Article What is a Website? by Christopher Butler on March 3, 2009 For Skittles, it's all about leveraging their social-media presence. Now, skittles.com simply provides a small overlay with their social media profile pages. Yesterday, it was their Twitter landing page. Today it's their Facebook page. An interesting approach... Read Now About
Article Check Your Social Network Privacy Settings! by Christopher Butler on March 2, 2009 There's an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that is a good indicator of how social media really is altering things significantly for even those in the Ivory Tower. Though the article is specifically about the role of social networking in academia, I think the following paragraphs could apply to just about any professional who happens to use Facebook, or some other social media tool... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Designing for the Web Today by Christopher Butler on February 28, 2009 Designing for the Web is more like jazz than a symphony. When you design for print, you can control just about every detail, finely crafting your vision and then conducting the production each step along the way. Similarly, classical composers write every note in advance, even including instructions for how the notes are to be played. Read Now About
Article Three Necessary Disciplines for Technology Companies by Christopher Butler on February 27, 2009 This is the full presentation (with audio) from our annual winter retreat. The slides don't all look great- I'm not sure what happens with SlideShare's compression- but you'll get the gist of it all with the audio. Three Essential Disciplines for Technology CompaniesView more presentations from Christopher Butler. (tags: futurism development) Read Now About
Article 100 Meters of Existence by Justin Kerr on February 27, 2009 I generally dislike horizontal scrolling on the web, but one excellent exception is Simon Hoegsberg's online digital photo, We're All Gonna Die - 100 Meters of Existence. It is literally, a 100-meter-long photograph stitched together from 178 individual portraits shot over the course of 20 days at one location in Berlin. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Attack of the 503 Error! by Justin Kerr on February 26, 2009 I love people with a sense of humor. And it seems the folks at iStockphoto have a rather twisted one. Below is the message you see when a 503 error (service unavailable) is generated from their site. I think all of us could take a cue from the iStockphoto developers and take ourselves a little less seriously. Read Now About
Article Three Necessary Disciplines: Think Like a Time Traveler by Christopher Butler on February 26, 2009 This is really about taking a long view of things. In The Time Machine, the moment that H.G. Wells' time traveller disappears from his lab, he begins to follow a timeline that is outside of that of the inexorable forward-thrust of the universe. He continues to skip forward in time, ultimately witnessing the cold death of Earth before finally returning to his own time. This man will never again be able to think solely in terms of his own life's timeline. He certainly can't depend on any technology to hold on to the memory of his travels for him, because that memory extends beyond the confines of technology contemporary to him, as well as any future technology he encountered. All of the sudden, he not only has a long view of things, but his memory is forcibly shaped by that long view... Read Now About
Article Three Necessary Disciplines: Try to Visualize Catastrophe by Christopher Butler on February 25, 2009 What do I mean by this? Well, I think it's often pretty easy to go about life without giving consideration to possible failure, at least not in a realistic way. You've probably heard the phrase "too big to fail" numerous times throughout the past few months of economic crisis. At this point, given the numerous entities to which have been referred as "too big to fail," which have ultimately failed, it would seem that the moniker is a better predictor of failure than a true statement of resiliency... Read Now About
Article The Snarky Side of Technological Progress by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2009 Louis CK on Conan O'Brien: "Now we live in an amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots that don't care." Read Now About
Article Three Necessary Disciplines: Be a Human Synthesizer by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2009 Last Thursday, everyone at Newfangled met for our annual winter retreat. Our program included presentations from Mike, Mark, and me dealing with the direction our engineering department is headed with our CMS, our marketing and new business practices, and how technology is shaping our company. My presentation focused on what I believe are three necessary disciplines to adopt in order to ensure success in our industry... Read Now About
