Paul Adams‘ book Grouped contains a lot of clear, rational sentences about human social behavior. They aren’t surprising sentences, but I don’t think anyone’s put all these insights in one place before in plain language. The insights are the result of years of research by many different people. The book cuts through the noise of [...]
Posts on Ideas
Sharing vs. Selling
22 Jan 2012
So if sharing online is about validation, what if the objects being shared are for sale, and you stand to benefit from their sale? Does money always ruin it? There is a lot of sharing and curating going on of objects that are available for sale somewhere. See Svpply, Fancy, Pinterest, large swaths of Tumblr, [...]
22 Dec 2011
Refavorited is a Tumblog (do people still say that?) where my favorites from Etsy, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flickr, Fancy, Twitter and Wikipedia go, automatically, via ifttt. Etsy is not yet an official channel on ifttt (but is so ready), so I’m using my Etsy favorites RSS feed as a trigger. As for Wikipedia, for a long [...]
Consider the Albatross: Foraging and Activity Feeds
14 Aug 2011
I came across this post on Quora on “Lévy-flight personalization” and optimizing Quora’s activity feed for novelty-seeking users. Its inspiration is the albatross, a long-range ocean forager that’s larger than you think. Lévy flights are seen in the behavior of many animals. It’s the pattern that emerges when an animal darts around randomly in one [...]
The Timeless Way of Designing for Play
27 Dec 2010
“The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name. “This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, [...]
Playing Favorites
04 Aug 2009
There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite. Find a shop you like? Check out the shop owner’s favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop owner’s favorites. Repeat until you realize three hours have gone by and you have 26 browser [...]
Search Datamob
31 Jul 2008
Lauren got the search functionality for Datamob up and running, making the site about 1,000 times more useful. Adjustments are in progress but you can subscribe to feeds of search results. Recent additions: NPR API, BBC Backstage, CrunchBase API, CrunchBase Map, TheMiddleClass.org, geophysically scaled economic data, Walk Score, Lee Byron’s San Franscisco Walkability Map, Toby [...]
UI Shopping with Pattern Tap
22 Jul 2008
I’ve been separating out product- and UX-focused feeds from the tech business feeds in my feedreading. Great product feeds include Emily Chang’s eHub, Chris “factoryjoe” Messina’s Flickr feed of notable screenshots, Marshall Kirkpatrick’s custom meta-feed of app sources which includes the aforementioned feeds, Konigi, Dave Winer’s TechJunk and the venerable Signal vs. Noise. But I [...]
