Texture design

Posted by Oatmeal

I don't normally cross-post blog entries, but I figured this one was appropriate for the Designmoz crowd.┬? About two weeks ago I made a couple funny sketches of what social media websites would look like if they were all sitting around together.

Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form

If you haven't already seen it I highly recommend checking it out.┬? Most of the office was in hysterics when they saw my depiction of Digg.

I drew these mostly because I was killing time before my vacation to Maui; I didn't expect such a huge reaction.┬? The Digg crowd was surprisingly positive, some of the comments could even be described as glowing (weird, I know.┬? I guess to appeal to diggers you have to insult them first).┬? One of the co-founders of Reddit even emailed me and asked if he could use my sketch as the Reddit logo for a day, which I of course agreed to.┬? I'm a huge fan of Reddit; I've found the quality of content and community on reddit to be far superior to Digg.┬? Having my drawing up there as well as having them send me a Reddit shirt was very, very awesome

Posted by randfish

On Friday evening, I hopped a flight from Seattle to Copenhagen, then Copenhagen to Munich, arriving Saturday around 5:00pm. Munich's a gorgeous city, and one of Germany's friendliest, a fact I've proven to myself by stopping most of the town's population to randomly ask for directions (impressive, since I've only been here 48 hours so far). From Mittlererings to┬?Autobahns to a Mercedes with no acceleration whatsoever, Munich has been like one giant driving test - luckily, I appear to be passing.

This morning featured my first solo-panel SES presentation; I covered Blogging, Social Media Marketing & Linkbait (warning: the PPT file is 500K).

Although Germans are notorious for┬?being less┬?participatory during Q+As than their British and American counterparts, the session was filled with questions (we even ran over time a bit to accomodate). The session's moderator, Tim Cole, did a terrific job of keeping things rolling and ensuring that the session wasn't too myopic (an issue when a single presenter speaks for 1:15). Many thanks, Tim!

Most surprising to me was how accepting the German Design audience was to the ideas of linkbait - I was expecting more frustration with the English-language centric focus of most of the primary linkbait portals, but several examples from audience members (who've already been adopting and engaging in linkbait)┬?made it clear that┬?sites like Digg & Netscape┬?can be used, even for German content┬?(thanks, Marcus).

After the session, Mystery Guest (who accompanied me for the first time to an SES show) and I visited downtown Munich - wandering downtown's Marienplatz. We did a bit of window shopping, but were most entranced by the farmer's market, where fresh truffles are the featured item this week:

Although Germans are notorious for┬?being less┬?participatory during Q+As than their British and American counterparts, the session was filled with questions (we even ran over time a bit to accomodate). The session's moderator, Tim Cole, did a terrific job of keeping things rolling and ensuring that the session wasn't too myopic (an issue when a single presenter speaks for 1:15). Many thanks, Tim!

Most surprising to me was how accepting the German Design audience was to the ideas of linkbait - I was expecting more frustration with the English-language centric focus of most of the primary linkbait portals, but several examples from audience members (who've already been adopting and engaging in linkbait)┬?made it clear that┬?sites like Digg & Netscape┬?can be used, even for German content┬?(thanks, Marcus).

After the session, Mystery Guest (who accompanied me for the first time to an SES show) and I visited downtown Munich - wandering downtown's Marienplatz. We did a bit of window shopping, but were most entranced by the farmer's market, where fresh truffles are the featured item this week:

I've never seen a farmer's market with greater organization. Each item is stunningly laid out in its own basket, with clearly marked names & prices. It's a far cry from Seattle's often scatter-brained Pike Place Market. We got pretty hungry viewing all those beautiful, expensive mushrooms and decided to satiate our appetite with a bit of the delicacy at a nearby restaurant:

I've never seen a farmer's market with greater organization. Each item is stunningly laid out in its own basket, with clearly marked names & prices. It's a far cry from Seattle's often scatter-brained Pike Place Market. We got pretty hungry viewing all those beautiful, expensive mushrooms and decided to satiate our appetite with a bit of the delicacy at a nearby restaurant:

┬?After lunch, we visited the Glockenspiel, but just barely missed the display.

┬?After lunch, we visited the Glockenspiel, but just barely missed the display.

Jetlag and insomnia finally caught up with us, though, and it was back to the hotel room for a nap. Last night's 4 hours simply couldn't keep me going all day. Tomorrow at 1pm it's back to Seattle, and back to your usually scheduled blogging. Thanks to everyone at SES Munich - it's been a terrific, if short, trip.

Technorati Tags

ses munich, munchen, linkbait, search conferences

Jetlag and insomnia finally caught up with us, though, and it was back to the hotel room for a nap. Last night's 4 hours simply couldn't keep me going all day. Tomorrow at 1pm it's back to Seattle, and back to your usually scheduled blogging. Thanks to everyone at SES Munich - it's been a terrific, if short, trip.

Technorati Tags

ses munich, munchen, linkbait, search conferences

On my daily journey through some top webmaster resources I stumbled upon an article feature over at WebProNews on net neutrality. It's odd that I didn't think to cover this in a previous post as I did touch on it on Webmaster Radio last week. The issue at hand was the neutrality of the Internet which, while the Republicans held Congress the fate of the democracy of the Internet and the way it functions was being threatened. Republican Senator Ted Stevens lead the charge though, as WebPro author Jason Miller so delicately reminded us, he has no real understanding of the way the Internet function referring to it as,"a series of tubes." And as Jon Stewart would point out, "that's OK, he's only the one in charge of regulating it." (See the video below if you're up for a chuckle)

The issue at hand is the placing of control over the Internet and how all those 1's and 0's are handled into the hands of the major telco's such as AT&T. What this would effectively do is allow them to charge for preferential treatment to those who could pay for it giving enormous advantages to major corporations and reducing those who can't afford to pay the extra to settle for slower access to their websites from visitors. Hosting companies should fear this as should small companies that couldn't afford to pay the extra fees (and we all know how "fair" telco's are when they hold monopolies right?)

There is still a chance that the bill could be pushed through in the time it takes for the Democrats to takeover in the Congress and Senate however this may be difficult as any opposing Republicans (and there were some) are more likely to vote with their conscience rather than tow the party line.

While I try keep away from politics in the blog (though I love it as a hobby) I'm truly grateful that the Internet just might maintain its democratic structure. We might not always like what we find there but when we do, it's almost worth the 300 spam emails we had to weed through to find it

The article by Jason Miller on the issue is definitely worth a read and can be found here. You can also find a number of interesting information on the subject through Design News here. And now, enjoy the video.

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