Planner Reads

Ever wondered how to make a four year old’s head explode: Install a Gummi Bear Chandelier in her room.

'Frenzy' by Amayu, courtesy of Flickr

“The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Landon Kettlewell, fictional CEO Kodak/Duracell in Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”

I’ve finally finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” and – like a lot of people I suspect – needed to take a little break afterward to put my brain back together again. It’s the usual Doctorow high octane cocktail: stuffed full of imaginative near-future action & immutable human frailty, at times the plot veers close to depicting a post-capitalist, economic Armageddon. I’m not going to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying more.  Instead, against an ever-increasing backdrop of recent pieces examining crowdsourcing (here are two of our own, here and here), I wanted to dig quickly into a single thought that the book provoked in me within its first few pages.

What if, instead of thinking about sourcing from the crowd, we reverse engineer that thought. In other words, why not send the ...

Last weekend I was lucky enough to spend my first weekend in Napa (yes, I'm walking a San Francisco ad cliche).  Pretty amazing place, and some seriously stunning food.  (If you're ever in or near Yountville, I strongly recommend a visit to Bottega and Ad Hoc.)

It struck me how a lot of the weekend felt like it was reminding me of times past.  it was about sitting down and taking time to enjoy a glass of wine and food.  About the product you were enjoying being the result of a few simple, high quality ingredients being combined into something that showed the chef's skill of technical ability, taste and confidence in restraint (the antithesis to both fast food and the overbearing whizzbang of nouvelle cuisine).  And the desire to serve it in a relaxed, homely style that feels refreshingly at odds to the daily cut and thrust and posturing.

I'm going to stretch this to make a point.  What concerns me when I look at a lot of the work we're producing as an industry at the moment (and frankly the culture we're consuming) is that it's often all about technical fireworks to dazzle, rather than showing the restraint to let the ...

Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app.

Stickybits is that app. Founded by Billy Chasen (the original programmer behind Chartbeat) and Seth Goldstein (chairman and founder of SocialMedia), the startup just closed a $300,000 seed round from Polaris Venture Partners and Mitch Kapor. Officially launching this week at Austin’s SXSW festival, stickybits is a new mobile app for both the iPhone and Android. It lets you scan any barcode and attach a message to that physical object.

The barcode in a greeting card , for instance, could trigger a video message from the sender. One on a ...

Fully draggable, zoomable, Zelda-like map of NYC…this is awesome. But where are the Octoroks? (via waxy)

Tags: maps   NYC

Here’s looking at you, data point.

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/67/428271747faved by Melissa

FloatingSheep, a fun geography blog, looks at the beer belly of America. One maps shows total number of bars, but the interesting map is the one above. Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.

Of course there are plenty of possible explanations for the distribution. Maybe people get all their food from superstores like Walmart in the red dot areas, so there are fewer gigantic stores than there are small local bars.

Then again, the FlowingSheep guys did their homework and found, according to Census, that the number of drinking places in those red dots are really skewed compare to the average. So it’s also possible that area of the country just likes to drink a lot.

Anyone who lives in the area care to confirm? I expect your comment to be filled with typos and make very little sense. And maybe smell like garbage.

[Thanks, Michael]

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2010 is the year of the infographic. From chickens to iPhone apps to the Denzel Washington Venn diagram, stats have never looked so sexy. At the moment I’d have to class the one below as my favourite.

This infographic illustrates the benefits of socialising your website and/or seeding good content into social networks. One stat that I’d like to add is that Facebook users share an average of 12 pieces of content per week, with the integration of Facebook Connect into websites across the globe assumed to be the reason behind the 500% increase over the last 6 months [source].

For those with flash websites, try to share your key pieces of content. This should become the number one priority of your web strategy.

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As someone who does a lot of screwing around on the internet in the name of creativity, it’s always nice to read an article like this from Wired about the value of distraction (especially the kind you run into on social networks).

A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.

In all seriousness, though, two things jump out at me about this: First, it falls into some of the thinking I’ve had about the role of serendipity tools in the creative process. What makes the web magical is it’s ability to deliver the information you didn’t know you were looking for and I absolutely believe you can optimize services for that (I’m working on one now). Second, and I think I’ve mentioned this in the past, I see a real connection between input and output: When I stop spending time on the web consuming content, I don’t think as well.

via The Awl

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