A lovingly eviscerating graphic design parody. From Kyle Webster. (Based in Winston-Salem, NC)

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I only just heard about the Google Image Labeler via the IAI mailing list.
Here’s a description:
You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to […]

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UPDATE: See this one on SlideShare. You need to see it full-screen to read the notes, and you can only do that from the actual SlideShare page.

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This is my official plug for the Adaptive Path UX Week in Washington, DC, August 13-17.
I’ll be speaking on Monday, on User […]

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Danah Boyd is pondering some of the rich, loamy stuff she’s uncovering in her long ethnographic study of young people and social networks.
She’s finding signs that there’s a growing social class/standing divide between Facebook and MySpace among high-school-age kids, and she’s wrestling with precisely what that means.
Thankfully, before waiting until it’s all been […]

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My colleague and friend David Fiorito’s toy company (DreamLand Toyworks) is having an official launch party for a line of excellent collectible toys called Hoodiez, designed by Carl Jones, the artist behind Boondocks.
Check out the site, but if you’re in town, definitely go by the gallery, because even after the party Jones’ work will […]

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This is the ‘final’ version of the Architectures for Conversation talk. Hence the (ii) appended to the title.
The presentation isn’t very useful without the notes, and unfortunately at this size the notes aren’t terribly legible. So I recommend viewing it at the Slideshare site, then clicking “Full” there, to see it full screen.
(Here’s a […]

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Gene puts up a very nice honeycomb diagram for thinking about the capabilities & focus of social software.
Social Software Building Blocks
While doing research for a recent workshop, I came across a useful list of seven social software elements. These seven building blocks–identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing–provide a good functional definition for […]

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Two colleagues in the last week or so have posted in their blogs about persona-based design.
Austin Govella gives us a nice set of links about Personas, and Antonella Pavese touches on some counterintuitive truths about personas after reading Jason Fried’s Getting Real in her post Get Real: How to design for the life of […]

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Online Community Basics: Start with Research - The 3 questions to ask - Online Community Report
I hadn’t heard of this blog/site until a colleague pinged me about it. It has some excellent advice on issues to consider when thinking about designing for an online community, especially the idea of an “ecosystem” that’s already there to […]

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I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0″ world.
I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a […]

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This sounds right up my alley … I’m fascinated with how various things in ‘real’ life behave with game-like logic and rules.
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Half-Real is an attempt at creating a basic theory of video games: In the book I discuss what video games are and how they relate […]

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Michael Hirschorn has some thoughtful and sobering comments on the “social computing” hype in the Atlantic Online: The Web 2.0 Bubble
The walled-garden attributes of MySpace and Facebook, like those of the subscriber-era AOL, can quickly become liabilities. And as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter […]

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