1/100

I’ve blogged about Nicholas Felton before, but he continues to outdo himself. He has recently redesigned his website, and released The 2007 Feltron Annual Report which meticulously details all aspects of his personal and professional life. I’m not sure how he has any time to interact with people, what with the furious note-taking he must undertake to capture where he has been, what he has listened to, what he has seen, what type of food he is eating, etc. Here are a few samples:I love the typography, the detail, the statistics, the idea. And I love the ingenuity of offering a print edition, which means I can support the Nicholas’ work and have something beautiful and strange for the coffee table. Buy it here. 

Popularity: 30% [?]

Which column do you choose?

Popularity: 16% [?]

“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% [?]

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% [?]

Feltron is my new personal hero. Not only is he a brilliant designer, but he is insane in the best possible obsessive-compulsive way. He has meticulously recorded, documented, and designed a beautiful annual report on his life in 2006. It includes air miles traveled, restaurants eaten at, types of beers drank, number of iTunes tracks played, breakdowns of movie genres watched, and much much more. And I thought I was crazy to carry around a set of Mundane LifeFocus™ Cards to keep track of my daily routines.

Popularity: 3% [?]