1/100

I was a little late in catching onto Mr. Zero Punctuation [Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw], an English video game reviewer for The Escapist magazine. A few scant months back, a co-worker of mine played Croshaw’s review of The Orange Box for me (knowing that I was a huge fan of the game) - and I found myself really not only bowled over by the quality of the review itself, but in the funny and unique presentation. Obviously, the guy gets his moniker from his verbal delivery… he snarkilytalksreallyfastandgetsinalotinaveryshortamountoftime - but the accompanying minimalist / information graphics-style animations are so simple, subversive, and friggin’ fast that you NEED to be paying very close attention to be getting all the jokes, cross-references, jabs, and barbs.

Hell, I’m even not the world’s biggest gamer (in fact, I remain blissfully unaware of most of the games he reviews), but whatever… I could watch this guy review breakfast cereal.

Check him out either via The Escapist or his blog.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Which column do you choose?

Popularity: 17% [?]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rTkp1dek4]

Popularity: 8% [?]

“A lot of rich qualitative user research loses its soul by the time it’s been squeezed into conference and journal submission formats and in addition, work involving concept generation tends to remain confidential. So what you see here scratches the surface, nothing more.”

And that quote is about right, but do not think that it’s not very interesting. There are a lot of  odd tidbits that are worth knowing. They traveled to 11 cities, interviewed over a thousand people and have the pictures to prove it. If you have any interest in how hand held devices, any hand held device, may change in the future, these presentations may give you a little head start.

I enjoyed the blog format of their travels coupled with the PDF files that explain what they found. I guess the questionnaires must have been an exercise in information design by themselves, how do you ask a guy from Kampala about the interface design issues he’s been having? The writer posts some interesting thoughts from the cities, like this one, ‘ “What happens when everything is transformed into ‘experience’ shopping? And the experience shops are clustered in close proximity? Is it possible to experience, well, ‘experience fatigue’?” Some of them sound like he’s a bit jet lagged, some are relevant musings from a good scholar. It’s a blog, dammit.

Link 

Popularity: 26% [?]

Michael Beirut has written a bona fide Soprano’s missive that gives all creatives some timely and astute advice. From Client Relationships to Aesthetics, Beirut finds the lesson in The Sopranos.

On commitment:
“I came home one day, shot her four times. Twice in the head. Killed her aunt, too. I didn’t know she was there. And the mailman. At that point, I had to fully commit.”

I heard this back in design school, and I still forget it every now and then: if you’re going to make something big, make it really big. If you’re going to make it simple, make it really simple. Or really small, or really fancy. If you’re going after a project, if you’re trying to win a competition, if you’re serious about getting the job done, don’t bother unless you’re willing to fully commit.

Well written, brilliantly spotted and impeccably researched. Read Don Beirut at Design Observer.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The last sign before the impending apocalypse is upon us. I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER has become the most popular blog on Wordpress. Described as “lolcats tagged for your convenience (also for your lol*’s)”, this sight delivers user submitted pictures of their pets (usually cats) with ludicrous captions that are a mash-up of leetspeak, SMS, and bad english. They are supposed to be funny.

Here is the picture that started it all, followed by a few fan favourites (you can vote via cheezburger on each individual pic).

Not to be outdone, I snapped a few pix of my favourite LolCat, Sabine. Using the crazy and ridiculous online application LolCats Buildr I easily uploaded, captioned, and submitted my entry in less time than it takes to say “CHEEZ”. See my fat cat below. I’ll let you know if she makes the cut…

Popularity: 6% [?]

Many of these sites have been mentioned on this blog, or even exist in the sidebar, but they are worth repeating. If you want or need to know more about global internet trends, then there are a few fun ways to put your finger on the pulse.

VIDEO:
What are people watching? What are people linking to? What are people talking about? Two sites do a very good job of covering this from two different perspectives. ViralVideoChart measures links, Videmeter measures views.
ViralVideoChart.com
Vidmeter.com

SEARCH:
People look for things that interest them. They have a specific intent in mind when they type words into a search engine. This stuff is gold, and both Yahoo and Google have interesting pages to track trends and cultural shifts.
Yahoo! Buzz
Google Zeitgeist

BLOGS:
Blogging makes the internet world turn. It is word-of-mouth in a rocketship. Knowing what people are talking about is the key to understanding them and what they really want. These sites are worth their weight in wit.
WTF [Where’s The Fire] by Technorati
BuzzFeed

We only feature movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture that are on the rise and worth your time. - BuzzFeed

ONLINE ADVERTISING:
There are a million ad blogs, but the best aggregation I have come accross for one stop shop-talk is the Ad Feed.
TheAdFeed.com

There. Now you know a few of my more obvious secret weapons. I’m going to have to dig a bit deeper next time…

Popularity: 11% [?]

I love watching all the crazy things that happen leading up to a US Presidential Election. I love the hype and the spin and the frenzy. The most interesting part is watching the candidates react under pressure, especially now in the age of camera phones, YouTube videos, and instant, intimate coverage of every blink, breath and wave. It’s crazier than any reality show. It’s also fantastically interesting to see how various candidates are using the online space, be it Flickr, SecondLife, MySpace, blogging, podcasting, etc.

The Democrats are kicking ass on MySpace, with tens of thousands of friends. Obama just cracked 40,000, Hillary’s on her way to 23,000 and Edwards has over 11,000. The closest Republican, Ron Paul, has a lonely 2300. An election won’t be won or lost on MySpace, but it does say something about how people want to connect to their (prospective) leaders.

Micah Sifrey pitches his site, which has amazing graphs charting the fluctuating MySpace friends of the major contenders:

Come check out TechPresident.com, where we’re tracking not just how the presidential candidates are using the web, but how the web is using the candidates. Some features: we’re scraping their MySpace pages to track trends in presidential friending…we’re delivering a live feed of citizen photojournalism culled from Flickr…we’re looking at how they’re using search (would you believe the Republicans are taking more advantage of buying keywords than the Dems?)…and we’re about to post a detailed look at their presence on YouTube.

Then there’s Discursive’s post on the platform various candidates are running on. And I don’t mean their party platform, but their technology platform: Did you know Obama uses Linux? Interesting and geeky discussion and dissection.

PresidentFeed (created by Tim O’Brien from Discursive above) tries to cover everybody in the race, with links to their blogs, MySpace accounts, Flickr pix, Wikipedia entries, YouTube channels, and official sites. It also allows visitors to login and vote for their favourite right now.

Man, this is going to be fun.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I know this guy. He wishes to remain known simply as Ugglesquelch (and no, he’s not a special friend who ends up being me, that’s way too predictable). He has a strange talent for weaving the desperate human condition with psychedelic cartoonish delight/pain. There’s nothing really like it out there. At times loose and spontaneous, rough and awful, tight and well formed, hilarious and sad, brilliant and incomprehensible, this work is a slice of surrealism cloaked in lines and many colours.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Smashing magazine puts together a list of 19 (21 actually) free fonts for download. Usually when you think of free fonts, it’s those shitty dirty deconstructed grunge knock-offs from the 90s. Or it’s another ‘hand writing’ font that’s missing most of the special characters. Well, not this list. These are premium fonts at a free-er than free price. $0.00. Go get ‘em!


And while you’re on their blog, check out the amazing aggregate of web and design articles… stunning. Everything from the best Fonts of 2006, to Wordpress Themes, CSS, Ajax, Design, Websites, Resources… honestly I don’t know how they can keep up with themselves. It’s going to take me a few years to wade through all their content.

Popularity: 4% [?]