LatestTHOUGHTS
The International Academy of the Visual Arts
awarded Brainstorm a IAVA 2008 Silver Davey for it's work on the Lumina Camino a la Universidad site.
in Step Inside Design’s recently released, 2008 Best of Web Annual for the design and development of Lumina Foundation for Education’s Camino a la Universidad site.
under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.
Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.
If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]
NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”
Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]
Track the Hive’s Buzz
Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.
Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]
A word from A List Apart about design based on simile.
Looking for a digital color scheme that will last the ages? Colour Lovers explores masters inspired color schemes.
Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.
Regardless of your geopolitical views you’ll likely appreciate the satirical humor of this product parody sketch run amok.
Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.
Here’s Google’s take on the phrase, “Across the pond.” Visit Google Maps, enter New York to London in the search field, scroll to step #24.
How to reduce Firefox from a memory hog to a piglet. Caught this Firefox usage tip over on Ade Olonoh’s blog (see comments).
If you’re a developer or just interested in CSS, check out this article entitled, #IEroot — Targeting IE Using Conditional Comments and Just One Stylesheet,” over on the PIE site.
An iconic-rich, one-click site on how hundreds of the planet’s most noteworthy brands came to be. Updated daily.
From the Bonn Physikshow—A lesson on YouTube regarding the denser than air properties of hexafluoride (likely sulphur hexafluoride) gas.
Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”
Originally published in Communication Arts November Design Annual 2006, here’s their list of 50 essential bookmarks. Conspicuously missing, sites such as Delicious, Technorati and Lifehacker.
Sure to appeal to the megalomaniacal extraterrestrial in all of us. World, meet geoGreetings. When you care enough to send a satellite image.
An interactive glimpse into the the random and spontaneous feedback Jackson Pollock once realized in his medium—sans the clean up.
Pressed toast with panache. From the, “Table Manners Collection,” Delfts Toast Pan by Minale Maeda. As seen on “ohmygooshness.”
March 1st, 2007 at 4:15 am
Surely most of the older people are there because (like me) they have a professional interest in keeping on top of stuff like this?
I’d be more interested in a profile of the frequenct users rather than those who register. I think it would paint a rather different picture.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:24 am
You’re confusing “population” and “participants” with “total number of registrations.”
As a handful of bloggers have reported and discussed over the years, registrants cannot reasonably be called “participants.” Most registrants never come back to Second Life after their first visit. Some who register never log in. Not all registrants are unique users.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
This is a new twist on an ancient facet of human life, in my opinion. Humans have always “lived” vicariously or within their own minds which makes us unique… or we like to think we are unique?
Creative people have always retreated into their own minds, utilizing their surroundings coincidentally. Writers, musicians, artists, economists, politicial leaders, and of course those with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects of their lives depend on this departure from reality. It could, however, become a major problem if everyone retreats from human contact. Let’s hope it can be kept in perspective.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Lee:
Great point. I can only speak from personal experience. I have encountered many intellectually proficient people in SL. Programmers developing products and services for corporations, University researchers, etc. I, like you, would be interested in deeper profile statistics. Perhaps another .think article idea. Thank you for that as well as your comment.
Tony.:
Thanks! Excellent semantic catch. I love semantics. Our use of the word participants was inadvertent, statistically speaking. But in fact those were technically registration numbers (based on SL defs/data anyway).
However, our overriding point, i.e., that the sharp up-tick aggregate growth across wide ranging age groups, remains remarkable based on the overwhelming increase in numbers. Coupled with deepening corporate and education-oriented marketing and research involvement, all the more so. See below for definitions and year over year number comparisons.
“Registrations? is the number of people who registered on Secondlife, including ALT’s (Alternate accounts). These numbers are generated the same way the secondlife.com homepage displays “Total Residents?
SL Registration number January 2006: 124,175
SL Registration number January 2007: 3.1 million
“Unique” is the count of residents that excludes Alt’s matching users by payment information and/or email address. The calculation also excludes individuals that have not logged in:
SL “Unique” number in January 2006: 95,769
SL “Unique” number in January 2006: 2 Million
Again, source for the above: Second Life
Mary Ellen:
Your philosophical viewpoint adds a nice reflective aspect to all our analytical bent.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:00 pm
If you have day dreamed, ever, you have lived in second life. I read in the comments about demographics of registrants, participants etc etc. But the fact is, SL is growing, managing the pains. Answer to the last question;
Not so virtual any more! I can check out next BMW over at SL. I hate those sales people at BMW!
March 1st, 2007 at 9:27 pm
illig, while we’re on the subject of semantics, you are still referring to 3,117,287 registrants as Second Life’s “population.” It isn’t a population in any meaningful sense of the word, for the reasons I earlier described. Even Linden Lab doesn’t call it “population,” they call it “residents.” Another misleading term given the data.
Thanks for trying to explain how you got your numbers, but I’m well aware of the data and its sources, having written regularly about Second Life for the last 3 years. I’m a bit surprised you seem to have missed Clay Shirky’s high-profile deconstruction of Linden Lab’s data reporting, and what the “population” of Second Life might actually be.
Second Life’s population–that is, people actually “living” in-world–at any given time is in the 20k-30k range. That data, as I’m sure you know, can be sampled at any time from the Second Life home page.