Come Say Hi To The Basement.org Guy At SXSW

First off, my apologies for the lack of postings on Basement.org. I am still alive and I've got thoughts I badly want to get down, but time is sparse these days unfortunately.

If you're attending SXSW Interactive, I will be there along with some of my partners in crime from Arc90: Tim Meaney, Avi Flax, and Rama Poola. Tim and I will be giving a talk that should've been called The Revenge of People, but instead it's called The Revenge of Editorials. It's about the Web, people, craftsmanship, content and all sorts of other stuff. We're excited to about it and hope you can join us. It's our first time at SXSW. We look forward to the sensory overload.

In any case, if you'd like to meet up, feel free to email me or ping me on Twitter.

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The iPad & The Side Streets

Anyone that follows this blog knows that I'm an unrelenting advocate of building great user experiences. Whether on the Web, mobile or desktop software, great user experiences enlighten, flatter and elevate users.

As technology continues to accelerate forward, it's become even more critical to mask away the complexities of how things work and to just make them work. Period. Thanks to the likes of Apple, user experience isn't "something we should think about" anymore. It's a key differentiator. A better-designed anything will win.

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The Essential First Step To Blowing Minds

"Less is more."

It's a powerful phrase. It's one of those rare quotes that itself is illustrative of what it's trying to say. If we decompress it, we're really saying something like "If you show less, then each thing you show carries more weight."

Taking the thought a bit further, I'd assert that less isn't only more, "less" is often essential to success. Conversely, "more" often leads to failure. When we release a product, we often want to talk about its power and versatility. Truth is, nobody else wants to hear about that. They want to know – in as simple a manner as possible – why something should matter to them.

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The Admiral's Club & The Junkyard: What Would We Pay For In Today's Web?

When new concepts or constructs are introduced to us, we tend to quickly cement our perceptions about them into stereotypes. Over time, these stereotypes firm up and solidify. They become quite difficult to undo.

The Web today is understood to be "free" in the broadest sense. Here's the general stereotype around the Web today:

Don't put toll booths all over the Web. Let me go where I please and don't charge me money to see anything I want. It's ok to advertise because I understand you need to make money somehow, but don't charge me for content.

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The Rise & Fall of The Nintendo Wii

At Arc90, one of our meeting rooms is proudly called the Wii Room. It’s an informal meeting space with a whiteboard, projector and…a Nintendo Wii. When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.

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Basement.org Turns 5 Today

Five years ago today, I launched this blog, www.basement.org. I actually can’t believe five years have passed. I’ve tried to cover the things that interest me (and hopefully interest some readers) around technology and design. Looking back, it’s been a lot of fun, if at times daunting to post something, anything. Still, no regrets.

Basement.org has often been pegged as a bitch-and-rant blog that just does a whole lot of complaining and not much doing. That’s probably true to some extent. I like to think basement.org is for bitching, while Arc90 is for doing.

Still, I’m kind of proud of some (by all means not all) of the stuff that’s made it onto this blog. It’s still a young, fumbling kindergartner today. Hopefully it’ll pay attention at school, eat its vegetables and have a generally well-adjusted childhood.

Above all else, I hope I can keep the curiosity and desire to look forward in place. In many ways, this blog is about daydreaming, as corny as that sounds. The real world gets plenty of press these days. It’s more fun to daydream.

Note: If you’d like to check out some of the more popular posts, here’s a list from 2007.

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Introducing: Arc90

Nearly five years ago, a sort of resurgent movement was starting to take hold on the Internet. From the ashes of the dot-com apocalypse rose a new view of the Web as not only a place to serve up “Web pages” but as a platform. This was incredibly exciting to me. A series of trends seemed to all be converging at once: RSS, AJAX and the Rich Web and of course simple approachable API’s.

Beyond the technology that seemed to be materializing, a new philosophy was taking hold. This new movement was demystifying and knocking down the walls that had surrounded software building since software building began. Technology was no longer the sole domain of engineers and computer scientists. It was now capable of being exposed to good strategic thinking and thoughtful design. The walls were coming down.

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Google’s Fast Flip : Breaking The Internet & User Experience In One Fell Swoop

So Google decided to break the Internet paradigm today by releasing a new tool called Fast Flip. It’s essentially a visual browser for news. Google apparently has far too much spare CPU time in its datacenters so they decided to take image snapshots of news pages.

This is solid evidence that Google has lost its collective mind. The Internet is about links and connecting content to content. I felt slightly stupid when I clicked on what looked like a search box in one of the snapshots only to find out it’s not a search box but an image of one.

Is there research out there that supports the theory that people want visual artifacts (in the form of snapshots, thumbnails and the like) vs. the actual content? Searchme, a cover flow-style search engine, tried to fulfill a similar phantom need. They raised a ton of venture capital to deliver this visual browse search engine. Nobody cared and now they’re gone.

What’s interesting about this tool is that it’s the anti-Readability. Instead of helping us get rid of the junk around what we’re trying to read, Google fossilized the layout - junk and all - in images.

Bizarre.

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