Read Now About
Article Blogging Customer Service Experiences by Christopher Butler on April 10, 2009 I've been following the Infrastructurist blog since it started (it's a great one, by the way), but today editor Jebediah Reed posted a customer service story about what happened when he left his iPhone on an Amtrak train that I think is worth passing on. Here's a snippet... Read Now About
Article You are guaranteed success if… by Christopher Butler on April 10, 2009 Phil Johnson, the founder of one of the agencies we partner with, PJA, posted a pretty profound article to the Advertising Age Small Agency Diary blog today titled Why I Want to Give Out Big Raises at My Agency. Here's a quote that I thought was great.. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Pimp My Battleship: Dazzle Camouflage by Justin Kerr on April 10, 2009 Dazzle camouflage was developed during World War I. Since ships were hard to disguise against an ever-changing sea and sky, a Royal Navy marine painter named Norman Wilkinson came up patterns that would disrupt the ship's outline, making it difficult for German U-boats to target.The Rhode Island School of Design has a permanent collection of drawings you can view online here. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Hand Drawn Maps by Justin Kerr on April 10, 2009 The Hand Drawn Map Association is accepting submissions of hand drawn maps until April 30th. There's something very beautiful and personal about a device as utilitarian as a map when it's sketched in a notebook or a napkin. Some of the submissions remind me of the hours I spent as a teen carefully planning D&D maps (all of you born after 1980 can go look that up on wikipedia). Read Now About
Article The 2008 Survey For People Who Make Websites published on April 10, 2009 My wife (who is a web developer for Duke University) recently sent me this link to the results of A List Apart's second annual survey of the web industry. It thought it was so cool, I figured I'd share it here: Findings from The Survey For People Who Make Websites 2008 Read Now About
