Micah finds this interesting.

GIF for you http://gifshop.tv/m/RSJYQ4ZI63/

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:56:29 -0600

GIF for you http://gifshop.tv/m/RSJYQ4ZI63/

No shit. @chromeo funked @firstavenue...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:42:31 -0500

No shit. @chromeo funked @firstavenue http://gifshop.tv/m/9H3BA4ZI63/

jakeszy: I’m gonna need one of these…

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:26:19 -0500

jakeszy:

I’m gonna need one of these…

simsdoomtree: I put out an ep today called Wlidlife you can get...

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:05:17 -0500

simsdoomtree:

I put out an ep today called Wlidlife you can get it for FREE HERE http://sims.bandcamp.com/album/wildlife

Awesome light show by Pretty Lights...

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:22:38 -0500

Awesome light show by Pretty Lights http://gifshop.tv/m/BZK8H4ZI63/

What it looks like for most of the drive through Wisconsin....

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 11:01:01 -0500

What it looks like for most of the drive through Wisconsin. http://gifshop.tv/m/YCE1H4ZI63/

Ratatat @ Lollap http://gifshop.tv/m/TEE1H4ZI63/

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:58:02 -0500

Ratatat @ Lollap http://gifshop.tv/m/TEE1H4ZI63/

Ratatat @ Lollapa http://gifshop.tv/m/R3E1H4ZI63/

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:55:39 -0500

Ratatat @ Lollapa http://gifshop.tv/m/R3E1H4ZI63/

Photo

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:41:22 -0500

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could copy a direct link to a track in your iTunes shared...

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:03:43 -0500

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could copy a direct link to a track in your iTunes shared library to send to people on your local network? Like “Hey! Listen to this AWESOME song: local://my.itunes.link” - it would save me the hassle of having to look it up on YouTube.

Paul says “You mean, do like Spotify does?”

wugazi:

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:12:23 -0500

wugazi:

On taking a little break

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:15:10 -0600

The most recent post has sat with a broken image for over a month now. And I’ve neglected it, like a lot of other things in my life. I plan to continue to blog in this new year, but I need to take a little time to gather myself after a pretty bizarre turn of life-events in the past month. And as fitting as it is to let that broken image just sit there as I neglect this blog, every time I get an alert that more then 5 people in one day have looked at it I get really embarrassed.

Happy new year everyone!

On what's inside my backpack, and why I need to clean it out more often.

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:56:00 -0600

Traveling to Boston tomorrow, so I decided to clean out my backpack, since it’ll be my only luggage for the weekend.

95% of this was in the little front pocket. Some things to note:

2 wireless mice, one by Apple, one by Logitech
12 writing utensils (yet I can never seem to find one when I need one)
3 various USB cords
US Postal Service mailing labels
a Dinosaur sandwich holder
a tape-deck adapter (should note: I don’t own a tape deck)
a thick gold chain (in case I need to dress up for the club while I’m out)

On the proper use of the Twitter RT button

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:56:00 -0500

About a year ago, Twitter launched “Project Retweet,” a product they claimed would change the way users retweeted. It was received negatively by the general twitter public. Their reasons were varied, similar to every renew of the facebook design.

Properly used, however, this Retweet2.0 is possibly the best thing that has happened to twitter (since the basic service hasn’t really changed, ever). Except, no one in my timeline can seem to figure out how to use it properly.

“Old School” methods of retweeting have their purpose. When you find a link in your timeline that you want to pass on to your followers, and you want to include your own special note, RTing is the way to go. When you don’t like the phrasing of the brilliant-gem-of-a-tweet you just read, rephrase it and add (via @badspeller).

But if you’re just going to repost verbatim, “RT @” adds little to no value to the tweet, not to mention 4 expensive characters. For this purpose, hitting the Retweet button actually might be more beneficial to the original tweeter as well as your followers.

Your followers gain the added value of context, knowing with a quick glance who exactly the original tweet was from (glancing at a twitter avatar is like reading a book by it’s cover).
The original tweeter gets a) proper credit for the tweet; and b) better exposure on twitter. If their nugget was really as brilliant as you thought it was, chances are that some of your followers will feel the same way, thus hitting Retweet and passing the value on to their followers (with credit still owned by the original tweeter). How many more times can I write original tweeter without feeling ridiculous?

Fun and games aside, artists, businesses, and the general advertising world are the biggest abusers of the “new” retweet function - in the sense that they just don’t use it.

Twitter appears to be a fairly straightforward game. You type out a tweet, and hit send. Bam, your message is out there for millions (soon to be billions?) to see. But for big and small businesses alike, it can sometimes be easier to alienate your followers than it is to attract them. And recently, at least for me, the culprit has been improper retweeting.

Here’s an example

Now, for ease of use, I’m going to pick on my favorite local music venue (not that any of your reading this aren’t from Minneapolis, but still, the web is global) First Avenue. They recently opened a bar next door to the venue called The Depot and both entities rightly have separate twitter accounts.

Here’s where the retweet button works perfectly. I follow both (I love music, I love beer) twitter accounts. But they have a really bad habit of retweeting each other, as one business often influences the other (again, music + beer = good).

This is how their tweets appear in my timeline, and this is not a once in a while occurrence. This is an almost everyday occurrence.

How this can be fixed (and applied to other entities)

The main purpose for the Depot is to remind their twitter followers that they’re a great place to stop in for a drink before the show. And for First Avenue, a RT reminds their followers that The Depot exists, has beer, and is a great place to stop in for a drink before the show.

But I follow both, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I don’t need to hear the same exact message twice. In fact in this case, it turns me off from heading to The Depot for a drink. Ultimately, it just seems like forceful advertising.

If @Firstavenue had just hit the Retweet button (do you see it up there? Right in between favorite and reply?) I would, since I follow them both, have only seen the message once. However, the followers of @firstavenue who do not follow @the_depot (and maybe weren’t even aware of it’s existence) would still have seen the tweet in their timeline with the added bonus of maintaining The Depot’s brand.

This effects how I read my tweets (and probably effects others in similar ways aka why anyone should care):

It may seem like a little thing, but it can make a huge difference. In another example, I follow many local artists, as well as their label’s twitter stream, their label execs’ stream, and other artists’ streams from the same label. When one of them has a show, releases an album, or tweets something clever, it often results in a massacre of RT’s - and I’m forced to read the same message 5 to 6 times.

This gets tiring, especially when it happens many times a day. I quickly begin to only glace, instead of actively reading, the tweets coming from the aforementioned tweeters. After a while, I tend to skip them all together, and as it continues to happen, I start to unfollow them.

With a proper Retweeting group strategy, I still would have seen the original tweet, and that fellow labelers retweeted it, but it wouldn’t clog up and create unwanted noise in my timeline.

Think on that for a while. And let me hear your response in the comments.

P.S. I realize that when tweeting for other entities, I myself have tweeted in inappropriate ways - mostly due to the use of Project Retweet incapable clients. I apologize. But when you think about the fact that 78% of twitter traffic comes directly from twitter.com, that’s hardly an excuse or something to ignore.

On Pearson and the [un]usability of a textbook as an eBook

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:27:00 -0500

It’s difficult to start this post without spiraling into a incoherent rant.

This semester, I opted to purchase one of my college text books as an eBook, possibly justifying my iPad purchase and saving me a few dollars off the printed version - not to mention the printed copies were not in stock and were scheduled to arrive 2 weeks after the start of my class. The class was being taught as a distance-learning online class anyway, so it seemingly makes sense to do all of the work for it digitally (including, in this case, the reading).

The book was being offered from Pearson, and cost approximately $55 over the $70 printed version.

You’ll [probably not] want to read more…

Price to sell?

This brings me to my initial contention over eBook textbooks - the price. We all that in a lot of cases, textbooks are extremely over priced. I’ve never done the research myself, but I can assume that the price is due to:

Their length and the wealth of time and knowledge that goes in to making a ‘Complete History of the World’
Their specialties and therefore limited audience (only students studying History in a colleget setting are likely to purchase said complete world history)
Publishing information where an external party may hold copyright - a large reason why photocopied course packets don’t cost $65 dollars rather than their actual production cost of $5.
The cost of physically producing a 500-page full color hardbound book and distributing it.

Not many of these bullets can be crossed off when discussing eBook textbooks. They’re still “wealths of knowledge,” still have a limited audience, and can easily still hold copyrighted information. But I would like to argue that the production and distribution costs fall so close to zero that they can be negated.

But this brings up the value of this eTextBook (I’m just going to call it that from now on. I am sick of writing eBook textbook and eBook as a textbook and everything in between). As everything from newspapers, to movies, to music, to videos, to boardgames, are finding themselves complete with digital counterparts, we are entering into an era where it becomes less about what we want to consume, but rather where/how we want to consume it.

And that’s exactly what excited me about this eTextBook - I was no longer tied to carrying a 15 lb book with me to class everyday, I could just load it up onto whatever digital device (Laptop, iPod, iPhone, iPad, i…) I had with me and read it whenever/whenever I was ready and comfortable. I can gripe as much as I want over the $55, but that most likely stems from my own understanding that everything digital must be cheaper, and that’s doesn’t have to be. Paying just as much (or in this case slightly less) to use a digital product in more ways than it’s traditional counterpart can be argued as reasonable.

Only, Pearson, it seems, didn’t spend any money on research into why their customers might want to use an eTextBook. From the look of their design and distribution of all of their educational tools and eBooks, they are attempting to do nothing other than cash in on a product they already have (what [books] is produced sans-digital these days?), where students are likely to circumvent their traditional distribution methods and find else where (for instance, purchased the physical book used and in good condition for less than the eBook).

What user experience?

If you’ve ever ~~read~~ used a text book before, there are a few universal interactions that you make with the book:

Read and scan pages for bullet points and main topic headings.
Underline or highlight important and interesting ideas.
Jump from chapter to chapter in a non linear fashion (most time syllabi and textbooks do not sync).
Quickly reference previous and forward pages to connect ideas, figure-callouts, as well as genearl purpose skimming of information.

These are seemingly fundamental user interactions that every college student exhibits.

I’ve only used a few eBooks at this point, and only on to my iPad - but here are a few experiences that make eBooks and exciting learning tool:

Linkable chapters and pages.
Innovative use of external links.
Adjustable legibility/font preferences.
Searchable text.
Multiple bookmarks.
Highlightable.
Ability to jump quickly from one section to the next without much effort.
In some situations, printable for offline/non-digital referencing.

These are just some of the basic features of an eBook, but they are fairly universal in their nature (as in all eBooks I’ve used contain most of these features).

Comparing these two lists, you would think that digital reproductions would not only be extremely helpful, but could also be pushed to find innovative uses for some of these features.

However, in the case of this Pearson (I keep using the publisher by name because I hold them responsible for the state of this eTextBook) eBook, all of the typical user interactions are ignored, and the feature set of a typical eBook completely ignored.

The eTextBook is flawed from the outset, as it is not available in any format other than a browser-based Adobe Flash application. While I won’t get into the extreme usability details of (or my extreme distaste for) Flash, it means one giant thing - the user is tied to using the text in one, very specific, way: accessing it from a traditional computer that has access to the internet. This not only means it is inaccessible from most portable devices like the iPad or Kindle, but it also means there is no ability to use it offline (like the car ride home over Thanksgiving break, or on the grassy knoll on campus, or in the restaurant that doesn’t have WiFi).
The book does not exist as a whole, rather as 29 separate, chapter-based mini-books, all loading in their own flash-based window, with no access between chapters.
While the book itself has chapter introductions that link to chapter-sections, there is no way to quickly navigate between non-linear pages. For instance, to go from Page 37 (which discusses the tone of your writing) to page 433 (which discusses the tone of memos), you have to close the window for Chapter 3, guess at what chapter contains page 433 (it’s chapter 17, good guess) open that chapter in a new window, then proceed one page at a time from the start of the chapter (page 403) to the page you’re in search of (that’s 30 clicks).
There is no continuous scroll. Each page stops scrolling at the end of the page, requiring you to to hit the “next page” button, located at the top of the window, not at the bottom where your eyes/attention is currently focused.
There’s no search function. Wondering which chapters contain information about Memos? Open the Appendix chapter, page through to the page that contains the M’s, memorize the page numbers associated with the subject, close the window, then follow the aforementioned page-search-guessing-game.
The text is not selectable.
The default viewport is 225% (or whatever is appropriate to maximize size for your window size/resolution - imagine the default on a full screen width window on a 27” monitor!). There’s really no usable way to view a full page, as most monitors are landscape and have limited vertical screen real-estate. At my typical 1440x900 resolution, that requires you to zoom out to 75% producing the text to appear no larger than 10 pixels high.
Most of the time, even if you zoom out on one page to a reasonably legible level (150%), the next page will maximize back to 225%.
Did I mention it was Flash? This makes it buggy and a resource hog. Scrolling isn’t smooth or attractive, unless you physically click first into the open page, multitouch cues like two finger scrolling don’t register.
You can highlight, but the highlighting registration is atrocious (I was actually trying to highlight “people don’t do much planning before writing”). You can bookmark pages, but it’s impossible to find where those bookmarks go.

These are honestly crimes against usability, and everything that is designing for a digital realm. I can’t even image what negative feedback a user testing of this product would produce.

The sad truth, in all of this, is that the R&D money that went into building this bricked-flash application, is probably tenfold that of what it would have cost to just export the book’s design files to a digital format - and the usability experience would be a million times better (both tenfold and a million times are scientific numbers based on independent research)

Oh. I didn’t even mention that you can’t print the book, or even resell the book. But this post is long enough…

On Google's Evil Plan

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:08:00 -0500

If you had told me two years ago that Google would propose plans like this I would have fought you on every word. Google was the crown jewel of the internet, offering free solutions to many of the internet’s problems.

When Google announced their Android operating system, I was among the many who awaited eagerly to an alternative to the extremely expensive AT&T iPhone, and to see what this behemoth of the internet could bring to the mobile handset.

Since, Google has done very little to keep my respect and live up to their “Don’t Be Evil” mantra. They’ve consistently leveraged a “people vs. Apple” approach to their mobile endeavors, hiding behind support for “open” practices which are constantly found to be neither safe, nor open. Their mobile operating system struggles to impress with a hodge-podge of awkward UI tendencies.

But up until now, I welcomed Google into my life with open arms, always giving them the benefit of the doubt.

But what Google is suggesting (along with evil-doer Verizon) will effectively KILL the Internet we all have come to know and love. By putting money and business first, they are suggesting that the next wave of the Internet be a segregated and privileged place, where the users of the Internet no longer matter.

The only thing I can do is relate it to what must have happened to TV as cable services emerged. Sure, 6 or so channels are still freely delivered to your house, but the quality of said stations are shoddy at best. To get real TV content, you have to pay xfinity or Dish or DirectTV for “premium” services. And that doesn’t even get you everything. There are a million tiered plans, not to mention even more premium services like HBO, VOD, and Showtime. Middle tiered plans can easily run over $100 month.

Google and Verizon are proposing basically the same thing, but here’s the kicker: we have built our culture around the free, open internet. Can you actually think of anyone who doesn’t conduct some sort of business online? Alright, well, now if you actually want to even get to those services like facebook, Amazon, probably even Google-search, you’ll have to pay a small monthly fee. Oh! You want to use YouTube too? We’re happy and here to help, it’ll just cost you a little more. Hmm, TicketMaster wants to pay to have access for their website appear to be “free” - well they can pay too. And IndieTickets.com, you can’t afford the same level of elitism that TicketMaster can? Well, your customers can pay for you. It might balance out to make TicketMaster the better deal.

Everyone hates xfinity - because they feel like they are being cheated. No one feels like they should be charged $139 dollars a month just to enjoy the HD TV that they purchased themselves from Target. No one will feel happy about having to pay the same amount to use the wireless internet on their new mobile-iPad-tablet-like-device that they just purchased for that very purpose.

Please sign the petition. Who knows if that will even do much of anything. But do whatever you can. Call your congress person? Call your senator. Turn this into the make-or-break issue for the coming elections.

But seriously. This could take away I Can Haz Cheezeburger forever.

P.S. The thing that kills me the most is that, I just would say “f-it” and stop using Google services. But even to write this post I turned to Google to search for sources. And all of my e-mail accounts are owned by Google. And god-for-bid I seriously suggest that we all use Bing to find things on the Internet…

On learning a new software program...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:39:17 -0500

Recently, I’ve been attempting to learn Adobe’s After Effect program, which is proving to be incredibly difficult, stimulating, exciting, frustrating and rewarding.

Stumbling blocks:

I’ve never really worked with a timeline before - which also means I’ve never really thought about motion before.
I’ve never [successively] worked in 3D before.
I don’t really understand the mechanics of cameras before, specifically how aperture size, focus distance and zoom can interact with the point of interest.
I’ve never used After Effects before and I have a very strict deadline.

Successes:

Like most of the Creative Suite, After Effects is intuitive if you’ve used any of the other Adobe programs before - many of the tools are the same.
Lynda.com has video tutorials on After Effects.
Google can find almost anything.
Motion is fun.

I am so glad that I didn’t realize there was music during the 90s. I think I would have been,...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:37:28 -0500

I am so glad that I didn’t realize there was music during the 90s. I think I would have been, for the most part, scared for life.

I’ve realized this after my friends/roommates insisted on a 90s dance party at top volume on ,y sound system, and I found myself struggling to actually dance to anything off the VH1’s “top 100 songs of the 90s” playlist.

Where as you throw on an 80s mix and all of a sudden dancing just makes sense.

What happened in the 90s?

The case of extremely long URLs and the simple reasons why they frustrate me.

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:36:00 -0500

I was working on some social media initiatives today for the office that I work in, and was trying to link the facebook photo albums I was making to the office website in a more meaningful way than facebook provides right out of the box.

Now, I haven’t kept close watch over what’s changed each time facebook redesigns itself, or what functionality is reserved solely for proper “profiles” over “fan pages” - but I remember a day when there was a little link at the bottom of each photo that said something along the lines of “if you want to share this photo publicly, use this link.” It provided you with a link that was approximately 60 characters long. I am now appreciating that simplicity, and even though 60 characters isn’t exactly twitter friendly, it was a straight forward link that contained (what I can assume) facebook.com/youruserID/thealbumID.

Now, jump forward to today (because I was working on being a S-M-GuRu today) and that link is no where to be found. The “share” button doesn’t help much - the only two functions it actually provides are posting it to your profile or sending it as a facebook message to a friend. So, like any smart internet user, I turned to the address bar to find the address of my 100% public photo album, only to find a 168 character URL. That’s longer than a standard SMS - and definitely NOT twitter friendly. Not to mention the thing was littered with obscene characters (f#?%). The URL length has basically doubled in a year - and with that rate of growth, within the next few years we’re going to have URLs the size of short paragraphs.

I am not a network specialist. I don’t know how databases work or how facebook stores it’s photos or how dynamic URLs are allocated - but this also isn’t a problem confined to facebook - I see these ever lengthening URLs creeping up everywhere, especially when it’s pretty obvious a heavy-lifting CMS is being used.

The real point here is: these mile-long URLs are not usability friendly. They are confusing, hard to copy, easy to mess-up, don’t paste well into social media situations, and overall are just ugly. This might be a minor usability foible, but in good design it’s the smallest details that can make the biggest difference.

Case study: In this same orientation office, we redesigned our website, implementing an easier-to-use design and a CMS - with out developer completely ignoring the URL structuring of our site. It came time to start designing our summer print publications, and we wanted to link to a certain page only to realize that the URL to that page was 2.5 lines long. We had to go back and retroactively set up redirectors so we could publish more usable links to our web content.

Have you ever tired to paste a NYT article into Twitter? “http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/24latest.html?scp=2&sq=&st=nyt” - this isn’t even one of the worst offenders, weighing in at only 67 characters. But that leaves me with less than 73 characters to tweet with? The truth is, “http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/24latest.html” gets you to the same article. Even better you drop the www (we all know we’re on the WORLD WIDE WEB). All of a sudden, that URL almost makes sense - the date it was published, and the article title, dot html.

I think that URL structuring is something that I’ll make sure to take into consideration next time I use a CMS to build a website - where you don’t necessarily control the name of every directory and every file. And while it may seem minuscule, each little step can make the web more usable.

Also, how cool would it be to set up a database search function that takes whatever string appears after your domain name and “I’m feeling lucky” searches it. “http://www.mycooldomain.com/where can I buy the best candy” would take you to the review you wrote about the coolest candy store in town. Not what you were looking for? The site would have one of those “traffic sources” sniffers (OH! YOU COME FROM A SOCIAL MEDIA LIN!K? PLS PLS PLS SHARE THIS SITE SO I CAN MAKE ADBUXXX) that acknowledges you might not be on the right page and would offer you another chance to search what for what you’re looking for, this time with a more robust search page showing you all the ranked results. #ideas #justathought

We Choose the Moon

Mon, 10 May 2010 14:38:00 -0500

The Moon. Micah finds the moon interesting. Or at least the moon landing. All of it.

This website blew my mind. Did you know that that Apollo 11 did a 180º turn, in the middle it’s flight path? Incredible.

http://wechoosethemoon.org/ (site requires Flash, FYI)

I found this site via the FITC Awards, via @guell. We Choose The Moon was recognized in the “Technical Excellence in Flash” category, and you’ll see why.