Category: long story short

  • Norm(s)!

    ocial norms may be defined as a set of values particular to a group, the purpose of which is to provide a sense of balance, a mechanism by which people may gauge what is “normal” and acceptable in a specific context or situation. Such norms are not defined by outside factors; rather, they emerge directly…

  • An essential guide to fostering online community

    Building Social Web Applicationsby Gavin BellO’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,…

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

    Walking to Guantanamoby Richard FlemingCommons (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.…

  • This is what a dislocated pinkie looks like

    The doctor I saw on Wednesday gave me this printout “as a souvenir.” Note the badly strained wrist (seen only as a large bulge, since only soft tissue, no bone, was damaged).

  • I fought the bus and the bus won

    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). Our first step was to inform the attorneys for personal injury cases in…

  • New iPhone stencils for prototypers

    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…

  • Map sketches from over the Pacific

    (san francisco peninsula) (new york harbor) (san francisco bay) (western north america) (bering straits)

  • Happy blog day to me

    Boy was I smart to start my first real blog on my birthday (in ’97). It sure helps keep things straight around here. Somehow along the way I turned 45. What. The. Fuck? Now, in honor of the kind of manic blogging I used to do before the twitter and the employment, I will actually…

  • Down in the Blue Mountains

    teeny falls Originally uploaded by true dirt Briggs took some wonderful pictures in Oz. This one’s from the rainy day we climbed down the ravines in the Blue Mountains.

  • The book has arrived!

    the book has arrived! Originally uploaded by erin_designr We started our book proposal around June of ’08…

  • Smile! You're on candid skitch

    Not a manga or mad man among them.

  • The new phone book is (almost) here!

    The writing is over (for this edition), the book has “shipped to the printer,” and the cover mechanical (shown above, in its technicolor glory) is in the can. My tech writing career is now complete: an animal book with O’Reilly!

  • Open source unbooks and a pattern language for groups

    Two hot bookmarks today, each of which probably warrants a full blog post: Book’em, Github | Linux Magazine tech authors posting source code and sometimes entire books on GitHub Pattern Language of Group Process A pattern language for group dynamics whose goals include (1) To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function, (2) To deepen…

  • When in Rome…

    When my Bulletin article got written up in Metafilter, I started posting replies in haste without allowing the conversation to unfold naturally. I’ve spent a lot more time at Reddit in the last few years than at Metafilter, and more time than both on the Well. Along the way, I forgot some of my experience…

  • Bulletin article Boingboinged

    Cory Doctorow picked up on a brief mention from Bruce Sterling in his wired blog pointing to my recent bulletin article. Cory adds Stupid pitfalls of social media: This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo’s Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does. Commenters seem…

  • Comparing hosting options

    There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet. What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments.…

  • What was the Watergate scandal?

    Another in my new series of longwinded Aardvark answers made public, in this case answering a question about U.S. history from a 19 year-old in New York State: “What was the watergate scandal?” Here’s my answer. (How’d I do?*): Watergate is the name of a famous hotel in Washington, D.C. where a lot of political…

  • Why is Dante's poem called the Divine "Comedy"?

    I got this question from Aardvark and gave a speculative answer i’m not sure, but it may go back to the greek definitions of comedy and tragedy, which are different from ours today. for the greeks, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending and a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.…

  • gee and i've only met barlow once

    gee and i’ve only met barlow once Originally uploaded by xian was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

  • Playing around with Utterz

    Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument: Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

  • Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea

    Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside…