BASEMENT.ORG

Posted by richz at 9:48 AM

Teach Your Uncle RSS

Get hold of your non-English speaking, newly emigrated uncle (the one with the jewelry) and sit him down on this 4-minute sketchcast: RSS For The Masses. It's a quick primer on RSS and how to leverage it in Internet Explorer 7 (because let's face it, everybody uses Internet Explorer 7).

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Posted by richz at 9:03 AM

Why Interaction Design Matters

I've just posted a sketchcast called Why Interaction Design Matters. It's (intentionally) short and (hopefully) sweet. Here it is:

Sketchasting is an experimental/hybrid style of podcasting that introduces a whiteboard style of narrating to blogs and podcasting. You can find all future sketchcasts on sketch.basement.org. If you're all about RSS, you can subscribe the RSS feed of sketches. If you're all about watching sketchcasts on your iPod or iPhone, you can subscribe via iTunes by clicking here.

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Posted by richz at 9:18 AM

Let's Meet By The Whiteboard...

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy writing stuff for Basement.org. I've been doing this for a few years now and I still get a kick out of it. Nevertheless, some days do come along where I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what I want to convey but don't want to put the time into writing the post. Eventually I would get to it, but procrastination often prevails. It takes a fair amount of time to write up, revise, edit and tweak a post before publishing it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on where you stand), I'm not one of those quick-ramble bloggers.

So that got me thinkin'...

Can I somehow recreate the communicative power and immediacy that comes from assembling a few people and gathering around a white board? We take for granted how much we can convey effectively in such a short period of time in that type of setting. It's a different medium that lends itself well to pitching ideas or explaining complex concepts.

In the spirit of "jottin-stuff-down-while-you-talk" I'm kicking off a little experiment: sketchcasting. Sketchcasting is essentially podcasting (there's talking audio) with a whiteboard that you draw on and talk over. The sketches will be hosted on http://sketch.basement.org. Here's the first sketch:

If you're diggin' this new-fangled way of blogging/talking/scribbling, you can help spread the word by digging it on Digg (I'm not entirely clear on Digg's policy towards shameless self-promotion, but what the hey).

I'd love to hear your feedback/thoughts on this. I've got a bunch of topics cued up for sketching. This has also been put out as an Arc90 Lab experiment.

One last point, this is not meant to be, in any way, a replacement for good thoughtful writing. It's just yet another means of communication and publication that works well in some cases.

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