May 20, 2009
hells yeah
hells yeah
Originally uploaded by xian
if it’s really him, why not?
[wake up!]May 17, 2009
stump the chumps
what’s the difference between a duck? - Wolfram|Alpha
Originally uploaded by xian
ok - trick questions are no fair, but hire someone with a sense of humor and load it up with snappy answers, yo.
[wake up!]April 27, 2009
When it comes to thinking, bigger really is better
Michael Port, author of a number of bestselling sales-guru business books, has now come out with a pocket volume called The Think Big Manifesto: Think You Can’t Change Your Life (and the World?) Think Again.
I like the arresting graphic design of the book (a publicist sent me an advance copy) but was somewhat wary of the bold marketing language on the wrapper. Still, I found on opening the book that I was drawn in by the author’s cool, knowing style and I prepared myself to be convinced.
I started reading the book, nodding my head: I agreed with just about everything I read. The prose voice is somewhat breathless, though, and I had trouble staying focused on the book’s flow. As brief as it is, I noticed myself skimming ahead to the summarizing statements.
I found myself agreeing with all of the specific advice in the book and wondering whether I can (or do) actually follow it myself. What most of it comes down to is daring to think big and avoiding the doubts and negativity and small thinking that can so often hold us back.
I like this kind of thing, though I am also wary of it. That is, I want self-help, breakthrough, artistic and entrepreneurial leaps, but I have also seen a lot of snake oil and easy answers in my day. So it’s love/hate with this type of thing for me, and sometimes I adore it (The Power of Now, The War of Art, Money & the Meaning of Life) and other times it doesn’t stick.
For all of the books of this ilk I’ve devoured, where are my masterpieces, my killer apps? I’m still waiting to see if this one will take.
[wake up!]April 20, 2009
The perfect pink margarita
as promised via twitter:Serves 6:
7 limes
1 blood orange
4 mandarin oranges (medium sized)
1 pink grapefruit
8 fl.oz. Patron reposado
6 fl.oz. Cointreau (or Patron Citronge or any decent triple sec)
rock salt
table salt
3 ice trays of cubes
- Put six cocktail glasses in the freezer to chill.
- Reserve one of the limes.
- Juice the rest of the citrus, mix, stir (you need about 9-10 oz. of juice. If significantly more or less, adjust the tequila and liqueur proportionately).
- Add the tequila and liqueur, stir, put in refrigerator to chill/stay cool.
- Crush the ice cubes.
- Pile the rock salt near the edge of a circular plate.
- Put the table salt on top of the rock salt.
- Slide the one lime into at least seven wedges, notch the wedges with a knife.
- Remove the glasses from the freezer.
- Wet the rim of each glass with one of the lime wedges.
- Turn a glass upside down and swipe its rim through the salt pile, repeating for each glass.
- Put a large mound of crushed ice in each glass.
- Pour the margarita mixture over the ice.
- Garnish each rim with a lime wedge and serve.
April 15, 2009
Designing Social Interfaces, Rough Cut edition now available from O'Reilly Media
Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian
The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.
Yay!
March 31, 2009
Designing Social Interfaces Web 2.0 Expo workshop slides
March 23, 2009
Slides from Designing Social Interfaces at IA Summit 2009
Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
March 15, 2009
south by, in a nutshell
this is a screenshot of a sampling of the tweets about the core conversation i did with erin malone re social design patterns.
there was one that said we weren’t prepared and were just promoting our book, too.
i do wish we had explicated an example pattern. the summit talk with slides will be more useful, i think. but then this was a core conversation. we tried to seed it and then go with what the room wanted to talk about. that’s unstructured for a panel.
also, we could have walked through the handout all together. live and learn.
[wake up!]March 7, 2009
Building my sxsw schedule
[wake up!]March 5, 2009
Invincibility overrated
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Something Jonathan Lethem might have cooked up after watching all three seasons of the Venture Brothers while perusing the Watchmen graphic novel.
I enjoyed it!
View all my reviews.
March 2, 2009
My YDN lightning talk on design patterns
Thanks to Julie Choi who is producing this series and Ricky Montalvo who directed and filmed this five-minute talk. I really enjoyed it and I think they did a great job with it (and the whole series, actually):
[wake up!]February 23, 2009
testing
is the famed mediajunkie blog that was prophesied? (ask Ozzy)
[sandbox]See Me Speak
how do these side pages work? [sandbox]January 27, 2009
Pattern languages interview
![[design.yahoo.com]](http://xianlandia.com/pix/dpl_logo.png){kind=logo}
In anticipation of the Pattern Library workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, Will Evans interviewed us for Boxes & Arrows, the premiere user experience magazine online.
Will asked great questions and I think he brought out some interesting discussion among us all. Here’s a taste:
Question: I have heard it argued that use of design patterns and pattern libraries removes creativity and innovation from the solution-finding process? Do these criticisms have merit?
xian: I don’t really think that argument holds water. I do understand the concern, and it’s totally possible to apply patterns mindlessly or to force their use inappropriately, but, to my mind, patterns focus innovation and creativity on the leading edge of the problem: the unsolved part.
Read the whole thing over at B&A!
[wake up!]January 16, 2009
unbook, that's the word I was looking for
Dave Gray articulates clearly some ideas I’ve been wrestling with about writing, publishing, bookmaking, the web, and social collaboration:
[wake up!]January 3, 2009
gee and i've only met barlow once
gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian
was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?
[wake up!]November 6, 2008
evangeline
evangeline
Originally uploaded by xian
she is the queen of make-believe
my new electric uke (hollowbody tenor ukulele with pickup)
October 30, 2008
Briefest annual birthday blogging yet
Started blogging on birfday in 1997 (called it “doing an online journal then”).
11 years later I’m still (sorta) at it.
Happy birthday to us!
[wake up!]October 15, 2008
About this new book I'm (co-)writing
As you may know, I am writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media.
Erin is the the founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and hired me to be its third curator. Today she is a partner at Tangible UX, a consulting firm, and I maintain the library as a YDN design evangelist on Micah Laaker’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) team, in collaboration with Luke Wroblewski’s Front Doors and Network Services (FDNS) team.
The top of my agenda in the past year has been to identify, gather, and document a family of social design patterns: observed practices that work well in resolving common design problems in social applications. I’ve been looking for and teasing out patterns that enable social environments to thrive and sustain themselves.
Fortunately, I had a leg up or two. While there were very few documented community or social media patterns in the library, there are a wealth of specs, papers, patterns, presentations, and guidelines scattered around the intranet, and there was Matt Leacock’s first take on a social media toolkit, shepherded together on an internal Yahoo! wiki.
More importantly, I looked out across the landscape of the web and drew on my own personal experience as a user, analyst and addict of online social experiences.
At BarCamp Block last year I facilitated a session on social media patterns (at least that’s what I was calling them then) and the net takeaway was an amazing mindmap of potential patterns. Quite a few of them turn out to be social moments, social behaviors, or social objects; or scenarios that illuminate patterns without being patterns themselves. But the outline and cloud diagrams we built from that brainstorm helped get me started sorting out some possible organizing structures beyond what we had internally a Yahoo.
This mindmap went through a series of iterations and refinements. Meanwhile, I started presenting on the topic of social patterns at BayCHI, at South By, at the IA Summit, at Ignite and more recently at TechPulse and soon PLoP and Interaction09.
Taking your half-baked ideas on the road and presenting them to a demanding crowd of payng customers is a great way of figuring out which ideas have resonance and which miss the mark. Presenting ongoing work in progress is tough: you make yourself vulnerable and open to criticism. But the criticism will come eventually anyway. Why not hear it now while you can still address it and incorporate the best ideas of others into your work?
For that matter, I feel it’s essential to be clear about one thing: almost none of this work on social design patterns is original. Yes, of course I am naming patterns and writing them and perhaps throwing in a nugget of experience here and there, but for the most part I am still curating these patterns. I’ve been stealing from everybody!
We hates plagiarism so we cite sources and point back to originators where applicable. I’ve proposed that the nascent PLPL (Pattern Language Markup Language) standard include an attribution element, with a common structure for reflecting sources, reuse, derived work, and licensing matters.
Furthermore, in our book we are inviting a wide range of leading practitioners, thinkers, and bloggers to contribute essays on one or more of the pattern families we’re developing for the book. Because, yes, the book is in many ways an offshoot of this ongoing social pattern collecting effort. And in that same spirit we’re both interested (Erin and me) in experimenting iwth methods of opening up the writing process and seeking feedback, correction, criticism, and contributions before the book’s ship date.
We’ll probably post patterns in progress on a wiki and in the meantime we will both be posting thoughts about the chapters we’re working on on our blogs. I’ll also post some draft patterns here at least until we have the wiki process figured out.
My next post in this series will be about a set of fundamental social design patterns I’m pulling together in Chapter 2.
[wake up!]October 14, 2008
Too risky!
Looks like Jay Smooth has decoded the McCain ad strategy:
(via Vivirlatino via Jenternational)
[wake up!]September 26, 2008
Get Your War On says time for us to come together
to kill all the bankers and steal their money:
[wake up!]September 13, 2008
Girl Talk at Yahoo!
Girl Talk at Yahoo!
Originally uploaded by kentbrew
I do the white man’s overbite. Please @kentbrew, point that camera over at @cynk. ah. better. thnaks!
September 12, 2008
Design hacks with stencils and patterns
These are the slides I worked from today in my talk at Yahoo! Open Hack Day 08, Design Hacks with Stencils & Patterns:
Open Hackday 08 begins
I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.
So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.
At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.
August 1, 2008
Great way to showcase a redesign
I love this animation Delicious designer Bernard Kerr made to introduce the user interface improvements incorporated in the design of Delicious 2.0:
[wake up!]July 15, 2008
Apps I've downloaded onto my iPhone so far
Twitterific would like to use your current location!
Shazam didn’t recognize John Cage last night.
Facebook is slick.
OmniFocus is my new Obama.
Google app is weak (brings up a tiny serp?) but at least it exists.
Pandora would be perfect if faster and also not crashy.
You had me at NYTimes.
Loopt does what now?
[wake up!]July 7, 2008
...and we're back
Holy Christ that was a giant pain in the ass.
On the bright side I may have gotten a whole chapter for my book on presence, all about what it’s like to have a longstanding web presence offline for six weeks or more. As far as the Internet is concerned you might as well be dead.
Maybe I’ll get some more blogging in now that I am alive again.
Did you hear me?
I… AM… ALIVE !!!!1!
[wake up!]May 6, 2008
Playing around with Utterz
Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument:
[wake up!]May 1, 2008
System going down in 10 minutes. Please finish up....
This blog, this domain, and all of my other Mediajunkie domains are going offline for about a week. We are retooling our server, migrating from RHL to Ubuntu, and generally tightening up security.
If I have a burning need to blog while this site is down, I’ll do it over at Vox.
See you in about a week or so.
[wake up!]April 24, 2008
I'm helping Sir Christopher Wren build this here cathedral
Or should I perhaps have found an anecdote with a bazaar in it for my title? I’ve been enjoying watching a lot of my fellow Y!OS cow-orkers “decloak” if you will and proudly announce to family and friends that yes, this Yahoo! Open strategy is what we’ve all been working on:
[wake up!]April 23, 2008
Ignite was fun
My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
Audio when it’s available (video too).
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
April 22, 2008
Three talks for the price of, well, none
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
April 17, 2008
Social design patterns slides from BayCHI last week
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
[wake up!]April 7, 2008
Talk back to presenters with Ted Nadeau's patented* Reaction Deck 1.0
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
