via nytimes.com
A great peek into the thinking that goes into brand identities, and a real indicator of how times have changed: companies used to want to look like authorities, and now they want to look like friends.
Google Wave Preview
via wave.google.com
Tim O’Reilly: “Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”
Tiny Art Director
A completely delightful blog: the Tiny Art Director is the artist’s somewhat demanding and temperamental young daughter. And yes, she is indistinguishable from many adult art directors.
A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy
via alistapart.com
A great post on why attractive design is more useful, by UI consultant Stephen P. Anderson. Emotions are not just the waste heat of cognition, they’re essential to cognition. So attractive products are not just “more fun” to use, they actually work better.
Google Fellowship Applications for PdF 2009 Due Friday 5/8 | techPresident – http://bit.ly/190LTk
“Are you an entrepreneur or activist with ideas about the next big thing to change government? A non-profit professional trying new technologies with great results? A former campaign staffer still blazing new trails in online politics?
Google and Personal Democracy Forum are teaming up to offer registration fellowships that cover the full forum registration costs and a meal with Googlers for twenty well-qualified, creative political entrepreneurs to attend this year’s conference on June 29-30 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Fellows will be chosen based on evidence of how you’ve turned ideas into action and into new applications of technology in the political or civic arena.”
Apply at http://personaldemocracy.com/webform/google-fellowship-application-pdf-2009-wegov
So much opportunity here. E.g. I’m more and more convinced that much of the challenge facing government is the difficulty of visualizing and making sense of complicated systems, policy, organizational networks, opportunities, threats, etc. All of which could be helped by data visualization, shared data sets, web services, etc.