Links from 2009

The three percussion experts behind the seminal indie rock / post rock band Tortoise showcase their rhythmical prowess, coming together for Bumps, the self-titled concept break beat record.

What if your digital creative agency sold 100 little digital experiences instead of 1 big website?

Been waiting for this to drop for ages. Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Gastr del Sol, Bjork, Speedy J; very good.

LJ Kruzer and Uncharted Audio present the Tam Variations, eight engaging experimental versions of Tam, a piece which features on Kruzer’s forthcoming album Manhood & Electronics. Each variation is the end result of methodical sequences of sound processing exploring all the possibilities of computer manipulation of digitised sound data.

"Knowing what’s available in your area at a given time of year is often difficult to determine, so we’ve taken on the task of collecting data from a variety of sources and presenting it all in the most understandable of ways. The Locavore iPhone app will come in handy next time you’re at the market and want to know what’s actually being grown near you, and what is most likely to taste the best right now." US-only, mind.

The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company

“Online purveyors of high quality crimefighting merchandise.”

An opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.

Discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections

$99, London on 28th October. Devtastic but subjects look good.

I'm currently researching three post-graduate HCI/Usability/Interaction degrees at three institutions in and around London UK, at: City University, UCL and Kingston.

UCLIC (pronounced You-Click) stands for the University College London Interaction Centre. I attended their MSc in Human-Computer Interaction and Ergonomics, a joint program between Computer Science and Psychology, this past year. As promised, to aid others in selecting their program in the future, I am giving a full review of the program.

"Back in February at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual meeting, Payne delivered a speech urging the industry to adopt bigger, bolder creative and to be less sensitive to user experience." Well gee, that's just what the doctor ordered.

Point your phone at real-world objects and find relevant information and services.

Turns every tweet into it's own real-time thread. It brings Friendfeed-like real-time replying to Twitter.

Presentation on ace Fire Eagle hack.

New weekly street market in E5.

It’s refreshing to see such a big brand being so philanthropic, providing the sort of support most artists would be happy to be connected with, which is so often where big brands can get it wrong.

A free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it.

Answer: people who you know who will probably like it who don't work in the biz. Because not only is it effective, it's also a nice thing to do. Thank you, Dubber, for expressing so clearly something I've spent ages trying to explain to label people.

I've used Visio and Axure Pro in the past to do quick and dirty demos of interaction. With Visio, it's been easy to link sheets together. But I've been spending my time primarily in OmniGraffle Pro lately, so I wanted to demonstrate to the other Mac-using IA's and IxD's out there how you can do the same thing.

Adds a widget to list an artists upcoming shows or your top tracks from Last.FM on your Wordpress blog

A mobile speed test designed for the Apple iPhone.

The shift is from one of web page optimization and link hounding to content and engagement optimization. In short, search engine optimization and social media are now undeniably intertwined.

In the first day of release, Twitter lead the traffic drivers to the Jimmy Eat World site, with more than 22% of all traffic coming straight outta Twitterland. Twitter was third as a driver of revenue, though, driving just over 20% of all sales. Still, with the large number of people reached, and email a smaller percentage of total sales in this campaign than we see on average, it’s very reasonable to conclude that Twitter was a meaningful driver of incremental revenue.

"Remix your favourite song into a bangin' hard dance anthem." Supported by the University of Sussex?

An e-commerce plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress-powered website or blog."

Line – Number One (Cyan341 remix)

"It's Twitter, disguised as a spreadsheet." PowerPoint was probably too much to ask for.

The follow up to High Performance Websites, from Steve Souders and other yahoos.

"So, is Interaction Design a dead-end job? As an expertise, no. But as a discrete service offering or a career path, I say absolutely." Slightly inflammatory; read on for the significant caveat.

"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." Pies, pies, the sky is all pies.

The dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit from dotMobi to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog.

"How do I change my company’s name?" Why, by passing a special resolution at a general meeting or by having all member sign a written resolution, then paying a tenner to Companies House.

A prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop, and mobile phone can all work together. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs.

As used by my crappy ISP.

They don't seem to be precious about ideas. They don't cherish them, regard them as valuable or hard to have. They have lots and lots of them and then prune, recombine and mutate. He talked about this as 'excess and selection'. You have an excess of ideas and then pick the ones that seem to fit the problem. (And you keep them all, because they might come in handy next time.)

MEAT CARDS

“Screw die-cutting. Forget about foil, popups, or UV spot lamination. THESE business cards have two ingredients: MEAT AND LASERS.”

Reach, engagement, influence, sentiment.

Enables you to collect your accounts - on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and every other network of your choice - in one spot, and share them in real life by using any mobile phone or Connector.

An Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

Freecycle alternative.

"This, then, is my current thinking about embedded web fonts: FUCK THE FOUNDRIES." Mark Pilgrim rants.

"Columbia Records, part of Sony BMG, [...] invited [Winston's Zen] in to talk to them and suggested he bring along a couple of other bloggers and make something of a meeting out of it. So last Thursday [some MP3 bloggers] went along, the Sony people booked a table in a pub and we talked about stuff and drank ourselves into a stupour. And what did we achieve? Well honestly, I’d say not an awful lot, really." Worth reading despite that, though.

The API (available at Gigulate.com/api) will offer developers the chance to build on the Gigulate aggregation platform, which has an engine to pull in trusted music news sources.

Why Dave Shea is switching from XHTML to HTML.