An essential guide to fostering online community

· Applications, Best Practices, Design, Development, Information Architecture, long story short, Patterns, Social Design, User Experience

[Building Social Web Application book cover]Building Social Web Applications
by Gavin Bell
O’Reilly (October, 2009)

Gavin Bell draws on his extensive experience to offer a well structured guide to adding community elements to a website or application. His book will help any professional planning a social strategy, designing a set of social features, determining the types of relationships to foster among users, and even determining how best to manage change in an existing site or online structure.

Bell covers a wide gamut of issues that a site planner will need to consider, from developing the data schema for people, relationships, and objects; to how best to expose APIs to third-party developers; to the process of rolling out a new product or feature. Anyone developing a social website or app should keep this book handy throughout the process.

Bell and I share a publisher and our titles cover some similar issues. When I first picked up Bell’s finished book I gritted my teeth with envy. As I quickly devoured the book, though, I was relieved (or, at least I convinced myself) that our books are complementary and are each useful in their own way.

If you’re looking for one book to guide you through the entire process, from conception to launch and into the life of a social web application, then this is the book for you.

(via Amazon.com: Christian Crumlish “mediajunkie’s review of Building Social Web Applications”.)

Richard Fleming's Walking to Guantanamo: A closely observed true thing

· long story short

Walking to Guantanamo
by Richard Fleming
Commons (Oct 1, 2008)

I loved this book from start to finish. Fleming is a charming and self-deprecating travel companion: the best kind. His pictorial eye strives to transmit clear, unfiltered images and as his readers we make up our own minds about the pros of cons of hitchhiking across Cuba. Fleming’s wit makes it one of the more enjoyable learning experiences I could imagine, and the people, birds, religions, and politics of the island now mean something to me in a way they never had before, something that refuses to accept a black or white view of the world. Fleming shares his open lens with us and reveals the small truths of human interactions.

A+++++++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN!!!!

(via Amazon.com: Christian Crumlish “mediajunkie’s review of Walking to Guantanamo.)

I fought the bus and the bus won

· long story short

This past week, driving to work on 580 east my car “became involved in an accident” with a bus or large van (it happened very quickly and I left the scene in an ambulance, so I’m not positive of all the details).

It was a terrifying, if brief experience, followed by a wave of grief, horror, and despair. My right ankle was badly sprained and my left pinkie finger was dislocated in a way that turned my stomach.

The consequences for me could easily have been much, much worse. I am convinced that the airbag and seatbelt saved life, so I consider the bruises, cuts, and scrapes all over my body to be a small price to pay.

I was unable to open the driver side door and I called 911 myself. The first paramedics on the scene were primarily interested in keeping my neck steady and making sure I had no spinal cord injuries, no fractures of the “long bones” in my body and no internal (visceral) injuries. They put a brace on my neck, strapped me to a board, and drove me to the Kaiser emergency room.

Thus began a long and dispiriting day and a recovery process that will probably take at least six weeks. Again, I’m really not complaining. Look, I’m even typing with a splint on my left (dominant) hand.

It’s amazing the relatively trivial things that flash through your mind in the aftermath of a disaster like this. Things like “how am I going to play my ukulele now?” and “how am I going to get these presents to the post office.”

I’m lucky to be here. I’m looking on the bright side.

New iPhone stencils for prototypers

· Design, long story short, Patterns, User Experience, Yahoo!

Interaction designer and prototyper Chris Stone recently volunteered to adapt the iPhone stencils in our OmniGraffle based stencil kit in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and optimize them for use in Adobe InDesign.

Chris “created a customizable, vector-based iPhone stencil library for InDesign.”

To make it he worked from the PDF version of the stencil kit originally made by Lucas Pettinati and built out the InDesign snippets with customizable gradients.

See Chris’s blog post Lightweight Prototyping with InDesign for more on how to use them.

(via YUI blog)