andrewjameslockhart.com

Coming in later than usual this week, but it has been a crazy week for me, but I am hoping to write a few real posts over the holidays so stay tuned. 

1. BMW Product Navigator

As somebody who has previously worked on automotive kiosk experiences, I would really like to try this out first hand. Also, it is nice to see Microsoft’s Surface technology popping up more regularly.

2. How to be a 21st Century Capitalist

Umair Haque has a nice (albeit slightly abstract) post on the redefining capital and capitalism (something Adbusters and a whole bunch of other folks have been harping on for years). It is nice to see those ideas making it into more mainstream strategy discourse.

3. Woordle

Woordle creates word clouds based on text you provide. Below is what they automatically generated based on the RSS feed of this blog. I would love to see a word cloud of a week’s worth of the words that come out of my mouth. Now imagine that tracked over a year with robust analytics. I could pinpoint exactly when certain words became played out in my mind, compare my social vocabulary to my work vocabulary (I bet there would be a lot more cuss words than I would want to see in both) and do a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. There is definitely a nice business application or at the very least a cool art project here. Somebody please do this.

4. TechCrunch’s Interview With Lord Zuckerberg

It’s always nice to hear a bit about the vision for everybody’s favourite time hole.

5. Let Me Google That For You

Now when somebody asks you a question they could probably just Google themselves, you can really step up your jerk game by using this service to send them custom Google instructions to answer their question.

With the launch of their new website, Modernista shows they do (disclaimer: judging by a Google blog search I am pretty slow on this). Rather than displaying their content within a typical agency site format, Modernista took the concept of a social media hub to the extreme, allowing (arguably) the best in breed site for each type of content do the heavy lifting for them with just a simple DHTML overlay allowing the user to navigate between them.

Once I realized the conceit of the site, half the fun became guessing which service they would use for each type of content (spoiler: they made all the obvious choices). Their print work is all displayed through Flickr, categorized through the usage of albums and tags to allow users to navigate the work by client and category. Their television spots are brought to you by YouTube with playlists allowing users to view the videos by client. Similarly, all their interactive work is presented through a link to… you guessed it… del.icio.us, again using tags to categorize their links. Finally, their about and news sections are brought to you by Wikipedia and Google News respectively. One of the best things about this site is that as Modernista is taking you through all these sites, you can hit their escape button and be released into the familiar comforts of whichever social media space you happen to be in. In addition to a great conceit, the site creates a fantastic social media ecology, drastically increasing the reach of Modernista’s content (they could have improved the strength of this effect by cross-linking all their channels to one another rather than just back to their own domain and by using some of the third party Facebook applications to bring their other channels into their Page, but that could be nitpicking on my part).

One critcism I do have of the site is Modernista’s use of “web” spelling in the menu, which may indicate a bit of a shortcoming in understanding of the interactive space on Modernista’s behalf. People only intentionally spell things like that if they are a fledgling start-up and the correctly spelled domain will cost a fortune or if they are a really cool 16 year old on MySpace. Other than that, I really have to applaud Modernista for a fantastic concept with a strong execution.

Update: Wikipedia clearly doesn’t like how Modernista has co-opted their service, but instead of taking the entry down, they have posted a large warning on the top of it. I find this surprising given how protective Wikipedia’s admins are over the neutrality of the site. I would guess they haven’t taken it down because the way Modernista has used the page isn’t occurring within Wikipedia and therefore is not covered in their terms of use.

Google is now providing select customers with the ability to embed videos within PPC results (check out the second sponsored result). I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Google will enable in search results, both paid and organic in the next few years. Once these type of features become enabled for organic search results (which should present enough incentive for web developers to adopt some standardization in terms of microformats), we really will begin to see the next generation of search results emerge.

Update: I should have taken a screenshot as it looks like the experiment is over.

First let me preface this by saying that if you are involved in the interactive industry and haven’t read Getting Real, you should. The way 37signals approaches web development really is a breath of fresh air. Although Jason Fried (President and Founder of 37signals) didn’t really share any concepts that hadn’t been communicated in some way or another in Getting Real at SXSW, it was great to hear it directly from the man behind it all (note: Jason ended up sharing 14 lessons instead of 10).

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I thought I would share a brief outline of what I have done to date at SXSW Interactive and share some brief thoughts on what I have seen. I decided to combine Days 1 and 2 as Day 1 wasn’t really too eventful. I will likely be expanding on some of the thoughts/threads below in the coming days.

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