Tag: technology

Ten Steps to Blogging Genius Presentation

The reason you should never use a 4G photo memory card is that when it konks out, you lose weeks of your life. I can’t even remember what was on the begining of the damn thing, but all my Detroit photos so far are kaput. I’ll miss you Eastern Market, gorgeous burnt-out ruins, weird face Melissa makes when you tell her you want to cuddle. I’ll miss all of you. In the meantime, here are some presentation photos Bryan took.

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UX Week 2007 Roundup

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I’ve already mentioned the One Laptop Per Child presentation. Here’s my UX Week roundup of other presentations that I found moving:

The Charmr
Adaptive Path introduced its product concept for how a diabetes management device should look and function.

Clear Rx
Deb Adler presented her revolutionary redesign of prescription pill bottles, which was later purchased by Target. She noted that 60 percent of Americans don’t take their prescriptions correctly, often because instructions are so confusing and bottles look so much alike. She also said that the toughest logo to design was “for external use only.” So if you have a lightening-bolt idea, let her know.

Yahoo Teachers
Bill Scott and Karon Weber are creating a new tool that helps teachers collect web research and share lesson plans. It is unbelievable. You can drag and drop any element of a web page while you’re researching, then search for other people’s lesson plans by grade, subject, and state standards. You can even locate nearby teachers who have to teach around the same local events (Chinese New Year in San Francisco, for example). It shows you top-rated, most recent, and most copied lesson plans, and lets you build a network of teachers whose work you trust. Holy crap, it’s going to rock your world, teachers.

Also, Andrew Hinton from Vanguard said something that I’ve been mulling over lately, “An individual is not defined by any one practice, but we do typically want to identify with one.” In other words, “What do you do?” can be a tough question for some of us

UX Week: One Laptop Per Child

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So, as I mentioned, Adaptive Path’s UX Week was amazing this year — so inspiring. These photos are of the One Laptop Per Child Operating System presentation. If you’re not familiar with the project, their aim is to make sure that every child in the world has access to a laptop. Their first large scale distribution is in September, and the computers are amazing.

Details:

-They work in direct sunlight and have hand cranks to power them.
-The icon on the front of the computer represents a little person, and can be color customized to suit a kid’s preferences.
-The operating system is awesome. It’s based on the idea of a community of people participating in activities. When someone in your network is doing something (playing a music game, making a drawing, writing something), and they want others to join in, they make their activity public. That activity icon appears on everyone’s desktops. You can see at a glance which activities are popular, because the xo icons gather around a task in which they’re participating. You click on your preferred activity icon to join the fun, and clicking puts you into an interface with the tools you need to play or learn. A “journal” feature automatically records (saves) everything you do, so you can go back and see what you did, when you did it, and who else helped.
-About 2,000 developers around the world are developing activities for the laptop.
-The laptops are tied to a leasing system that immediately deactivates a laptop if its reported missing or stolen.
-School participation is way up in communities where kids get these laptops, and for many families, the laptop is the brightest source of light available in their homes.

You can learn more at the One Laptop Per Child site. It’s a genius project.

In D.C.

We’re in D.C. for Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week, and we’ve decided to roll with the baby’s jetlag, as midnight to 8 a.m. is a far more awesome schedule than his usual 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. It’s a much bigger conference this year, and AP encouraged a few of the speakers to bring their babies along (which partially explains the much higher proportion of female speakers than you typically see at other conferences). The presentations have been surprisingly moving so far — a lot of speakers who are really using design to change people’s lives in meaningful ways. More later.

There Goes August

Let’s say you’ve had a particular Yahoo email address since college. You use it to order products, give it to new people you meet, keep in touch with old friends. Now say it randomly stopped forwarding to your daily inbox about two years ago. And you? Failed. To. Notice.

You randomly log in to find thousands of messages waiting for you. Notes from old friends, notices from services, Evite after Evite after Evite.

Suddenly, you can taste the upper part of your esophagus.

Once you begin breathing again, how much time do you spend searching for the “Do Over” button before it’s acceptable to bang your head against the keyboard?

Book Update

Lately, Matthew Baldwin of Defective Yeti is posting like crazy, and he’s been pulling a few ideas from my book, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. Here’s my favorite 100 Ideas-inspired post so far. Never underestimate the power of acid wash jeans and red suspenders to make your heart go pitter-pat.

Meanwhile, Jeff Veen, user experience guru for Google, mentioned my book in a discussion of how the web is turning amateurs into experts, and tools like Vox and my book are helping on that front.

Blogging expert Leah Peterson is playing along by asking readers to submit something via mail for inclusion in a group painting. She has a P.O. box for submissions, so send something her way.

Finally David Beach, formerly of Yahoo Shopping and now with Wink, is still hard at work whittling his body down and upping his health quotient at Die Old. I mentioned Beach in the book because I’m pretty inspired by what he’s doing. Go on over and lend a helpful comment. It would be great to see him build a community around the idea of dying old.

That’s it for now. If you haven’t bought the book, I hope you do, as I think you’ll like it. If you have, please link to your 100 Ideas posts in the comments. I can’t wait to read them.

Ed Note

OK, you know how I’ve been posting for more than six years and have never, ever posted on weekends? This NaBloPoMo schedule is really throwing me for a loop. If I inadvertently skip a weekend day out of deeply ingrained habit, please forgive me. I’ll even out the karmic debt by adding an extra post to make up for my stupitude.

Just Write

Eden over at Fussy has just christened National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), during which participants agree to post every day during November.

She has quite a list of participants going, and I’m falling in line. I can’t resist tidy little packets of accomplishment. Won’t you join me? Yes! Do!

And please don’t tell me you can’t think of anything to write about. By now, you know what to do about that.