I’m completely elated that Barneys.com, a MANOVERBOARD designed site, received the Macromedia Site of the Day award today. Flash partner CLR Media got noted, too. Total dream.
Monthly Archives: March 2004
Passion
I haven’t publicly weighed in on the asinine, anti-semitic, anti-spiritual, aggressive, and agonizing aggravation called “The Passion of Christ,” because so many others have written persuasively on the subject. But, if one is looking for the True Passion, the Box Office By Movie” href=”http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=passionofthechrist.htm”>stats sure are telling.
A Few New Blogs
It’s that time of year (or rather, that time of the morning) to post some new blogs that have come into my purview:
Dishes
There are so many dishes in the sink. And all I can think about are two things:
a. The huge pile of work I have to attend to tomorrow, digital piles on top of piles on top of ruins of email.
and
b. The fact that Coca-Cola never patented its formula, because to have done so would mean that the copyright would have expired and we would all be making Coca-Cola syrup on our stove top. Coke does, however, tell you how Coke is made. After reading it, I estimated that a bottle of the stuff costs them about $0.16 to make.
11:59
I’ve always wanted to post something at 11:59 pm. I’m usually either fast asleep or in the throes of creative endeavor (or both).
I’ve been thinking a bit about the process or trajectory of death. I wonder if the transition between, for instance, sleep and the few moments before death and then full and utter death itself is one of comfort, repose, and certainty or instability, insecurity, and illusion. I think this is the thing that bothers me most about death — the very act of dying, the process by which one’s consciousness is sloughed off into another true state far from one’s experiences or expectations.
As a Jew and a naturalist, I do believe that death, in its finality, cannot be hellish. No G-d worth his salt would want people, animals, plants, or other living things to suffer in eternity — which is a very long time I’ve heard. But as a paranoic, or at the very least a modernist, I wonder if there a screech between the two states, a hurried and lousy rush of feeling, a tension among a million competing parts for the soul to be pulled out into nothingness (or everythingness). I guess I also wonder if that is felt always or sometimes, depending upon the state of the dying and the partiality or fullness of consciousness, which brings me back to sleep, which I must now do.
Brilliant Maps
It is indeed the little things in life that count. In looking for the location of a doctor’s office online this evening, I punched in the address into Yahoo! Maps. In the rest of the country, driving directions are all one might need to get from A to B. But, finally, someone figured out that if one lives in New York City, one might want to know which subway line to take to a specific address.
Yahoo! Maps has done it. Surrounding the starred doctor’s office on the map are very clearly labeled subway stops — and relevant distances to the office were only a click away. Not interesting? Using a technology called SmartView, one can also locate specific restaurants, community services, stores, and even ATMs near any specified address. (SmartView is so new that I could find no online documentation for it.)
SmartView does not yet allow one to see multiple locations at the same time, so if I wanted to find a buy a book, find a cafe, and then rob a bank, I’d have to try different radio buttons sequentially. In the coming search engine battles, it’s these seemingly small advances that are going to win the annual wars.
Is SmartView perfected? Not quite. In typing in my own address, I learned that the nearest “tourist spots” include “Two Little Red Hens Cafe,” the “Brooklyn Museum of Art,” and “FG Guido Funeral Home.”
Bloggers That Aren't Men
Congrats, not so much to the women writing excellent posts and providing great resources online, but to the Daily News for having the smarts to cover the story.
Now, if only some of these bloggers would actually put some effort into customizing their sites, that would be cool. “Template,” regardless of what I said earlier about blogs, begins with the word “temp.”
37
Thirty seven years ago today, I was born.
If this was 1850, I’d have one more year to live, on average.
Blogs Look Nice
It comes via Michael Barrish via Zeldman so you know it has to be good: Lars Holst’s excellent compendium of nicely designed blogs. There are many beautiful blogs out there and Lars has done us all a huge service in providing a comprehensive gallery of blogs that are setting new design standards for the Web.
But I would argue that it’s still text content that is driving the real beauty of blogs and not design — at least not quite yet. I know that this, coming from a design guy, a person that crunches images for a decent living, seems somehow wrong, funny, defeatist. But if you look at some of the most interesting, relevant weblogs out there, they’re not all that well-designed.
Here are a few (and please, no offense to those who own and publish them):
- Anil Dash’s ugly but often prescient blog
- Seth Godin’s timely and useful commentary
- Doc Searls crappily designed but superbly researched notations
- Paul Ford’s fugly but influential Ftrain
- Heath Row’s template-driven, well-written weblog
- Glish’s relevant but sad looking commentary
Would good design make any of these more valuable Web properties? Yes, I believe it would. Interface and interfacing makes a difference, particularly in the way one initially approaches a website. On the Web, first impressions are not everything but they do come close.
But a blog is about second impressions, and then third, fourth, and fifth. In fact, it’s the impressionistic quality of blogs that makes them alternately satisfying, off-putting, and provocative. And those impressions are indeed driven, with occasional exception, by text content alone.
Real Pain
As I’ve written before, RealOne is a crappy application by a ridiculously mercenary company. Jogin writes a few days ago about his experience with Real and I found through Kottke’s message boards that the BBC offers a free, ad-free, painless, and simple version of RealOne so one can listen to the Beeb’s programming happily and without real problems.