The Barbarian Blog

I'm a Driver, I'm a Winner.

Ryan McManus — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:17:00 -0500

So, The L Magazine, bastion of Brooklyn culture, recently had a contest where patrons could nominate their bodegas for Best Bodega in NYC. For those of you outside the NYC area, a bodega is a corner store that carries the essentials: coffee, egg and cheese sandwiches, some dusty cans of goya, and most importantly, beer (here in NYC, you can only buy beer outside of a liquor store, you know, because it’s still the 1400s?)

So I nominated the guys at On The Corner, which not only is the closest bodega to my house, but is literally the best one I’ve been to – they’re just really interested in making it the hub of the neighborhood.

And L Magazine agreed, so they gave them the award.

And then they gave me a prize: A week’s supply (7 six-packs) of whatever beer I wanted.

We all win.

The Reality Behind Up in the Air - Page 1 - The Daily Beast

Rick Webb — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:03:47 -0500

The Reality Behind Up in the Air – Page 1 – The Daily Beast :p. Stories from people who played the laid-off people in Up in the Air. Mildly depressing.

Un-Representative Representatives

Noah Brier — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:36:26 -0500

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin points a fun Washington Post article that imagines new ways to divide Senate seats . Here’s the income plan:

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets—with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Obviously this won’t be happening anytime soon, but it definitely puts into perspective just how un-representative our representatives are.

via Snarkmarket

COMMENTS OPEN

"In a decision that deprives open-source foes of some rhetorical fodder, the group that licenses..."

Rick Webb — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:40:05 -0500

“In a decision that deprives open-source foes of some rhetorical fodder, the group that licenses patents for the widely used H.264 video-encoding technology chose to renew a streaming-media freebie through 2015.”

- _ Web video gets H.264 royalty reprieve | Deep Tech – CNET News _

Seeing the Internet

Noah Brier — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:27:59 -0500

I really loved this article about the many ways people visualize the internet . It brought me back to great scenes in movies like Hackers, where the internet is this totally ridiculous looking thing. The author attempts to explain the phenomena:

The problem isn’t really that we don’t know what the Internet looks like. It’s that what it looks like is so horribly ugly: not a glistening Tootsie Roll pop, not an open freeway, not a shimmering clear pool of chlorinated water nor a siren-littered sea, not even a chiseled movie star, but giant, hulking factories dotting the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and the Eastern Seaboard, covering old landfills, sprawling, like dozens of Costcos smashed together, stacked with metal and diesel generators and powerful cooling systems, crossed by power lines that deliver 2 percent of the world’s energy to the so-called cloud, where your tax returns and credit card statements cross paths with Medicare files and corporate budgets and your old love letters and the photos of Jennifer Aniston’s newest boyfriend.

While reading I got so inspired I decided to set up a little site to catalog all the great ways the web gets visualized. So, with no further ado, I present Gallery Interweb . If you’d like to add your favorite, you can do that to (thank you Tumblr submit functionality). Excellent. Let the fun begin.

COMMENTS OPEN

Formal Friday Salute: Doppelgängers!

Kevin Chan — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:24:00 -0500

Double the formality. (Thanks to Treffyn for manning the webcam!)

A TED talk in which mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium...

Josh Carr — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:08:54 -0500

A TED talk in which mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium — and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world.

Jozef Van Wissem on swan neck baroque lute playing “Amor...

Josh Carr — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:52:57 -0500

Jozef Van Wissem on swan neck baroque lute playing “Amor Fati (Love is a Religion)” from his Ex Patris LP on Important Records. Performed at Augustijnenklooster, Ghent in July 2009. Beautiful and haunting pacing.

"No piano need feel duty-bound to always sound like a piano"

Josh Carr — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:51:00 -0500

“No piano need feel duty-bound to always sound like a piano”

- Glenn Gould, as quoted from this excellent review of Bill Orcutt’s most impressive LP, “A New Way To PAy Old Debts.”

Rule #1 of interactivity: guide your users with simplicity

Anthony Dines — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:13:00 -0500

Do you design web non-sense? Do you build real world tools? If the things you build in life require at some point for someone to interact with it, at some point you are going to have to educate the user how to perform some necessary actions. It is our job as designers to not only make powerful and efficient “tools”, be they websites or awesome power drills, just as important is guiding the user to success without patronizing their intelligence.

This article does a pretty great job at summing up the concept of walking a fine line of simplicity, personality and intuitiveness in web design.

Colt 45 Commercial #1 (1967)

Ian Westcott — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:31:06 -0500

Colt 45 Commercial #1 :p. I favorited a YouTube video: Please subscribe!

Michael Bierut of Pentagram talking about clients. If...

Anthony Dines — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:58:42 -0500

Michael Bierut of Pentagram talking about clients. If you’re a designer, you should probably watch this.

"Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE… It wants to GET PAID on Fucking..."

Rick Webb — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:40:00 -0500

“Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE… It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.”

- _ Subscriptions are the New BLACK. ( why Facebook, Google,&Apple will own your wallet by 2015) – Master of 500 Hats p. This was a pretty great article, a cathartic read. I especially liked this:

We have largely WASTED an entire web decade of time, energy&venture capital on extremely inefficient revenue models. There have been a few interesting examples of startups acquired in the 00’s for large amounts due to amazing growth (eGroups, MySpace, Skype, YouTube) or advertising potential (aQuantive, DoubleClick, AdMob, RightMedia). However, mostly the decade has been an uninterrupted string of uninspiring business models and small-time acquisitions of Web 2.0 startups filled with rainbows&unicorns, rather than those based on simple, transactional revenue models.

I should add one thing he’s leaving out: SERVICES. MAN. What is with the internet that no one wants to provide professional services? It’s like everyone working on the web wants to start a car manufacturer instead of selling or repairing cars.

Well let me ask you this: how many people got rich starting a car company? And how many people got rich starting a dealership, a dealership chain or a repair garage? A lot fuckin’ more. Will it make you a billion dollars? No. Do you need a billion dollars? No.

What's consumer research?

Rick Webb — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:51:49 -0500

gautamramdurai :

p. notdickless :

p. gautamramdurai :

p. You don’t understand your audience by reading research reports, poring over demographics and analyzing preset stereotypes. You understand them by talking to them, living their lives, speaking to their friends, watching the shows they watch, reading the books they read, dining at the places they dine at. Research is not just about deconstructing human beings through numbers and graphs and reports – it’s all that and so much more.

It’s about understanding, it’s about letting go of your pre-conceived notions, it’s about empathy – it’s about realizing that they’re not your target – they’re * people. *

Who are you? You’re not a strategist, that’s for sure.

Ha ha – I’ll take that as a compliment! :D

This is manifestly confusing. You do all of these things. You live the life, talk to the people, MAKE the research, and read the research other people make. You may think you can understand them by talking to them, living their lives, speaking to their friends, watching the shows, yes. But that is DOING the research. And while you’re doing research, someone else is doing research too, and you damn well better be reading their research too. You can talk to all the people you possibly can, but someone else is talking to more of them. Read their research too. Anyone who thinks any sort of planner or strategist sits around reading research grossly underestimates the job. I don’t know a single one who spends ANY time at all “analyzing preset stereotypes.” And I know a lot of strategists and planners.

Why Not Try an API?

Benjamin Palmer — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:20:56 -0500

Why Not Try an API? :p. my ADWEEK article about APIs for advertisers

"My personal 35-year long software odyssey has made abundantly clear to me that the task of..."

Rick Webb — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:22:05 -0500

“My personal 35-year long software odyssey has made abundantly clear to me that the task of satisfying the user can only be achieved by fully integrating both the development and the interaction design practitioners into a single, self-organizing, self-directed team.”

- _ An Insurgency of Quality -Alan Cooper (via justinbaum )p. OKAY OKAY JUSTIN, I GET IT ALREADY. YOU WANT A PROMOTION. SHEESH. :P

"Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so..."

Ian Westcott — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:45:53 -0500

“Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone. What we’re trying to say is that Apple has opened the door for people to create Jumanji-style games – music-filled, fun-packed experiences that can be shared in a novel way. The iPad is an interactive board game platform that could easily revive board game culture and introduce new generations to classic family games. It’s up to developers though to take advantage of this opportunity and show us the future of family-based digital games.”

- _ iPad board games: Apple has created a ‘Jumanji platform’ – Recombu (via noneck )_

sciencevsromance: via rickwebb: www.boingboing.net worth...

Rick Webb — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:08:54 -0500

sciencevsromance :

bq. p. via rickwebb : ””:http://www.boingboing.net ” www.boingboing.net

worth every Penny, I’m sure.

Sure, you know. If you had some savings, put it all in some solid investments, were sick of all your friends and had a few years to kill, why not?

Formal Friday Salute: Floor!

Kevin Chan — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:49:00 -0500

We are getting totally desperate for new photo ideas.

rachelmercer: What makes a campaign viral? Wow this makes me...

Rick Webb — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:28:31 -0500

rachelmercer :

p. What makes a campaign viral?

Wow this makes me want to get into another line of work.