Wordle is cool.
Wordle will generate those interesting word-cloud images you see around the Web from words you paste or URLs you provide. On top of that, you can modify a lot of settings to customize your image. The cloud above was generated from the words on the home page of this blog as of January 2, 2010.
Bing brings it.
When it comes to search, results are what matter. After using Microsoft’s new search engine Bing for the past several weeks, I can safely say that it delivers on the promise of being a great alternative to Google. I didn’t find the results drastically different, but in some ways they were superior. I had some minor issues, but I’m sure those will be worked out.
What surprised me, however, was that in many ways I actually prefer Bing’s more elaborate interface; Google trained me to appreciate its uber-minimal UI, but there are times when more is, well, more.
That said, I’m having a hard time deciding whether to jump ship altogether. Bing is very good, but is it so good that I should drop Google? Since I don’t really see the need to have two major search engines on my dance card, it seems like I have to choose between them.
So, I’m wondering: what’s your preference? Are you binging or googling?
My first impression of the new CNN.com was very positive. I liked the obvious hierarchies; the reductive interface design; the clear bucketing of content types; the ease with which I could find a link that enticed me, and go there.
The new CNN.com.
My second impression was a bit more startling: CNN.com is starting to look like a news aggregator and, as we all know, news aggregators represent one of the primary threats to the branded news site; in fact, some would argue news aggregators represent a major threat to journalism in general.
That aside, I think the new CNN.com design is a tacit admission of what many of us have known all along: users are less concerned about where they get their news, and more concerned about how they get their news.
NewsPulse.
One feature in particular caught my eye: the NewsPulse feature is essentially a filtered news feed that ranks stories by popularity. It’s as though DIGG has taken over this portion of the CNN experience.
A note recording the first message ever sent over the ARPANET
At 10:30 pm on October 29, 1969, the first message was sent from one computer to another via the ARPANET system. The historic transmission? “L.O.” Why? Because the sender, Charles S. Kline (whose initials you see in the log note above), was trying to write “LOGIN” when the system crashed at the letter G.
At this point in history, telephones were for communicating, and computers were for data processing. That is, until a few scientists realized computers should be able to talk with one another.
And here we are, 40 years later.
Here is a quick summary of the 10 fundamentals of UI design from Carsonified. In particular, I like the quotes from known experts.
Twitter's good for business
I was recently asked to develop guidelines for those who post to our corporate Twitter feed; this is what I came up with.
Our tweets should:
*Because we use cotweet, we have multiple posters for our twitter feed.
So long farewell, auf weidersehen good-bye
We all know that Web sites should be programmed to run on most modern browsers; nothing is more frustrating to a user than to be told their software is too old to view your site.
However, we also know that Internet Explorer 6 is a buggy, non-compliant, frustratingly difficult browser to support, as this CNN article points out. Personally, I’ve seen time that could be spent on innovation and engagement devoted to band aid-type efforts to make simple sites work properly in IE6.
Bring Down IE6
That’s why I’m excited to see a grassroots movement that includes Web developers and designers finally taking aim at this albatross. Their mission is not anti-Microsoft. If it were, they wouldn’t recommend upgrading to IE8 as one of their solutions. Rather, they are trying to make sure development time isn’t being wasted supporting a completely buggy piece of software whose time has long gone by.
So, if you’re on IE6, please, please, please, upgrade your browser as soon as possible. Otherwise, the Web might just be leaving you behind.
I was in the process of writing a post outlining my thoughts about why the term social media will have a short life.
And then I saw this presentation. I’ll still write the post about the imminent demise of social media (or, at least, the term social media), but in the meantime, this presentation is informative and fun.
Need a retro arrow?
Remember when Web icons were small, flat, elegant little beauties, as opposed to today’s syrupy sweet jelly beans? These were the days of tiny GIFs that had to convey so much with so few pixels (and they were usually limited to 216 Web-safe colors, to boot)?
Years ago I bookmarked 300 Images from 1800 Sites as a handy reference tool, and today while cleaning up my bookmarks I learned the site still exists!
According to Ro London, the site’s curator, “I visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, I have this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.”
He categorized them, quite helpfully, by type: Arrows, Posts, Comments, Mail, Bullets, Print, and of course Carts and Bags!
So, if you want to take a trip down icon memory lane, visit now before this little museum of the ancient Web goes the way of the lovingly crafted, 256-square-pixel icon.
Lots of icons at iconspedia
Need a glossy, beveled, oh-so-two-point-oh icon? Visit iconspedia, and you won’t be disappointed. They have thousands of free, popular icons in a wide variety of sizes and formats, and the site is quite easy to use.
Add This. Now.
AddThis provides a quick and painless way to get one of those handy-dandy sharing buttons on your site. And, if you register, you can also add analytics to the button.
Life-streaming made easy.
I’ve been using Skimmer for a few days now, and I can report that it’s a pretty nifty little piece of Adobe AIR-powered software. I’ll admit that I was a little skeptical at first. After all, could an ad agency (Fallon) make a decent piece of software? (Sierra-Bravo, a Minneapolis-based technology firm, helped Fallon build Skimmer.)
Skimmer presents feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, and Flickr in a clean, simple format. In addition, it would be great if Skimmer supported more social media feeds, and I would definitely like the ability to see threaded comments on facebook updates, for example.
Normal, widget, and full-screen modes.
While the interface is a little non-traditional, once I got used to it I found it very orderly and responsive, thanks to its Flash underpinnings. One nice feature is its ability to operate as a small window, a widget-sized window, or full-screen.
Next up: tweetdeck.
Hue-rah!
While I firmly believe a talented designer / artist can and probably should create their own color schemes, Color Scheme Designer 3 is an incredibly robust and surprisingly intuitive Flash-based color palette creator that can really help out in a pinch.
Courtesy of Web Designer Wall, here are 30 great sites that use WordPress as their CMS, but don’t look it. As many are discovering, blog software is often an excellent platform for building non-blog sites.