Yesterday afternoon I watched Roy Halladay’s no-no on the Hot Corner, which is Major League Baseball’s concession to the Internet. The Hot Corner allows you to choose a single camera angle from which to watch the game, which has the advantage of showing you stuff you might not see in the multi-camera, frequent-cut-away televised experience. The downside is that you miss everything that happens outside of that single camera frame, which, as it turns out, is a lot. When Halladay was pitching, I chose the angle that kept the camera on his face the entire time, and this time I didn’t miss much because every single important moment happened right there. You could sense (not “see” exactly) the flow that Halladay was in; the announcers kept remarking on how “calm” he looked, but it wasn’t calmness as much as it was quiet, focused intensity.

The final out.

The New Yorker’s Roger Angell even mentions the flow in a blog entry about the game:

Pitching his no-hit, 4–0 masterpiece against the Cincinnati Reds last night, the Phillies’ ace Roy Halladay restored the smoothing, almost symphonic sense of pleasure that lies within the spare numbers and waiting possibilities of every ballgame. Even from a distance, at home again in your squalid living-room loge, you felt something special this time about the flow of pitches, balls and (mostly) strikes, the inexorably approaching twenty-seventh man retired ...

And of course the Philly fans were deeply engaged throughout the game. In the later innings, each strike was cheered, and Reds batters received hearty, cascading boos each time they asked for time to try to disrupt Halladay’s rhythm.

This guy brought the right sign to the game.

The remainder of the post-season will have to be pretty remarkable to out-shine this unique achievement. (And I personally hope that the Giants are up for it).

From the outstanding satirical Twitter feed, @BPGlobalPR. T-shirts here; book deal to follow, I assume.

Amidst the many changes around and within journalism, the journalist — as an actor in creating the news — is becoming more recognizable, identifiable, and individual. For instance, I’m “friends” with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof. (Okay, it’s on Facebook, but still).

Kristof himself is a media decathlete: In addition to being a NY Times columnist, he has a blog on nytimes.com, updates his Facebook status daily, posts tidbits of news to Twitter — and all of this relates and refers to his “official” journalist work as a journalist for the Times. He also engages with his readers in comments, carrying on conversations about his posts. These different “touch points” — a term that I hate, but which seems appropriate here — allow him to test assumptions, get quick feedback, and share information that may not fit into the framework of an official column. They also gives readers ways to get more engaged with topics they care about, providing a variety of avenues for participation. Finally, they give readers more insight into the reporters themselves — their interests, their informal voices, their senses of humor.

Is insight good? Is “participation” good?

I don’t know. This humanization of news sources isn’t totally new, either. There have always been celebrity journalists like Kristof, and their greater exposure ensures the accrual of an identity more extensive than a mere by-line.

The difference is that this also happening at much more granular levels. My friend Leslie is a reporter for the Modesto Bee. She uses Twitter to post meta-news (@BeeReporter), and created a Facebook page (ReporterAlbrecht) to foster a community around her beat. At the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, the sports reporters record podcasts, comment on articles, and maintain blogs.

I personally love the new avenues of participation, but I wonder what the effect of all this will be. News has become more of conversation. Reporters are extending their identity into the public sphere, becoming distinct as individuals. Does this increase the value, authority, credibility, reach, or depth of the subsequent journalism?

I’m doing some work in Singapore right now, and I’ve quickly noticed a couple of things: Singaporean people love to shop, and they love deals. But they don’t have access to certain brands — American Apparel, Forever 21, Victoria’s Secret, etc. To get stuff from these places, they have to order stuff over the Internet, and have it shipped across the world. And this can be really expensive.

A community of practice. The practice of finding deals.

So, some industrious, deal-seeking shoppers have created LiveJournal communities in which shoppers can band together to save shipping costs from online retailers. These so-called “sprees” usually correspond to global shipping deals offered by a retailer, and they’re available until certain criteria are met — minimum amounts for the shipping deal, or whenever the spree-launcher decides to take care of the order.

In the above example, the spree is for a retailer called “Apparel,” it’s open, and there are 35 “comments,” many of which are actually “orders.” That’s right, you submit your order in a public space, so that others can see how close the spree is to being filled.

In order to build trust among their users, the community above provides a way to give feedback; they’ve created a separate community called “spreefeedback” where users leave comments about the trustworthiness of the users who launch the sprees. Hacky, but apparently effective. Pretty cool, huh?

On related notes, Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is filled with intriguing examples of everyday hacks in the physical world. Last summer, I wrote about my friends Kristen and Rob and their Flickr UI navigation cues that helped the non-savvy folks in their family find their wedding photo albums.

Doug LeMoine is puzzled that the construction of Facebook status updates requires me/him to refer to myself/himself in the third person. This format gives structure to the News Feed, but it also encourages the updater to craft the update as a sentence beginning with his/her full name. The forced third-person would seem to create myriad grammatical problems as people try to construct meaningful sentences, but pretty much everyone ignores grammatical correctness (not surprising). The surprising thing is, grammatically incorrect status updates don’t really seem weird (to me) anymore.

(It’s possible that I’m taking this all far too seriously).

When I first joined Facebook, I dutifully wrote all of my status updates in the third person, as the format dictates. Because I am both a grammar snob and a rule-follower.

Rule-abiding: Doug ... his

This construction is appropriate for the feed, but it’s also terribly awkward. Statuses are usually personal, “microblog-ish” bits of content, and it just sounds weird when personal stuff is written in the third person. Recently, I started to lapse into the first person in the body of the status, and while doing so, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.

Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug ... my

But so far, there has been no condemnation forthcoming. Why? Maybe we all quickly become blind to the totally obvious disagreement? Or maybe it just makes cognitive sense that the content of the status will be in the first person? If the latter is true, how soon will we be updating Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?

I couldn’t agree more with David Pogue, Twitter is what you make of it. This is what I would make of it, if only.

Ever since Shaquille O’Neal left the Lakers, I’ve been more love than hate. He’s smart and charismatic in ways that are rare for a professional athlete, and of course he’s given out the League’s best nicknames — The Big Aristotle (to himself), The Truth (to Paul Pierce), The Big Fundamental (to Tim Duncan), The Big Ticket (to Kevin Garnett), and Flash (to Dwyane Wade). But now that he’s started Twittering as THE_REAL_SHAQ, I’m very firmly in the Shaq love camp. He’s quickly picked up on Twitter’s conventions, and he’s engaged a variety of fans and other folks on a variety of mundane topics. @Shaq: I feel you, my friend. Keep it up.

A selection of Twitter Shaquliciousness:

• His bio, two words: “Very quotatious.”
• Yesterday: “Last nite i told greg oden , ‘we r not the same, i am a martian’”
• Last week: “About to go to yoga, gotta get my stretch on”

Which reminds me of another star who has a way with words: Randy Moss, who recently launched “hellified” into the everyday sports lexicon. Back in 2002, he became a permanent fixture on my refrigerator when this passage appeared in Sports Illustrated:

The perception was that [recently hired coach] Mike Tice, after one game as interim coach, was given a three-year deal last January because he convinced McCombs he could control Moss. “No,” says Moss. “Mike Tice got the job because he and Randy Moss can get along. Nobody controls me but my mama and God.”

There’s something about that quote that sticks with me. Only controlled by his mama and God. @RandyMoss: It takes a special kind of person to even think in those terms. Keep it up.

I love reading, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology is affecting the way that we read now and in the future. I keep thinking about something Sven Birkerts said in a 1998 interview with Harpers: “If you touch all parts of the globe, you can’t do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way.” [PDF] Of course, one could be turn around and look at one’s wife in a more informed, more educated way, but that’s not the way he sees it. I share this anxiety: I love reading the New York Times on my phone, but I can’t help but sense that something will be lost if all printed matter moves in this direction.

This is the top shelf on one of our book cases. It’s comforting to have the books sitting there; they’re like a version of myself, sitting on a shelf, disassembled and re-arrangeable.

In August 1995, Harpers Magazine conducted a round table discussion with Wired’s Kevin Kelly, author Sven Birkerts, the Well’s John Perry Barlow, and Mark Slouka. The results were condensed in the magazine [PDF], and the conversation outlines the two ideologies that continue to converse today: Those who believe that the paper incarnation of the book is an irreplaceable arena for the delivery of its content, and those who don’t. Birkerts discusses the former in his 1995 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts sent a shot across the bow in a paper called “Reading at Risk,” [PDF]. The researchers surveyed 17,000 people, and they concluded that the future of literary reading is bleak: “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”

Still, the total number of books sold continues to rise, so is the future really that bleak? The NEA thinks so. It released a follow-on to Reading at Risk called “To Read or Not To Read.” This study focuses on young readers, and links the decline in reading to “civic, social and economic” risks.

Last spring, Nicholas Carr discussed Google’s effect on literary reading in the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” [I discussed this in a blog post at the Cooper Journal called “Dumb is the new smart”]. In it, he interviews a blogger who confesses the following:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article also sparked a discussion on brittanica.com, collected in a forum called “Your Brain Online.” It’s got a lot of interesting stuff from folks like Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, who thinks that the “unprecedented abundance” of the web will function to break the vise-grip of the “literary world” on culture:

It’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream ... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Ursula Le Guin disputes the notion that people have ever read War and Peace. (Well, maybe.)

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

The title of her recent Harper’s essay pretty well sums up her position: “Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” It roars through the various aspects of the state of reading and publishing, quickly turning into a ringing indictment of corporate publishers:

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

On that social note

I was just looking at my beat-up copy of “The Dharma Bums,” and I felt a sort Chris Matthews-esque tingle. I bought it during high school at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and it sparked my fascination with the West Coast, years before I ever traveled here. Would I ever read it again? Probably not. In fact, just now, I could barely read even a couple of pages without feeling like Kerouac was on auto-pilot. But I like the idea that my bookshelf is a kind of externalization of myself, a collection of important influences and expressions. The future of my books appears to be not so different than the present: A combination of talismans, objects of beauty, and points of reference.

On the subject of reference, in (wait for it) a Harper’s essay called ““A Defense of the Book,” William Gass talks about the pleasures of not having the world at your fingertips:

I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely, above it — what? — gombeen — which turns out to be Irish for usury.

And holy crap, there’s a whole lot more Gass at Tunneling. Articles, links, thoughts. I love the Internet.

We have a house guest this week, and we’ve been doing a lot of hanging out while reading and listening to music. Last night, the discussion turned to Auto-Tune, and it quickly revealed the beauty of being at least somewhat Internet-literate.

Speaking of Internet-literate, this is our houseguest: Dave.

It started with Lil Wayne. I mentioned to Mara and Dave that Stereogum has an irritating post about Lil Wayne’s use of Auto-Tune on SNL. It was irritating because, to me, there’s a difference between using Auto-Tune to compensate for your own inability to hit the notes (e.g., Kelly Clarkson in “Since U Been Gone”), and using it to increase the funky quotient, as Lil Wayne does in “Lollipop.” Anyway, Dave recalled a Pitchfork interview with Neko Case in which she has some salty words on the subject of Auto-Tune. [tappity-tappity]

Neko Case: When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody’s voice, I don’t take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you’ll hear a little bit of Auto-Tune and you’re like, “You’re too fucking good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don’t you know what that means?” It’s not an effect like people try to say, it’s for people like Shania Twain who can’t sing.

(It gets even saltier). Then the conversation turned to Auto-Tune’s first major splash, which was recently discussed in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker [tappity-tappity]

The first popular example of Auto-Tune’s distorting effect was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. During the first verse, Auto-Tune makes the phrase “I can’t break through” wobble so much that it’s hard to discern.

Of course, then we had to hear “Believe,” so Dave suggested Favtape. [tappity-tappity] Bingo; briefly, we revisited 1998. Then, it seemed like it made sense to listen to Bedhead’s cover as well. [tappity-tappity] It features a touch-tone phone as an instrument.

So what’s the story with using Auto-Tune on “Believe?” Did the producers seek it out because Cher couldn’t hit the notes, or did they just want to get funky? [tappity-tappity] The Internet has your answer, sort of. It’s from a 1999 article in the British magazine Sound on Sound, but the problem is that the producers don’t admit to using Auto-Tune; it was still a trade secret at that point:

The ... obvious vocal effect in ‘Believe’ is the ‘telephoney’ quality of Cher’s vocal throughout. This idea came from the lady herself — she’d identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.

He explains, “Roachford uses a restricted bandwidth, and filters the vocals heavily so that the top and bottom ends are wound off and the whole vocal is slightly distorted. It took a while to work out exactly what it was that Cher liked about this particular Roachford song, but in the end we realised it was the ‘telephoney’ sound. I used the filter section on my Drawmer DS404 gate on the vocal before it went into the Talker to get that effect.”

Actually, we now know the truth. It was Auto-Tune.

All of this happened in about 15 minutes; we explored the arc of Auto-Tune in popular songs, with examples of early incarnations and deep discussion about how and why it was applied. Nice. [tappity-tappity]

What we have here is both a failure to communicate and an ingenious workaround. To Kristen & Rob: Kudos.

Muxtape has blown up — just a matter of time, I guess — but I hope this doesn’t mean that they’ll add a bunch of “features” to it. It’s basically two things — the homepage where you pick a mix, and the player where you listen — and it doesn’t need much more. Really! Please!

Part one of two: The home page. It’s where the “navigation” is. There’s no keyword search, no “categories.” Just you, the name of each mix like a sticker on a cassette tape, and the sense of rooting around in a cryptic virtual shoebox, popping a mix in, listening for a little while, striking gold, or not, and moving on. It’s a really lovely and evocative of the simpler, more mysterious times.

Part two of two: The “player.” It’s genius. No “friends” or “people who are also listening to this” or “messaging” or “you may also like.” Just the songs, links to buy them, and an indication of which track is playing.

For the record, I don’t think it needs much else. Whatever happens, I really hope this stuff is NOT added:

• Search. Please, no search. Of course search would make it easier to find mixes that “match” your keywords, but who wants that? Well, I did, at first, but after I poked around I realized that I was having way more fun exploring, letting go of the way that I normally explore. We need more non-keyword-oriented ways of exploring! Seriously! It’s way more fun to roll the dice than to look for what you think that you want, and it’s somehow more appropriate to music
• Any kind of “profile-generating.” The madness must be stopped somewhere, sometime. A way to connect with mix-makers would be nice, but no names, birthdays, pictures, blogs, or any of that.
• Any kind of more “predictable” homepage. Please. Just show the random stuff. Let people start here. It’s scary and frustrating and annoying at first, but it becomes fun, magical. Perfect! Done!

See, I criticize Flickr, and then this thing comes along to demonstrate once and for all its inherent goodness. No Flickr stylez or post-processing necessary. Via Sorry I Missed Your Party and BuzzFeed.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Flickr promotes a distinct style of photography; I say “promotes” because Flickr’s “Explore” tab displays photos that are deemed “interesting” by Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, and the photos in this area are generally characterized by what many are now calling “Flickr style.” This is shorthand for “extensively post-processed” — color-corrected, cropped, montaged, and so on — techniques that turn simple pastoral landscapes into vivid, science-fantasy dreamscapes like the example below.

This was in Sunday’s interesting pool, and it’s a pretty strong example of the “Flickr style,” i.e. heavy-handed, post-processed and much-adored by like-minded members of the community. Photo: James Neely

I don’t patently dislike post-processing, but I find that the photos deemed “interesting” frequently have a creepy unreality about them, a flatness, an obsessive visual “perfection.” The result is that many of these photos seem like scenes from Dune, or Lewis Carroll, or a Bjork video, or a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Everything is in focus, perfectly lit, tightly composed. In short, I dislike “interestingness” because it feels like a sort of Pixar-ization of photography. (I love Pixar). But I don’t like that CG-esque feel creeping into a medium that, for me, derives its essence from its simplicity and imperfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with post-processing and unreality

I just appreciate when post-processing supports the natural aspects of the photo, when it adds layers to the scene. The photo below is called “The Flooded Grave,” and the photographer is Jeff Wall. It’s a montage of 75 separate photographs from two separate graveyards and Wall’s studio. Why all the cutting, pasting and blending? Well, If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s actually a small coral reef growing at the bottom of the grave.

Wall says, “I worked with oceanographers to create a momentary fragment of a real undersea corner. I didn’t want an aquarium display, a cross-section of sea-life from the area, or anything like that. I wanted it to be a snapshot of everyday life at a certain depth of sea water.” Read more at the Tate Modern’s online catalog.

So where does the Flickr style come from?

I’ve been excited to talk about Virginia Heffernan’s article in last week’s New York Times, Sepia No More. She addresses the disconcerting popularity of high-dynamic range cheesiness in the Flickr style, and she strikes at the heart of what is emerging as a formula for popularity on Flickr. She discusses Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir, one of the Flickr style’s “leading proponents:”

[Gudleifsdóttir] discovered ... how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Gudleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Creating images that look good shrunk

I’m intrigued by the interpretation of the UI’s effect on the Flickr style, i.e. that the Flickr interface for browsing thumbnails informs the way in which people compose and upload photos. It makes sense to me. The browsing mechanism is tightly-tiled matrix, so photographers are going to want to craft individual elements that look good when they’re (a) cropped to be square, (b) shrunk down small, and © snugly packed together.

Here’s an example from a photographer I like, a nicely differentiated matrix with some intriguing juxtapositions. Photos: Feedbacklove.

Is “Flickr style” a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Maybe the early users and founders were graphic designers? Maybe they really liked glossy, vivid stuff that often looks like the background of beer billboards? Whatever it is, I feel like the “Flickr style” is much less free-form than most may think. The formula behind “interestingness,” as stated on the site: “Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” Interestingness as a function of the community actions makes sense. Tagging, assigning photos to groups, favoriting, commenting — all of these things seem like useful vehicles. But my sense is that everything that’s being folded into “interestingness” is coming from a fairly closed system, a group of like-minded people with similar tastes promoting the same stuff again and again. Back and forth, forever. ))<>((

Un-interestingness

I’ve got a list of my own “un-interesting” photographers, mostly gleaned from the group I Shoot Film. I also follow the feeds of a few Flickr photographers — This Is a Wakeup Call, Feedbacklove, and Last Leaf, to name a few.

Still, it seems like most interesting stuff still lives outside of Flickr. I look at SUCKAPANTS and The Constant Siege pretty often, both of which can be NSFW, by the way.

I’ve followed Khoi Vinh’s excellent blog, Subtraction, for a long time. A couple of years ago, he became the Design Director of the New York Times website, and in the meantime the site has really changed, for the better, mostly, I’d say. This week he’s doing a Q&A about his work, the NYT, design, and all of that.

As I’ve always been curious about what he does in his role, and the structure of the NYT.com UX department, I was glad to see that someone went there right off the bat:

As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).

You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it’s used by visitors to the site. Of course, it’s not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it’s really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.

More here.

things magazine has amassed an incredible index of Pelican book covers from the 1930s through the 80s. The one above is from 1968. Check it.

Some great stuff on FFFFOUND, a social bookmarking service for images. It’s in private beta, and I’ll be curious how they maintain the current, continual high quality, as in images like this ...

Like this stuff by Andrei Robu.

Via kottke.

Yes, I appreciate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my photos online, share them with others, and display them on my website. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frustrates me daily. Here’s why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pictures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they’ll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST photo uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr homepage, and in that position of prominence it says something about me. It annoys me that I can’t control this more.¹

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can’t control the order of uploading, can I control what’s displayed on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I display only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has introduced new layouts, but all of them are simply ways of arranging the most recent stuff. Not helpful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I’m thinking of my grandparents here. Wouldn’t it be nice if a meta-set (or something) was created of stuff that’s new to the viewer? I could just create a bookmark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has totally solved this yet, but here’s something that would work for me: I usually upload multiple related pictures at a time, and these pictures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I’d like to create small groups of tags for a groups of pictures, and then quickly drag and drop, or multi-select and apply, a tag to a subset of those pictures. del.icio.us’s tagging interface is rudimentary, but it’s vastly more helpful than Flickr’s:

The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Collections? Sets? Archives? What’s the diff? As my mom once asked me, “Where are the albums?” At the risk of sounding irretrievably old-school, this particular set of grouping concepts is a frustration to cognition. (Also, if the distinction is made in this navigation area, why aren’t the things (sets) in the right column labeled as such?)

No record of blogged pictures?

When I create a blog entry from a picture, why isn’t there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me.

¹ Interesting side note: I bumped into some Flickr people at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their rationale: The photostream is what Flickr is all about, and the strictness of the sequence is a useful governing principle. Umm, yeah. Flickr people may think of uploading as a continual stream, but I upload photos in clumps — I don’t always think about my photos in the terms of the last photo uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have control over the way those clumps are displayed. If you force me to always show the most recently uploaded individual photo, shouldn’t you also give me some control over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

I attended (and spoke at) my first UX Week last week in Washington DC, and it lived up to its billing as a good ol’ time. I met many amazing people, stayed out too late, and yet was still motivated to get up early every morning to see the keynotes. That’s saying something. Most conferences can be considered successes if just one of those things happens.

The UX Week program with my lucky cat.

Breaking it down

The sessions came in three varieties: (1) products and interface implementations; (2) design tools and processes; and (3) ideas and inspirations. Sarah Nelson at Adaptive Path organized the conference, and she recruited speakers who were not the usual talking heads.² The mix of backgrounds, experience, and subject matter kept things lively. I especially appreciated the discussions of process by AP folks like Indi Young, Kate Rutter, and Jesse James Garrett during the panel discussion of CNN.com. All of these opened my eyes to new design tools and techniques, and exposed the fact that there is a lot of innovation going on out there. In terms of the flashy products on display, I’m inherently too inquisitive and skeptical to believe what people tell me during product demoes — I need to get immersed in them myself, and ask: How did you get there? Where did that come from? What need is that addressing? How did the design evolve? Because I’m a nerd.³

Design is story-telling

As Leisa Reichelt pointed out during our panel, a lot of speakers addressed the topic of story-telling in one way or another. Kevin Brooks of Motorola Labs led a workshop on storytelling techniques; the folks behind the recent redesign of CNN.com described the way in which they crafted the story that they told their internal stakeholders; people from BestBuy.com and Sachs discussed the use of videotaped customer stories to make a case for a redesign. Of course, story-telling and design are intimately intertwined — two strands of a businessy double-helix. I was inspired by the variety of ways in which designers are telling stories about the problems to be solved, and the techniques and nuances involved in their approaches.

UX is real

I go to fewer conferences than I should (so I may be a bit sheltered), but I’ll say this anyway: at the conference, I got the feeling that UX was much further along to becoming an actual profession. UX practices are no longer outposts in the Wild West of digital products; our work is now identifiable territory in the business landscape. Not long ago, there were very few things that wouldn’t be considered within the purview of user experience; now, the boundaries of our problems are a little more clear, and our experiences as practitioners have more commonalities than differences. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big.

Now, if only I could explain what I do to my parents ...

¹ From one of my favorite movies of all-time, Freaks, i.e., one of us, one of us, we accept you, one of ux.
² Okay, except Jared Spool, but it’s always good to hear what he’s thinking.
³ I admit: The interface for One Laptop Per Child is elegant and intriguing, but I’m politically ambivalent about the project itself. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of creating an information pipeline the developing world, but I guess I’m not enough of a tech evangelist to believe in the idea that distributing laptops is better than distributing more immediate aid. Maybe I’m not thinking big enough.

Thanks to a tip from fellow Simpsons fanatic and Cooper colleague Chris Noessel, I discovered that I could generate a Simpsons character with my likeness on the Simpsons Movie site. Holy crap. Truly, a dream come true. Now the only thing left is to have my likeness drawn in the Wall Street Journal “hedcut” style [a PDF on the Dow Jones site about how pictures become WSJ-ready].

And it’s me, right? Except there were no options for beards, which is strange considering that there are quite a few bearded Simpsons characters. Homer’s got a perpetual five o’clock shadow; God has a flowing white beard; Hyman Krustofski has the impressive ZZ Top-style beard befitting a cartoon rabbi; Dr. Marvin Monroe has a beard that is more like mine. So there’s got to be lots of existing styles to choose from.

When I did a Google search for “simpsons beard,” I discovered that Simpsons creator Matt Groening is a self-described beardo, as revealed in this email chat from 1993: “I’ve been mistaken more than once for Stephen King, Leonard Maltin has been mistaken for me, but I think I look more like a bearded hippie verson of Homer Simpson.” (This chat took place on Prodigy, of course. Wow. Simpler times.)

Overheard on College Humor’s weekly sports chat, Straight Cash, Homey:

Ethan: Who has the better NFL career: Russell or Quinn?
Amir: That’s an impossible question. I couldn’t even tell you whos having a better career: Culpepper or Garcia, and they’ve had like 15 seasons between them. I’ll guess for you though: Russell. He’s bigger, faster, and stronger. I’m really curious to see a 6’6″ 260 pound quarterback will do in the NFL. Can you imagine him and Brandon Jacobs on the same team?

I’m kinda just doing this to try out Clipmarks [Verdict: Useful, but inserted a huge amount of HTML crap into the clipping], but hey, those College Humor guys are funny. And I’m skeptical about Jamarcus Russell, anyway. Even though he seems like a great guy, and he has a good QB presence, I’m just not sure that a guy his size without proven traditional QB skills is such a good bet with the #1 pick. Why not Calvin Johnson? The guy is a surefire superstar. But a perfect storm has been created: Russell is in the draft and the Raiders’ have the #1 pick. Al Davis is a gambler, and he loves anything unconventional. I suspect that he’ll not be able to resist.

Earlier in the chat, they equated Trent Green and Rich Gannon and, in all seriousness, I don’t know how you can compare the two. They were both referred to as slow, which, umm, is just patently untrue for Gannon, who made his name with his wiliness and speed. The dude had about one-third the arm strength of Joe Montana and still won an MVP. Green is slow, of course, though not as slow as, say, Dirk Nowitzki.