Holo-Cat Goodness.

iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.
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Deconstructed Appliances

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

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Get Your War On.

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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.

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BarCamp New Orleans

BarCampNOLA Conference Set to Gather Gulf Coast Technology Experts for a Good Cause

BarCampNOLA, a technology conference that aspires to bring Gulf Coast digerati, entrepreneurs and those interested in them together in order to connect with the local community, socialize and learn, will be held on February 16th and 17th at the Voodoo Ventures, LLC offices at 757 St. Charles Avenue, Suite 301 in New Orleans.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences that was born from the desire of people to share and learn in an open, participatory environment. BarCamp conference content is provided by participants and often focuses on early-stage web applications and other open source technologies. Participants interact in the form of discussion, demos, and collaborative projects. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005. Since then, the BarCamp movement has gained momentum as hundreds of BarCamp conferences have been held in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Australia and Asia over the past few years. BarCampNOLA is one of over 30 BarCamp conferences that have already been scheduled to take place in the United States this year.

The main focus of BarCampNOLA organizers is to help a struggling Gulf Coast-based small business or nonprofit by participating in a “hack day” style project over the course of the conference in order to produce or modify a needed technological service such as a new website or enhanced Web services. Organizers anticipate the attendance of participants with expertise in relation to code, design, creative concept production, and a variety other technology-related specializations.

BarCampNOLA is free to attend, and active participation is all that is asked of attendees. Wireless internet access will be provided by the conference. Also, individuals who attend are simply asked to share information regarding knowledge gained and overall experiences of the event via public web channels such as blogging, photo sharing and wiki-ing.

Like previous BarCamp conferences, BarCampNOLA will rely on securing sponsorship and donations ranging from food, beverages, and media advertising to monetary contributions of $250 to $400. BarCampNOLA organizers are actively soliciting sponsorship from local businesses interested in supporting the local tech community. Sponsors will have their organization’s logo printed on the back of the official BarCampNOLA T-shirt and are more than welcome to participate in the conference itself.

Local press will also be invited to the event, and are encouraged to assist in the promotion of BarCampNOLA. New Orleans-based organizations and groups that are able to spread the word about BarCampNOLA to their membership are greatly encouraged to do so.

For more information regarding attendance or sponsorship of BarCampNOLA, please contact Chris Schutz, CEO of Voodoo Ventures, LLC by phone at (504)581-6446 or via e-mail at cschultz@voodooventures.com. Also, visit BarCampNOLA’s official website at http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampNOLA.

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1 iPhone Per Child.

Good stuff. Thanks Twenty B's!
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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.
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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.

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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.

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NOLA BarCamp

There's talk of organizing a BarCamp here in NOLA this coming January. Details to follow!

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The name "BarCamp" is a playful allusion to the event's origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O'Reilly.

The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19-21, 2005, in the offices of Socialtext. It was organized in less than one week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 31 cities around the world, in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Australasia and Asia. To mark the one-year anniversary of BarCamp, BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations world wide on August 25-27, 2006.

UPDATE: I believe the date is narrowing to the 5th and 6th of January. Please visit the wiki that has been set up for up-to-date info!

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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

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Bush Pointillism

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

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Faub.org Party Time.

Faub.org creative Aid and Pleasure Club PARTY!!

Saturday, November 3rd 7pm - til

Barrister's Gallery
2331 St. Claude Ave at corner of Spain St.

DJ Joey Buttons and DJ Brice Nice spinning
Psssst..Pass It On plus other multimedia

For more info, pls visit www.faub.org

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Faub.org Wants You.

Faub.org is celebrating its official formation and public launch with a bash at Barrister's Gallery Saturday, November 3rd. Food and drinks at 7pm, and DJs Brice Nice and Joey Buttons will fire it up into the night. Multimedia piece Pssst. Pass It On by Grow Design Work's Brian Dougherty-Johnson will be shown, along with Faub.org original works.

Join us, bring some wine, meet working artists, designers, developers, and folks running the creative and tech gamuts. Download the press release.

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Faub.org is Alive.

Kudos to Ness & Erik, who went deep and gave us faub.org. We've graduated from temp splash page to this wonderful and fun interim site, which will someday give birth to the full site, which has been an ongoing labor of love since the early days.

What's Faub.org? A growing handful of New Orleans-based creatives and techies, feeling a bit thrown to the winds post-Katrina, bound together in spirit and spirits. We design. We develop. We drink, and more often than not, we talk a lot. Check it out. Play around w. the site. Dragging stuff around encouraged. We're having some sort of launch party this Fall. More to come.

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Diesel Brand Denim.

Props to Diesel for this outstanding site. Check it out.

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Ignition.

We launched a local non-profit's site recently, with a nice custom PHP content management system.

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Science Trip.

When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25.

He's one of many scientists turning to LSD. From Wired.

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Sign the Declaration.

Annunciation is working with Trumpet for Idea Village, a New Orleans-based non-profit. They're looking for the vanguard, and are developing great programs to facilitate innovative growth in the city.
Sign their Declaration of Innovation to hear more about the movement.

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The Napkin iDea.

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

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Mini-Killer?

The new Fiat 500 has a gorgeous site up.

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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.

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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.

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10,116-point Logo

The intricate and brilliant new New York Times logo sign in Times Square, courtesy of Pentagram. Read about it on their blog.

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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
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Voyeur Launch

HBO's Voyeur project launched a spectacular site as a part of a larger campaign that included some really cool projections. Read more about the development and launch here.
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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.
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My Fave is the Liger.

A photo provided by the Zoo Safari and Hollywoodpark Stukenbrock shows the zebra and horse crossbreed 'Eclyse' during its presentation to the public in Schloss Holte, Germany, on Wednesday, June 27, 2007. The father of 'Eclyse' is a horse from Italy, where the crossbreed filly was born in 2006, her mother is a zebra from the Safari park.
(AP Photo/uripress.de, Udo Richter)
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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]

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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.
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MySpace vs. Facebook

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Danah Boyd
June 24, 2007

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class. [more]
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Rewinding.

Tapedeck.org is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There’s an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60’s functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70’s audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80’s and 90’s. [more]
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Site Entrance Hurdles

It's not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance. Someone walking in the door might have to clear some or all of these hurdles before they can even try out the site:

1. Figure out what the service does, and whether it meets their needs. This can be a lot harder than it sounds. The site might describe itself in text, images, or Flash demos. Even assuming the user has Flash installed, sitting through a demo can be tedious. The worst case: the site already assumes visitors know what it does.

2. Find the entry point for signing up. You'd think this would always be obvious, but on some sites it's not.

3. Pick a user ID. Often the first thing the service wants a new customer to do is pick an identifier such as a user name with which to identify themselves to the site later. If the site doesn't use email addresses as IDs, the user generally picks some variation on their own name. If they have a common name, they might have to guess several times before they find a variation of their name that hasn't already been picked as an ID.

4. Enter their email address. If the user ID isn't an email address, the user almost always has to enter their email address separately. Even if the service can be used without an email address, the site is eager to obtain this critical piece of marketing data from the user.

5. Pick a password.

6. Enter the password again to confirm it.

7. Pick the password several more times to comply with arbitrary security requirements.

8. Write down their password somewhere before they forget the new variation of their usual password that finally made it past the arbitrary security requirements.

9. Enter personal data used to configure the service to their needs.

10. Comply with (or carefully turn down) requests for demographic data for marketing purposes. This may include opting out of requests to be added to email newsletters.

11. Agree to terms of use and other legal agreements.

12. Activate their account. The user might need to switch to a completely different application—their email client—and look for a message from the service. They might have to wait for a period of time for this message to arrive. The length of this time period is unknown: it could be a few seconds, or a few days. When the user finally receives the message, they have to find a link somewhere in it that they need to click on in order to verify that they are, in fact, the proper owner of the email address.

13. Download software. If the service entails client software or browser plug-ins, the user has an additional dozen hurdles to jump through: the browser's save dialog, progress dialog, "Are you sure you want to run this?" dialog, an elevate-to-administrator security dialog, and probably a firewall dialog—not to mention the software's own overly long sequence of setup questions.

And finally, after all this, the person gets to try the actual service—and decide whether it's worth using.

With all these hurdles, it's a small miracle some web-based services end up with any users at all. Each hurdle constitutes an opportunity for the user to leave. The site is effectively asking the user, "Are you sure you want to use us? Are you really sure? How about now? Are you sure you're sure? Hmm?" Some users are going to take one of these opportunities and leave. People are growing increasingly leery of starting down the hurdle-strewn path of a new site. They've been down similar paths so many times that they've concluded the experience won't be worth their time unless they're already confident the site will provide substantial value.

From flow|state
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Microsoft Surface

Pretty neat. Take a look.

The Long Hallway

You've heard of the long tail and the long walk home. Now, for all those micro design firms looking to grow to the next level, there's the long hallway - the distance between the physical working spaces of the individuals that comprise virtual companies - which may be as short as a few miles across town or as long as thousands of miles across continents and oceans.

In the past five years, due to the ever-increasing speed and wide availability of broadband data pipes, the virtual company has grown in popularity as an organizational strategy for businesses in tech-centered fields. The virtual company structure allows employees to integrate their work and lifestyles as they see fit, living where they want and working when they want. If your micro design firm has taken on a project that's too big for your current capacity, if you need a representative in a new market, or if you want the best talent but can't find it locally or affordably, you may choose to work with people who share your vision, but not your physical location... [read more] from A List Apart