Image by pleasebestill, also used here
There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.
Find a shop you like? Check out their favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop’s favorites. Repeat until you realize five hours have gone by and you have [...]
Category Archives: Ideas
Playing Favorites
August 4 09
Search Datamob
July 31 08
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 Segaran’s [...]
UI Shopping with Pattern Tap
July 22 08
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 [...]
Back to Paper: Mind Maps and Sketch Notes
July 16 08
Before breaking out the wireframe sketches and paper prototypes, some back-to-paper web types get the juices flowing with mind maps and sketch notes. Then they blog about it.
“UI porn”: notes by Mike Rohde
Mike Rohde is kind of the king of these. 37Signals recently posted his sketch notes from the Seed 3 conference and they’re a [...]
NNDB Mapper: Beyond Lists of Links
May 21 08
NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people—the kind of thing we’re starting to see a lot more of—and you can use it to uncover little-known connections between Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker contributors who have been parodied as Muppets and philosophers featured on the cover of Sgt. [...]
New Project: Datamob
April 23 08
NEW on the internet tonight: a project I’ve been working on with Lauren Sperber, Datamob.org. Datamob grew out of an uncontainable enthusiasm on our part for projects that make innovative use of public data—sites like EveryBlock, MAPLight.org, OpenCongress, TheyWorkForYou and others. Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators podcast series, which often explores issues surrounding access to [...]
All Bookish Social Networks Considered
March 20 08
NPR’s Martha Woodroof interviewed me for a piece on bookish social networks last month and the spot aired on All Things Considered today. Check it out here. Since the interview I’ve been all over LibraryThing. And since LibraryThing started bridging the gap between virtual and real bookish social networks with LibraryThing Local, GoodReads has hooked [...]
The Paper Version of the Web
March 17 08
People have been sketching user interfaces since the birth of the web (possibly even before) but the sketches usually stay locked away in old notebooks and discarded bar napkins in Austin, Texas. Many of the websites we use started out as scrawlings, and with people like Jakob Nielsen and Bill Buxton spreading the gospel of [...]
The Big List of Things I Like About LibraryThing
March 7 08
#3: book covers.
A year ago I rounded up a fairly big list of bookish social networks. I’ve since tried a number of them (as the list has grown to something like 40 bookish competitors) and was pretty hyped up about Google Book Search until their embeddable book clippings started breaking and I realized their full-text [...]
Scan This
January 29 08
Clockwise: QR code, Data Matrix, ShotCode, Semacode
At last night’s Advertising Club of NY Meetup at Google’s Chelsea offices, Google execs talked about how they’ve been busy reengineering the offline ad-buying process and adding web-like metrics and measurement to radio, TV and print advertising. There was talk of environmental radio ad triggers, so that if pollen [...]
Five Websites That Might Possibly Change the World
January 18 08
Cynicism is dead in 2008. What are you doing to help the world? The least you can do is check out some forward-thinking websites.
Meetup Alliance attempts to take the meetup concept to the next logical level. If meetups are about the power of local groups that meet regularly, Meetup Alliance is about the power of [...]
Once You Open the Vault It Ceases to Be a Vault
November 26 07
Boston public television station WGBH has started to do what many people long for TV stations and related entities everywhere to do: chop up their archives into short video clips and make them findable online. Open Vault boasts a growing library of clips, mostly from the ’70s. Quick picks:
Nam June Paik’s “9/23″
Featuring the Paik-Abe [...]
Getting Into the School of Everything
November 12 07
The School of Everything is one of the better ideas I’ve heard for a startup in the last ten years: connecting would-be teachers with would-be students. They want to make it extremely easy to find people near you who can help you learn whatever it is you want to learn. If you think of all [...]
Beckett for Babies
September 21 07
From Crooked House, via Silliman, for Lauren, who had a similar idea.
Google Book Mashups
September 10 07
Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?
UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive [...]