Thinks?

top

Deconstructed Appliances

Really cool Flickr set of dissasembled household appliances. The above is a coffeemaker. Beautiful.

top

Know-Nothing Politics

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

via Paul Krugman / New York Times read article

top

Pandora Thumbs Up.

Whoa. Ben turned me on to Pandora, a iPhone streaming radio app that allows you to punch in artists or songs that you like and it then streams tunes it thinks you'll like based on a ton of parameters. It's based on the Music Genome Project. Pretty cool stuff, and free, which is nice.

top

Old New World Order.

Pretty cool agitprop from Knife Party and Submediatv. Jonah pointed me to this today. Said it was a little dated, but I still dig it.

top

1 iPhone Per Child.

Good stuff. Thanks Twenty B's!
top

One Laptop for Xmas.

This year, my company Annunciation donated 'One Laptop Per Child' laptops on behalf of our clients for the year-end holidays. We ended up with one of them at our offices. Very neat. The attentiveness in engineering is immediately apparent. Couldn't find the hand crank on ours - we must've gotten the domestic model. Great program, and we're excited to watch it progress.
top

The Davos Question.

Every year many of the world's top leaders attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how to make the world a better place.

This year, you get to join them.

First, submit a video answering The Davos Question:

"What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"

Then, starting January 1st, watch and rank others' ideas. The highest-rated videos will be screened in Davos (January 23-27), where world leaders will watch your videos and make responses of their own. Your idea could be the start of something big.

Visit The Davos Question website.

top

R.I.P. Evel

Evel Knievel died last week. He was huge when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. The Daredevil Stunt Cycle was a Big Deal. They don't make them like Evel these days. David Blaine and Chriss Angel et al pale in comparison to the impact and awe this strange, probably brain-damaged madman created.

Update: just read that the Stunt Cycle has generated over $300MM in revenue. Wow.

top

Email Standards Project.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

top

Facebook's Flaw: Humans

Great article on the nuances of social networking, titled How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook, by Cory Doctorow (co-author of the Boing Boing blog)...

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

full article

top

Bush Pointillism

I really like Phil Hansen's work - do a search on his name on YouTube - neat stuff.
top

Best Spam Ever

There are so many things about this one that I love. Click it to see full size. Trouser python? Moons of Saturn? His/her Royal Highness will attend, so I guess it's all good. Don't despond, order Megadik today.

- main opposition leader.

top

Mmmmmmn, classy.

From Axe. File under 'subtle advertising".

top

QBN's Shepard Fairey sessions.

top

Clean Is Happy?

This is a kind of funny site promoting what seems to be a bidet. I like all the hygiene euphemisms.

top

The Secret of Design

Not sure it's this simple, but some neat ideas re: the cyclical nature of consumer ebbs & flows. From Baekdal.

top

The Napkin iDea.

Check out this brilliant iPhone parody site from iDea. Thanks to Malcolm for sending it this way!

top

Mini-Killer?

The new Fiat 500 has a gorgeous site up.

top

Future of Web Design

The Future of Web Design is all about getting together leading practitioners and thinkers in the design field to talk about trends, directions and exciting new happenings in the medium. This isn’t just another web event, but one that’s dedicated to the creativity in the profession, bringing back the ‘design’ and drawing together the diverse fields that doing ‘web design’ now represents.

The date for your diaries is the 7th and 8th November 2007.

top

Reboot

Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us...

2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.

top

Too old for MySpace?

Everyone likes to belong, and that is one of the powerful forces of the Internet. Where once your service provider was your identifying online "community," today's equivalents are online social networks like Second Life, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

What's a career-minded grown-up to do amid such Internet playgrounds? [read more]
from International Herald Tribune
top

Real People Real Stuff.

This is a really neat concept - half craigslist, half YouTube, it allows people to show their stuff via video and sell it online. Click here or on the image above to see the woefully-underpopulated New Orleans section.
top

Apple's $3000 iPhone.

By Sinead Carew Tue Jun 26, 4:11 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc. said on Tuesday its hotly anticipated iPhone could cost as much as $3,000 with a required two-year service contract, but a handful of eager fans still lined up early to spend their money.

A small clutch of gadget enthusiasts staked out spots in front of Apple's store on New York's Fifth Avenue, days before the iPhone goes on sale on Friday evening 6 p.m. local time.

Plenty of potential iPhone consumers have said they would wait for Apple's next versions of the device to buy it, hoping for a lower price and faster network connection.

But industry analysts expect the first iPhone to sell quickly, at least in its initial months. Jessica Rodriguez, a 24-year-old student from the Bronx, seems to agree with them.

"I love everything Apple, and this is going to be something that goes down in the history books of cell phones," she told Reuters. [more]

top

TV-B-Gone™

TV-B-Gone™ universal remote control turns off virtually any television! It's the ultimate jammer tool for reclaiming public space. It works at airports, bars, offices... any place that needs a break from the idiot box. Clarity of mind, one click at a time.

Click here for details and how it works.
top

The Rise of Consumer Power

By Marie Jackson
BBC News

The makers of Mars bars have done a swift U-turn over plans to use animal products in their chocolate, to avoid a public backlash.

It appears the parent company Masterfoods did not reckon on the UK's vegetarians and their supporters being quite such a force.

















But as a growing tide of consumers are prepared to use their shopping basket to make a point, companies are increasingly having to watch their step.

A shift in consumerism seems to have taken place as shoppers become increasingly health-conscious and environmentally aware.

From prices and food labelling to sourcing and ingredients, there is little that does not come under the scrutiny of buyers.

And if it is not to their taste, consumers are prepared to reject it.
[read more]
top

Technology Use Survey

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer Sun May 6, 9:39 PM ET

NEW YORK - A broad survey about the technology people have, how they use it, and what they think about it shatters assumptions and reveals where companies might be able to expand their audiences.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that adult Americans are broadly divided into three groups: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users and the remainder have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones. But Americans are divided within each group, according to a Pew analysis of 2006 data released Sunday. The high-tech elites, for instance, are almost evenly split into:

"Omnivores," who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages.

"Connectors," who see the Internet and cell phones as communications tools.

"Productivity enhancers," who consider technology as largely ways to better keep up with their jobs and daily lives.

"Lackluster veterans," those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it.

John Horrigan, Pew's associate director, said he started the survey believing that the more gadgets people have, the more they are likely to embrace technology and use so-called Web 2.0 applications for generating and sharing content with the world. "Once we got done, we were surprised to find the tensions within groups of users with information technology," Horrigan said.

Many longtime Internet users, the lackluster veterans, remain stuck in the decade-old technologies they started with, Horrigan said. That a quarter of high-tech elites fall into this category, he said, shows untapped potential for companies that can design next-generation applications to pique this group's interest.

The moderate users were also evenly divided into "mobile centrics," those who primarily use the cell phone for voice, text messaging and even games, and "connected but hassled," those who have used technology but find it burdensome. Mobile companies, he said, can target the mobile centrics with premium services, especially once faster wireless networks become available.

The Pew study found 15 percent of all Americans have neither a cell phone nor an Internet connection. Another 15 percent use some technology and are satisfied with what it currently does for them, while 11 percent use it intermittently and find connectivity annoying.
Eight percent - mostly women in the early 50s - occasionally use technology and might use more given more experience. They tend to still be on dial-up access and represent potential high-speed customers "with the right constellation of services offered," Horrigan said.

The telephone study of 4,001 U.S. adults, including 2,822 Internet users, was conducted Feb. 15 to April 6, 2006, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Find out which category you fall under.

Welcome to the Machine