this is sippey.com

instant address bar?

Here's an interaction design problem that I'm sure someone at Google is working on: how to integrate the Google Instant experience into Chrome, without resorting to the obvious solution of splitting a search box from the address bar...or losing the ability open addresses, or search the combination of your bookmarks and browser history.

Update:  of course right after I post this Ken Norton points me to a TechCrunch post about Instant coming to Chrome. #whatevs

richard misrach's destroy this memory

Tyler Green on Richard Misrach's new book of post-Katrina photos of New Orleans, Destroy This Memory: "Consider Misrach’s book an affirmation that artists can bring strikingly different, equally valuable points-of-view to the same subject and that their contributions to story-telling and creating our collective memory are every bit as valuable as journalism or oral history."

I had a chance to look through the book this past weekend, and it's an incredible piece of work. Shot with a 4MP point and shoot, Misrach deftly sidesteps the temptation of turning the flood destruction into beautiful images; instead, each photo features graffiti left by survivors. Every photo has its own story, but taken together they all say one thing: Fuck You, Katrina.

pro publica news applications

Pro Publica launches their nerd blog, which is where they'll talk about the "news applications" they're building. Which is great and all, but what's fantastic about this is their simple definition of a news application. "It’s an interactive web page that uses software instead of words and pictures to do journalism." Nice.

aggregators and opinion labeling

A couple of interesting media-related bits this morning. First, the Nieman Journalism Lab is running a piece by Kimberly Isbell of the Citizen Media Law Project that gives an in-depth look at the legal issues around news aggregators. She reviews the different types of aggregators, existing case law, and issues around copyright, fair use and the definition of "hot news." And while there are no clear cut answers re. legality (are there ever?) I like her conclusion...

We are in the midst of a sea change in the way in which journalism is practiced in the United States. The past few years have seen an explosion of innovative approaches to both the practice and business of journalism. At a time of great flux in the media ecosystem, it would be premature, and likely counterproductive, to create rules which would have the effect, if not the purpose, of privileging one journalistic business model over others. In order for experimental business models to flourish, we need legal rules that promote flexibility and free access to information, not closed systems that tilt the playing field in favor of incumbents.

Second, Jonathan Weber of the Bay Citizen has a great post up about what their partnership with the New York Times looks like, and takes on the Times' new public editor re. the boundary between reporting and opinion, and the differing styles of the gray lady and the Bay Citizen.

The whole idea of a reported column is that it marries facts and point of view. Journalism today embodies a whole range of styles, some with more point of view and some with less, and while clear labeling of what's what is a good goal, it's not realistic to think that there can be some kind of calorie counter measuring the amount of opinion in a given piece.

As always, both are worth reading in full; of course now that you've read the key bits through this user-curated aggregator that layers on a specific point of view you probably don't need to.

tried to do too much

Instead of blockquoting the entire Ars Technica piece on Wil Shipley's Delicious Library 2, I'll just grab this bit.

For instance, a memory leak in the display of PNG graphics led to major performance hits and eventual crashes for users with thousands of items. Unfortunately, no one expected users with these huge libraries to attempt to publish their collections to the web. "Who has that kind of time? Well, it turns out, die-hard collectors do," Shipley said.

via subtraction.com

viral and transparent

via blog.buzzfeed.com

Buzzfeed opens up their dashboard. This is brilliant; let the meme makers in on the data to see if they can pour fuel on their own fire. And...

For publishers who want it on their own domain, you can get on the waiting list for the beta. And we will make a self serve version available end of Sept. We want everyone in the world to have one. If you're already in our Publisher Network, let us know if you'd like to make your dashboard public, as we have with ours.

The future is fully instrumented.

overdue comeback

Comebacks posted by msippey at Flickr

I think I missed the deadline for Longshot Magazine issue #1. Drat.

design sensibilities v. design skills

Marty Cagan is the best thinker about product management out there. His blog / newsletter coming out of his Silicon Valley Product Group is great reading; today's piece was typically excellent, and contained this particular gem: "Don’t confuse someone that has strong design sensibilities with strong design skills.  Recognizing and appreciating strong design, and being able to create strong design, are very different things."

in a volvo-shaped handbasket

Heather Havrilesky on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. "The really impressive feat here is Franzen's larger portrayal of the misguided mistakes of middle-class America: the delusions we indulge in our pursuit of happiness, the ways we neglect the greater good for the sake of our little family units, and the difficulty of setting aside our personal needs to save a world on the brink of total collapse. We're free, yes, and we use our freedom to build our own little fussy, claustrophobic, granite-countertopped islands, while the rest of the world goes straight to hell around us."

liquid angels

Fred Wilson on angel liquidity and the Etsy deal. "The interesting thing about this transaction is that it was not founder liquidity driven. The founders did not sell in the transaction. It was not VC liquidity driven. Some of the existing VC firms actually bought in the transaction. It was angel liquidity driven."

hi. i'm bill.

Bill Gates in the 80s posted by Esthr at Flickr

I dare you to stop staring back at him.

for some reason this reminds me of jeff spicoli

Erika Hall on Google Calendar's notion of working hours. "To a person on deadline, a calendar invitation is a hostile land grab. ... In fact, [working hours] is enshrining in the interface just the attitude we are trying to combat, that work is defined by meetings—or, euphemistically, 'events.' Events are what I attend outside of work."

be an unbeatable person

A letter of note from a kamikaze pilot.  "Do not envy the fathers of others. Your father will become a god and watch you two closely." An almost unbearable pairing of economical language and devastating emotion.

adam mathes is on fire

Yeah, I know I'm a link-sharing cycle behind on this one, but holy moly imagesoak is great stuff.

i will buy these

Angry Birds plush toys. "Rumor has it that the toys will be in the form of stuffed Angry Birds, and the game, which follows a flock of birds fighting evil pigs, may be the first major intellectual property to go straight from iPhone to plush form." Just say yes.

this is a depressing letter

UC Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare writes a letter to his incoming students. "I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board."

typing in textareas

Limited edition t-shirts; order yours before September 3. "Shut up. It'll still be popular by then. Just like Net Moguls."

Land, Speed and Bonneville: Places: Design Observer

Martin Hogue at Design Observer on the Bonneville salt flats. "I would argue that in this sense racing became a sort of idealization of the site and its resources, and that consequently the activities of racing and the events of record setting are in fact entirely connected to a greater sense of the landscape in both space and time. It was in recognizing the potential of the Bonneville flats as a natural surface to race on that a mutually beneficial relationship among technology and ambition and the landscape was forged — and with it a deep respect for the land."

See also Richard Misrach's The World's Fastest Mobile Home.

all is vanity

Mark Paschal on the iOS game Vanitas. "In a market full of games offering cheap achievement, lighting up all twelve stars would be a real accomplishment, a distant goal in an ever-refreshing software simulation that frames human frailty like a small wooden box."

first amendment for $200, alex.

Ken Norton's pop quiz, Which mosque opponent said it. I was hoping they were all Sarah Palin's, but apparently not!

actually, this is exactly what i was looking for.

27b/6's latest, Missing Missy. "It's a design thing. The cat is lost in the negative space."

nothing compares to sinead

Matthew Perpetua on his favorite cover. "The best cover version I can think of is Sinead O’Connor’s version of 'Nothing Compares 2 U.' ... The song is absolutely brilliant, one of the best Prince has ever written, and O’Connor rescued it from obscurity and turned it into one of the most emotionally devastating pop hits of all time. Prince’s versions are okay, but never really get it right — he always makes it sound too syrupy, and the stakes never seem very high. Sinead makes you hang on every syllable, every moment is life or death. It’s a truly incredible performance."

kermit and jim

Kermit's expression, as always, is priceless.  Swiped from NerdBoyfriend.com, and they're not sure where they found it.

glorified cursers [sic]

Henry Jenkins elaborates on his quotes re. Inception as a movie for gamers. Finally got around to reading this (thanks, Instapaper!). There's a lot to enjoy here, but I liked this bit.  "The very nature of an interactive narrative serves to strip characters of psychological depth -- game characters are often glorified cursers, vehicles we use to move through the game worlds, rather than characters into whom we project sophisticated motives or anticipate character development."

groan

Tell me Stuart Elliott isn't phoning it in just a little bit here. "A search on Monday of the New Era Web site found 128 types of Yankees caps, including some — in hunter’s plaids, 'metallic cotton' and 'intergalactic' — that might have given Babe Ruth a pain to rival his 1925 bellyache heard round the world."