“They never told me that Internet celebrity would be like this. A month before, I had signed up for a ‘contagious media’ contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins.”

“Going Visual is the first book to make the crucial link between images and business productivity, decision-making, profitability and competitive edge. It describes the profound changes and improvements to interpersonal communications that occur when businesspeople make everyday use of simple imaging devices such as digital cameras or camera-phones to create and communicate with information-rich images.”

“A friend pointed me to a survey that eBay is conducting. Because that survey will likely expire soon, I grabbed screen shots of the survey, because it was a fascinating example of how not to understand user behavior. The first page of the survey is straightforward enough. They want to get a sense of general satisfaction. Probably good for calibrating responses that follow. But the second page of the survey is bizarre.”

“Please note that this script format aid originally appeared on The Daily Script under the webmaster Dana Franklin. Dana wrote this based upon the Warner Brothers formatting style. Dana no longer maintains the site. This appears here on this site without his permission.”

“Using FeedMap you can geo-code your blog, browse already geo-coded blogs and search for blogs. Once geo-coded, you can get your own BlogMap location using a simple url that allows you to network with your local bloggers and much more!”

A new weblog about the advertising industry from Weblogs, Inc.

“Once again this year it was my honor to be one of the judges of May 1st Reboot. Viewing participating sites yielded a handful of gems and two striking observations: There is more talent than originality out there…. There was little content and even less user science.”

“script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style.”

“I came to the United States from England in 1967 as an architect to teach at Columbia University. As part of my move from East to West, I eventually defected into the ranks of graphic design. However, my initial years practicing as an architect both in London and New York had gotten me into certain habits. In those days, whenever you started work for a client you simply reached for an RIBA or AIA standard form of agreement, scribbled in a few numbers, and away you went. Other than the fact that you inevitably had to slash your fees, the contract was never really an issue because it had gained such widespread acceptance. Graphic design was different, however. Agreements generally seemed to revolve around a one-page letter or some numbers casually mentioned during a meeting or phone call. After that, 50 percent of your time was spent on the design process and the rest on diplomatically making sure you got paid.”

“A good brief is half success with an identity project. If you have all the information and an in depth understanding of your client’s brand you will have the basis for a great logo and striking identity. Without it you’re just shooting in the dark and can only rely on your luck to find the right solution. A good brief also simplifies your work by giving numerous seeds of ideas to work with… This is why I developed and fine tuned over the years a client questionnaire to use as a guideline to interview the client and now I’m giving it to you hoping you can make a good use of it for the next identity project you will work on…”

“This post is about those symbols we use … or rather, those other people use … to indicate common themes, concepts or ideas. Those symbols which have been used so often that they’ve become cliches. I warn against using them: or challenge designers to breathe new life into their rotting corpses. Welcome to the land of the living dead.”

“The biggest problem, of course, is that new names seldom sound good at first. Advertising executive Ron Holland thought that Xerox was a horrible name for their client’s up-and-coming duplicating company. ‘They’ll call it Ex-Rox, the famous Japanese laxative,’ he told his partner, George Lois.”

“One of the most interesting parts of the whole enterprise for me was his articulation of some clear levels of abstraction between database work, business logic, page logic, page mark-up and the presentation layer. It’s not an enormously novel set of distinctions I guess, but the level of clarity about each area really appeals to me. It’s an architecture that really supports the rapidly iterative way of operating that I enjoy and think is core to developing great online applications.”

“Thoughts about knowledge business, lifelong learning, collaboration, creativity and innovation.”

“Say hello to Blinksale, the killer new web application from Firewheel Design. Blinksale makes it a breeze to create, manage, and send CSS-formatted invoices to your customers and clients.”