Dear Representatives,

Please reject the Internet Blacklist Bills (PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House) in their current form.

Even as someone who has had their intellectual property used without consent by so called “rogue” websites, I can not stand behind these acts in their current form.

I’ve studied Digital Culture theory in college and have watched the net transform over the 10 years since. The only people who stand to be effected by this act are the legitimate, tax paying, employment producing companies who are giving jobs to one of the hardest hit demographics of the recession: 20-somethings. The underground web will not stop trading intellectual property, no matter what filters and laws are imposed. One site will be shut down, another will open. Onion browsers and other technologies will be used to by pass IPS blocks. If they want to they will find a way.

The internet should not be feared. It is an amazing tool that has already contributed to progress at speeds we have not seen in rest of human history. Blocking this and allowing a handful of people to interpret what is appropriate and what is not is dangerous. There is so much potential, please don’t take that from us.

The Internet Blacklist Legislation is dangerous and short-sighted, and I urge you to join Senator Wyden and other members of Congress, such as Representatives Lofgren, Eshoo and Issa, in opposing it.

Sincerely,

Shell Greenier

—
Jason,

Head over to http://americancensorship.org/ or Mozilla supported the Electronic Frontier Foundation to send an email to your representatives.

No, I know. It’s been a while. It happens. Can I just take a moment to say how awesome my friends are…and not just the ones who have been in my life for 10+ years. Faithful twitter friends are sending me emails to make sure I haven’t died. I haven’t, I can assure you. The truth is, I was cheating a bit on Twitter. You know how Facebook only lets you share updates on “like” pages to Twitter profiles? Well, up until their September debauchery redesign I had been sharing updates from my profile. I didn’t tell you that I was or how I did it because I didn’t want them to cock block me. I’m lazy. In a nut shell it boils down to this simple hack: switch out the numbers in the URL passed on the page that gives permission to share your like page updates with Twitter from your like page to your profile number. Voila! Lazy mans way of cheating the system. I assure you Twitter, I do love you and I am still alive.

Currently Mr. S.Gonzalez and his lovely wife are playing host to me in Raleigh. I was on my way to Pittsburgh last week when the snow storms hit and made the pass over the mountains impossible. So, being the amazing Gonzalez’: they threatened to take the tires off of my car until I acquiesced. Once they realized that didn’t work they bribed me with jQuery swag. Needless to say it was almost impossible to beat back the deafening sound of my nerdgasm echoing in my ears: “Must. Have. jQuery. Flask.” and my tiny <*SQUE*> of delight as stickers and buttons rained down from the heavens. Man did I feel like a nerd pimp when I borrowed his rolls of stickers and pranced around with them on my wrists like bling.

I promise I’ll be around more. My first trimester is over and instead of laying on the couch dying, I am feeling a bit better and hope to be churning out some more articles for Smashing soon.

“You must first engage users…”

There it was. Sitting there in 14pt black and white pixels: one giant statement of hypocrisy. The most un-engaging statement…in the world.

Engage.

Buzzwords are surprisingly unengaging. They are empty compared to what they should be. They act as stand-ins to a bountiful plethora of rich, meaty ideas that could have been but are instead replaced with a handful of syllables because the author (1.) didn’t care enough to find the more appropriate words that would lead users down an deeply intoxicating adventure of great emotional and spiritual importance or 2.) is a slave to word count.

Using buzzwords is just wasting the audience’s time. Respect the audience, don’t use buzzwords.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

T. Roosevelt “Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 via a bookmarklet on the bed at the eo inn in Orlando

“Believability. That is what we were striving for … belief in the life of the characters. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word ‘animation’: to invoke life.” Chuck Jones, describing animation at Warner Brothers via The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates

In case you haven’t been around the Madness that long, I’m relatively obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. Yes, ever since I was a wee lad-dess and worked on my thesis of believability in internet interfaces back in 2003, I’ve been obsessed. And my obsession mainly focuses around the inner workings of Carnegie Mellon and their Oz Project and their Center for Entertainment Computing. Swooooon. I remember my first conference there and the boy with the ping pong balls glued all over him. “Motion tracking” they gleamed with a big toothy grin and a thumbs up. My girl parts melted. I was in love. Technophilia at its finest.

So I find myself, from time to time lost among the archives of the Oz Project, and video game design theory and the psychology of film… and fiction writing. And that is the point of this, because while we are busy chasing our tails about things like responsive design and user testing there are industries out there that are light years ahead of ours. Not because they are older and wiser, but because they embraced the human element. They have embraced the art and the magic and the charms of their medium. While we are still stuck on numbers and platforms, they are weaving mystical amazing experiences and winning the hearts and minds of all.

Why is this? Why are we so different? Is it that we started out with Front Page and that they started out with canons? What are we missing? What are we doing wrong? Are we so caught up in the delivery that we miss the true meaning of the platform? As The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates discusses, we’re not constructing believable interfaces, amazing stories, awe inspiring fairy tales. We’re still just building navigations and links and informative hypertext. We’re not embracing the quirks of the medium.

Their reaction appear consistent with what Chuck Jones, famous for his success animating Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters, says was his key insight into animation. As an eight year old he had a cat named Johnson who liked to eat grapefruit and then wear the eaten rind on his head. Jones says he discovered that it is the oddity, the quirk, that gives personality to a character, and it is personality that gives life. If so, our architectures must support quirks, and this may mean they need to allow regularities, such as are expressed in abstraction barriers, to be broken.

Where are the grapefruit eating helmet cats of our industry?

A recent study from Boston College found that companies who employ the Gestalt Closure Principle in their logo design may be creating negative emotion in consumers who respond to the fragmented element with distrust.

On the other hand, “Incompleteness may be interpreted as unclear communication, which can lead to the perception that the firm is untrustworthy,” Hagtvedt said

read more.

I expect this will be my last post for this blog. Thank you to Psychology Today for providing this small soapbox and to you for reading. I am planning to take my Death with Dignity medication soon, unless I die spontaneously before then.

This article “Fairwell” was written June 10. I checked back today to see if there was any update on his condition. His biography was changed from “Ethan Remmel is…” to “Ethan Remmel was…” A small thank you note was posted on his blog by his partner. The denial kicked in, it lasted a few seconds and was more of a wish than an actual disbelief. This was fake, it had to be. It is so much easier to walk through life/scroll through the internets and go “this is fake” than to accept that people change, that people die. Tiny little conspiracy theories of footprints left behind on the binary sands of time.

It wasn’t fake. Ethan Remmel passed away on June 13 and his blog sits quiet.

Soulful Content
Three days before he died he wrote a blog on the need for natural death (like natural childbirth) and dying with dignity. 72 hours left to live and he chose to spend a few of them leaving the world with his view of a heavily controversial subject.

When most of us think about content strategies, we think about what others would like to hear instead of what they need to hear. We regurgitate ideas, spread informative links and aim for “viral”. What happens when we stop benchmarking our strategies and start focusing on the change we make with our words?

The Hard Stuff
When strategy has less to do with progress and manipulation and more to do with soul do we begin to see a change. It involves an internal struggle, be it interpersonal or interoffice. It’s not easy and sometimes it is excruciating, but the world has changed and despite it’s digital roots it requires a heavy dose of reality. We’ve become too connected, too informed, too transparent for the Nikes of the world to try and compare themselves with the TOMS Shoes of the world. We smell phony so if your words don’t match your business model, we know. If your words don’t match your soul, don’t match your mission then the disconnect will be blaring obvious.

If you knew in advance, what would your last blog be about? What would your last product do? What change would you try to make? What’s stopping you from doing that now?

Whatever you do, do it with the very last fiber of your being, do it well and do it honestly.

Wait for it…

…watch for it…

THERE! @ 10:00. It takes a whole 1/5 of a second, so if you blink you’ll miss it. She mentions Steve Jobs using an emotional contagion tactic in his speeches. Swoon.

But watch the whole thing, honestly, it’s divine. Especially Martin Luther King, JR at 11:50 as infographic. Genius.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

It can sneak up on you anywhere. In the laboratory it’s called “behavioral research,” in business it’s called “management,” in sales it’s called “CRM,” and in dating it’s called “issues”.

oh noes! yo

No one cared.

“So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases.” quoth the article here at TechCrunch on its recent official demise. And it was over.

The CEO shrugs his shoulders, kicks the ground with his shoe and says a timid “opps. my bad.”

No one cares.

But maybe, just maybe a few people cared. After all, Blippy was launched with over $13m in funding. That had to come from someone’s pockets, somewhere.

“We don’t think people want to share their purchases period,”  Swipely CEO Angus Davis told me after his service had pivoted, “I don’t know how to be more emphatic than that.”

The article discusses creating something a user wants. But what TechCrunch missed, the most crucial point of the whole, expensive experiment is this: that little fact about the business model not catering to a user need, yeah, that one… could have been figured out PRIOR to a $13m investment!

Expensive mistake.

How much money could investors have saved if they put, say 1/4 of that money into product testing and market research instead of just jumping in on the hype?

via SMI
Do you see him, in the corner? The ghost of the Pets.com sock dog is grinning at us again.

Kids, kids, settle down. Let me explain something to you. See this man:

If you keep throwing your money at every doe-eyed computer nerd with a dream that comes to your office with the next best thing, you will never be like him.

Here’s what you do: ask to see the numbers, ask to hear their process. How did they come up with the idea? Hype doesn’t matter. Anyone can come up with a delightfully intoxicating power point.

You don’t even have to pay Microsoft for the pleasure of making a power point in order to make a power point anymore. You can do it for free. Think about all the awesome people who like free shit.

So what does it boil down to? How do you stop yourself from blowing $13m in a company (unless it strategically makes sense to you and your accountant, of course)?

via iheartcharts
Look at the data!!!!

Don’t know how to do that? Hang around here for a bit. You’ll figure things out.
P.S. Is this explanation ok, or should I turn it into a power point just to be safe?