Article The All-seeing Eye by Christopher Butler on February 3, 2009 So look, I didn't see the signs. Oops. But they saw me, snapped a pic, sent it to me, and charged me $25 for their trouble. Nice. And yes, I drive a station wagon. What? Oh right. Something about the wonders of technology... Read Now About
Article 21st Century Skillset by Christopher Butler on February 3, 2009 In a culture column of the International Herald Tribune titled "What Technology Has Taught us at Dizzying Speed," Alice Rawsthorn muses on some areas in which technological change has rendered some skills obsolete and introduced new ones. Of course, skill change resulting from technological advances is not a new concept, but the especially quick turnaround that the author observes today seems to be unprecedented. "Just think of all of the skills that, if (like me) you're over 30, you learned years ago, but rarely use now because something else does the job for you. Who needs to learn how to spell when you can use spell-check software? To read a map in the age of sat nav? To be good at math when there are calculators? To remember exactly where that great antiquarian bookstore is in Paris when it's so easy to Google it? Those old skills haven't suddenly become useless..." Read Now About
Article How to call a javascript function from flash. published on February 3, 2009 A small example of how to call javascript from flash. Read Now About
Article How to Promote Your Blog Content by Christopher Butler on January 30, 2009 First: If you're new to blogging, read our newsletter, Is it Time to Start a Blog? and check out our webinar, How to Blog. Once you've created a guideline or editorial calendar for your blog, you can get started writing. Each blog post you write should be promoted off-site in order to increase awareness of your blog and drive traffic to your site. Keep in mind that shorter posts, especially those that are just added to share a link and perhaps a brief comment, should not be promoted in the same manner as a more lengthy post. I use the following sites every time I post to my blog... Read Now About
Article Simplicity by Christopher Butler on January 29, 2009 Take a moment to watch this video of John Maeda (of MIT Media Lab fame, now President of my alma mater, RISD) speaking at the TED conference about simplicity patterns. I really enjoy Maeda's whimsical take on simplicity in our lives (you'll see what I mean). This reminds me of a slogan that we say here at Newfangled - sometimes sarcastically, sometimes in a celebratory way - "Another day, another rectangle," which points out that, from a design perspective, sometimes websites are just rectangles. It's that simple ;-) Also, for you TED enthusiasts out there, here's an interesting take from this week's New York Times Magazine: Confessions of a TED Addict. Read Now About
Article Slideshare is Awesome by Christopher Butler on January 29, 2009 When I started developing material for this month's newsletter, How to Use Google Analytics, I knew that I wanted to include some kind of multimedia presentation showing our own analytics account as an example. I thought about using various screen capture tools to create a video, but I wanted to make sure that the analytics screens were a bit clearer and the size could be easily enlarged. At some point, Able asked our LinkedIn group about SlideShare, which prompted me to check it out. It ended up being just what I was looking for... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy History According to the ‘Net by Christopher Butler on January 28, 2009 I just read an opinion in the Guardian titled We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories, by Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library. This is something I've considered before, but first, a pertinent quote: "At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable..." Read Now About
Article The End of Solitude? by Christopher Butler on January 27, 2009 I came across a wonderful piece written in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled The End of Solitude, by William Deresiewicz, which emphatically voices a concern that I have found growing in me with increasing fervor. Here's a long, but important quote: "But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness..." Read Now About
Article Keeping Your Site Safe from the Bad Guys published on January 27, 2009 One thing that has evolved almost as quickly as the web itself is the rise of security problems associated with it. Web developers today have to take great care in not introducing security holes into websites. These security lapses can come from something as seemingly innocuous as a simple contact form. Read Now About
Article Time Definitely Has Value by Christopher Butler on January 26, 2009 I am just finishing up reading Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy by Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, which, written in 2000, was an exploration of how new methods of information delivery and interaction were eliminating the traditional business strategic distinctions between richness and reach. Evans and Wurster expected the internet to level the playing field, at least for a time, of competition in capitalist markets. Of course, we know now that they were right. However, a passage early in the text has got me thinking that they probably discounted something pretty important... Read Now About
