Via Venture Beat: I assume Facebook went through the exercise of examining this novelty effect of profile-centric platforms and how to create sustainable activity beyond the core base of college students checking each other out. In a brilliant move, Facebook opened it up its platform and allowed companies to build applications to create an ecosystem that would hopefully lead to a vibrant, lasting community.
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Via EDN: The most basic and simplest gesture is pointing, and it is an effective method for most people to communicate with each other, even in the presence of language barriers. However, pointing quickly fails as a way to communicate when the object or concept that a person is trying to convey is not in sight to point at. Taking gesture recognition beyond simple pointing greatly increases the type of information that two people can communicate with each other. Gesture communication is so natural and powerful that parents are increasingly using it to enable their babies to engage in direct, two-way communication with their care givers, through baby sign language, long before the babies can clearly speak (Reference 1).
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6466206…
Via IA Notebook, Japan: Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and in general filled with too many complicated words. Why do designers have such a hard time to keep it simple?
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Via Smashing Magazine: Data presentation can be both beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion.
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Via Improve The Web: f I mention the word design it’s likely to call up images of creative graphics, artistic layouts, and decorative aesthetics. But is that what design is all about? Are all those fanciful wows necessary to have a successful web design? While design certainly takes aesthetics into account it is just as concerned with the functionality of the thing being designed. read
Via Digg and Stanford Magazine: In 1613, Galileo published Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, his remarkable observations of the sun. On a fall day, 393 years later, Edward Tufte stands in front of a packed hotel ballroom, holding up a first edition of that book.
The room could be in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland or any of the dozens of other cities where Tufte, ’63, MS ’64, teaches his daylong course Presenting Data and Information. Today he’s at the New Haven Omni, just blocks from the Yale campus where he taught for 22 years. Nearly 400 people have come, at $360 a head (half-price for students, and a set of his books is included), to hear the man who has been called the Leonardo da Vinci of data, the Strunk and White of graphic design, the George Orwell of the digital age. link
Via Digital Web Magazine: Markup is the technical foundation of front-end code. In one way or another, it influences or is influenced by design, content, accessibility, CSS, DOM scripting, and more. The quality of your markup will affect the quality of related code, and even the cost of implementing or maintaining that code. Your markup might be good now, but following the guidelines in this article will help bring it to the next level. link
To be realistic, I doubt that conventions are really necessary or justified in this age. Virtual conventions would provide all the collaborative resources and opportunities of the real thing but without the wasted time, energy, and resources like jet fuel and plastic utensils. Frankly I suspect conventions are more a reason to get together and socialize at bars more than anything else. Pft, I’m just grumpy because I’m not attending.
Via the event site: This is ground zero for the world’s most creative web developers, designers, bloggers, wireless innovators and new media entrepreneurs. In addition to captivating keynote presentations and scintillating panel sessions, attendees make new business connections at the three-day Trade Show & Exhibition. The newest element of the event is ScreenBurn, which adds specific gaming industry programming as well as a two-day Arcade to the mix. link
