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 [...]
Posts on Ideas
NNDB Mapper: Beyond Lists of Links
21 May 2008
NNDB Mapper from the NNDB (Notable Names Database) is a sophisticated visualization tool for the people, 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. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band who have had asteroids named [...]
New Project: Datamob
23 Apr 2008
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
20 Mar 2008
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
17 Mar 2008
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
07 Mar 2008
#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 [...]
Five Websites That Might Possibly Change the World
18 Jan 2008
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 [...]
Once You Open the Vault It Ceases to Be a Vault
26 Nov 2007
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 [...]
