We email. We wiki. We blog. We IM. We convince ourselves that as long as we can write well, these are all good forms of communication. Perhaps in some ways even better, since we’re not distracted (blinded, biased, seduced) by the person’s physical presence. And we are wrong. According to the neuroscientists, anyway. I’ve just come back from a couple of days at the Conference on World Affairs, and attended a couple of different presentations where Dr. Thomas Lewis spoke. He has a particular interest in neurobiology (including the neurobiology of love), and what the brain does and does not want and need. One of the key points he made was that we are fooling ourselves into thinking that text is even half as effective as face-to-face at communicating a message.”

“My reason for shifting to Drawn and Quarterly/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux revolved around Norton’s unwrapping, stickering, and then reshrinkwrapping the bookstore copies of The ACME Novelty Library #16 without my approval. Quite admittedly, this was done to correct a very boneheaded error of my own (I’d stupidly made the bar code too small to be scanned)…”

“As soon as I saw the stellar titles that opened Thank You for Smoking, I had to fight the font freak in me from attempting to identify each typeface Shadowplay Studio used to emulate the look of cigarette packaging. Now that Veer has formally called us out, I’ll take a whack at it.”

“Eons ago when I was taking the Freshman web design course in college (okay, it was only 4 years ago) I was taught about the acronym of all acronyms, the one by which all other web design acronyms were judged. We learned that good design is based on the C.R.A.P. principles where C.R.A.P. stands for Contrast Repetition Alignment Proximity, and when Creative Directors tell you that your design is crap, they’re actually giving you positive reinforcement.”

“Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.”

Upon my return to civilization last week, Greg Knauss wrote up some thoughts he had after doing the remaindered links here for two weeks… ‘Like most of the disasters I’ve had a hand in, I’ve got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it. The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.’”

“Last week we introduced the concept of prototyping as a solution to the problem of representing Ajax at the early stages of designing an interface. We talked about some general strategies and attitudes we should take when starting a project (like not being a hero and establishing good relationships with our programmers) and reviewed some fundamental XHTML and CSS skills we should have in our arsenal before beginning the prototyping process.”

“When you’re looking for the next leader in web 2.0 blog design, Hicks starts to look a little too plain, Santa Maria wicked-worn out, and Zeldman like something you might print out, not read online. Where are the leaders of modern blog design? The particular platform (WP, Moveable Type, Typepad, Handcoded) doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with it that counts. This isn’t about prettiest blog, or the best written blog. This is a list of the most groundbreaking, cutting edge blogs out there. You see these blogs and cry, because they’re creatures of fierce untameable beauty.”

“My organization is very numbers-focused. Decisions are made based on quantitative data, and qualitative data alone. Market research, for example, is only trusted if there’s large-scale numbers behind it. Qualitative data is ignored or picked apart. In my view, quantitative data is an important part of decision-making, but qualitative is just as important if not more so. How can an organization that’s used to making decisions only on quantitative data move to being more open to qualitative research?”

Attention St. Louisans — your humble xBlog editor (that would be me, Bill Keaggy) is having an exhibit at the Center of Contemporary Arts in St. Louis, Missouri. The opening is tonight, Friday, April 14 from 6-8 p.m., for Junk Science | Projects by Bill Keaggy: Found objects, trash photography, strange collections and accidental art. If you are able, please stop by and say hi. COCA is at 524 Trinity in the U City area. There will be free wine and you can even enter for a chance to win a free piece from the exhibit, or a cool poster. Hope to see some of you local xBlog readers and friends of XPLANE there!

“It’s amazing as to the amount of time and effort that people put into making plug-ins, filters, actions, brushes and such and then make them available to whomever wants them at no cost. All of the following are the ‘best of the best’ and each one has received the highest rating from Adobe, and they are all free. I do not think that there are many items out there, that you have to pay for, that are better than the following…”

“I’ve decided it’s about time I learnt some Flash, mainly because of the exciting opportunities posed by the Flash-JavaScript bridge. It’s become pretty obvious now that Flash is the most practical option for dealing with audio and video on the Web, and the bridge means that anything Flash can do is now available to JavaScript as well. Google Finance and the Yahoo! JS-Flash Maps API are just two recent examples of why this stuff is worth knowing more about. I have minimal design skills, so much of the Flash literature out there isn’t much use to me. Does anyone have any recommendations for books and tutorials on Flash aimed at programmers?”

“In the old days, I’d lug my book around and do a dog and pony show with my work meticulously mounted to 16″x20″ black boards. It’s how they taught me to do it in art school. What they didn’t teach me was how to whip up a proper proposal.”

“Each and every day a comic strip abuses the use of the silent second-to-last panel.”

“As traffic to chicagocrime.org has steadily increased, I’ve been looking for ways to tweak the site’s performance. The site runs on a rented dedicated server with Apache/mod_python, PostgreSQL and Django… One thing that’s always bugged me is that chicagocrime.org’s Apache instance serves both the dynamic, Django-powered pages and static media files such as the CSS and images. It’s inefficient for a single Apache instance to act as both an application server (mod_python) and a media server… The solution hit me the other day — I can just use Amazon’s new Amazon S3 data-storage service to host chicagocrime.org’s media files, so my own Apache server can focus on serving dynamic pages.”