this is sippey.com

Chris Piascik, inspired by this post, drew this as one of his daily drawings.

Love it.

From the latest clientsfromhell:

Recently a potential client came to us to develop a brand and Web site layout for a new project dedicated to serving pornography that contained “wholesome eroticism” and displayed proper Christian values relative to sexuality.

This one actually sounds reasonably interesting. But on the whole I really dislike Clients from Hell, because as much fun as it must be to bash on people that you feel are below you, it puts the blame in the wrong place. It’s not their fault that they’re not as smart as you about things related to the Interwebs; it’s your fault for not treating them with the respect they deserve. Either by not hiring them in the first place, or by realizing that part of your job is to help make them better. They’re your clients. If they’re not treating you well or they’re not smart enough for you, that’s your fault...not theirs.

Via Beautiful/Decay, John Powers' Polystyrene Orb.

I'll swipe Beautiful/Decay swiping from the NODE10 catalog:

Meticulously constructed by hand, Power’s forms are constructed out of a limited formal vocabulary: Polystyrene blocks cut to a selection of preset sizes, attached to each other at 90 degree angles.

Feels to me like the antiseptic response to Chris Burden's Medusa Head. Love it.

Originally posted on my Google+ account, for reasons which will become obvious once you read the below. There's a discussion happening there (of course); posting it here for posterity I guess. (#shoebox?)

I must follow boring people (Hi, Friends!) because so far it seems that the primary purpose of Google+ is talking about Google+. Instead of bucking the trend I'll dive right in point out two interesting things that I think are happening based on what's not happening so far. (aka silence matters)

• API. I'm sure there will be one. But there's not one now, AFAIK. Which means they're waiting, and watching, and hopefully learning from past API efforts. It's easier to change the user experience on the web side as the service grows and evolves. Watch the pathways evolve, shape those pathways. And then create API methods that work for developers, users and Google.
  
  
• Automatic integration with other services. You'll note there's currently no way to automatically cross-post Tweets, Flickr photos, Foursquare updates, etc. I think this is a good thing. Friendfeed had some nice UX touches, but became entirely too noisy when people had hooked up their dozen social services. Flickr's become the shoebox of photo sharing; Google needs to make sure that Plus doesn't become the shoebox of social media -- your searchable profile of everything you're doing online. (Not that there's not value in that, they're just optimizing for actually taking time spent away from other services and delivering explicitly shared actions).

More as I think about it.

It's the summer of travel. Enjoying the week in Chicago with my family and seeing some friends. I love this city...especially when the lake isn't frozen.

Everyone here can't stop talking about Groupon. Maybe it's just because I've spent so much time in the Bay Area, but I'm kind of blasé now about companies with astronomical valuations that everyone thinks will crash and burn. What I've been arguing is that while Groupon's (creative) financials may not be able to support its current valuation, it's all about execution over the long term. There's still a ton of opportunity to use the Internet to create value for retail businesses, and if Groupon can hook them with efficient (and profitable) marketing / demand generation, then follow on products and services could end up being massive. The bankers may be playing the short game, but the company's playing long ball. (Hey look, mixed sports metaphor in a sports town!)  But they'll need to develop a technology / product advantage so that they don't have to compete on the size of their email list, the size of their sales force...or the cleverness of their copy.