At my day job, we've been looking at mobilizing our people to get the most benefit from our social channels. We've encouraged people to begin blogging internally and we promote particularly salient posts to the outside world. Blogging started slowly, but it's picking up speed now as people begin to see the value in it and start to see that it's not just firm leadership … [Read more...]
Apple HTML5 Showcase
Apple has added a showcase of HTML5 functionality on their site. It's a pretty impressive display. However, you're limited to Safari for viewing options. As HTML5 continues to get rolled out as a standard, creating rich web experiences will get a whole lot easier. I just hope that the uncomfortable period where you need to maintain two approaches (HTML5 and Old School) … [Read more...]
Following Function
Smashing Magazine has a good article written by Steven Bradley examining web design through the Bauhaus lens of "form follows function." He first gives a pretty good summary of the history of Bauhaus and the evolution of its principles, then turns his attention to interpreting the validity of form following function. Unfortunately, he takes his analysis to logical extremes … [Read more...]
Zeitgeist from the Cloud – Tapping your audience
Jeffrey Veen has an interesting post over at his blog discussing a stream of Twitter data coming in while he was speaking at a conference. He says he felt as though he was cheating on an exam by "listening" to what the audience was saying as he was speaking. By addressing audience concerns as they hit the cloud, he was able to turn the audience in his favor. I saw this … [Read more...]
A Word on the Tagline
You may notice the tripartite slogan that's part of the logo of this site: Useful, Usable, Compelling. Those three concepts are the pillars of the framework I use to design or analyze a system. In short, what I mean by these terms is: Useful Does the thing do what it's supposed to do and only what it's supposed to do? In other words, I'm using your site/app/thing to … [Read more...]
Catching a Wave
While some of the initial fervor over Google Wave has died down, desire to obtain one of the elusive invites remains just this side of Charlie Bucket's desire for one of Wonka's Golden Tickets. For those who have been lucky enough to receive an invite (like myself), an initial period of confusion is soon replaced by other periods of confusion. It's not that the platform … [Read more...]
One Card (App) to Rule Them All
A while ago, I got tired of fishing through my wallet for any of the myriad rewards program cards that I have. I also started leaving them at home to prevent my wallet from turning into a meatball in my pocket. That got me thinking: Wouldn't it be great to have just one card to carry around with you?I started sketching out architecture diagrams - a central repository where all … [Read more...]
WolframAlpha update
So, WolframAlpha has been out a while now and I've had several chances to use it. Occasionally, I've used it when I needed it. It always takes a while for a tool to take root in my psyche. Occasionally, a tool proves itself so useful that it takes root quickly (like Google, back in the day). WolframAlpha has proven itself to be that useful. The power is that you ask a … [Read more...]
CIO Twitter Dashboard
Chris, the CIO/CTO of my day job brought his blog in-house. He is active on Twitter and wanted to provide a resource for other CIOs to find each other on Twitter. So, the concept for the CIO Twitter Dashboard was hatched. The idea is to consolidate on one page as many CIOs using Twitter as possible.We decided to leverage TwitStamp to create a grid of CIOs. TwitStamp offers … [Read more...]