Think Happy Thoughts

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Good To See Charlie Brown’s Teacher Get Work

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I Wonder If He Won?

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Plumber Called In To Repair

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Epic Apology

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1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests.  You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area.   You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame.  Live Tweeting events are great because they  are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new  people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current  discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

8. Brand Monitoring

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

10. Hiring People

11. Build Your Personal Brand

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

Ron Knight is a US based Internet Solutions consultant with many years of experience helping people and businesses out in establishing a stronger presence on the web. ManyInternet Marketing Services India companies have benefited immensely from his advice. Read more at thuff007.wordpress.com

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Myth #10: If the Design is a Good One, You Don’t Need to Test It

Myth #9: People Don’t Change

Myth #8: Design to Avoid Clicks

Also,  there is an interesting story on the work of another pioneer Walter Dorwin Teague when consulting for Kodak. In an effort to sell more Kodak cameras to women, the ‘Vanity Camera’ was released in five distinct colors. The iPod, decades later was to use the same trick (and with a very similar color palette.)

Myth #7: UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product

Myth #6: If you Have Great Search, You Don’t Need Great Information Architecture

Myth #5: Can’t Decide? Make it a Preference

Every preference which is not really needed is a design choice that I’m offloading to all the users of my product or service.

I tend to think of it like using a screwdriver to open a tin of paint. It’s actually not the best tool for the job (because it has a tendency to bend over time), but it’s the first thing that comes to mind for many people to use, and is something they are very comfortable with. Similarly, we once had a nice email from the forensic department of a Police force who wrote to say how handy they found Comic Life to be for laying out (gruesome, I imagine) crime scene photos. The simplicity of the tool meant it was applied in many contexts for which it wasn’t designed.

Myth #4: Design Always with Implementation in Mind

Good reading: 37signals’ Ryan Singer on separating design from implementation.

Myth #3: People Know What They Like

There is also the infamous story of ‘chunky spaghetti sauce’ told by Malcolm Gladwell (Here’s a TED talk where he retells the story) imploring that market research (asking people what they want) won’t always reveal the products they do want. This one is also easy to misinterpret — asking what people want is a great thing—it might just take you some detective work to find out their real needs, and imagine how to fufil and surpass them.

Myth #2: People Read

However, this small piece of static and useful text in the Comic Life interface(below) seems to work well.

Myth #1: The Design Has to be Original

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You can view the talk at blip.tv. You may need headphones during the post-talk discussion to hear the !me part of the conversation. Thanks a ton to Blaze Streaming Media for the stellar video work.

The @ sign through most of its history meant Each at. It was a commerce term. “Apples 10@.49″ It survived the typewriter cut by being placed as a shift above the 2, a position it still holds today. Then the Internet showed up. In 1971, when Ray Tomlinson was writing the first email system and needed an addressing system to send a message between two computers in the same room (but via Arpanet). He needed a separator between the name and the location. Oh, @ works perfectly. The @ symbol then adopted a new meaning: Location. Then Twitter showed up. Because Twitter is simply an unthreaded long list of messages where you can’t easily track a conversation, people early on adopted a convention used in discussion groups to target a reply to a specific person, as in “@billder That joke wasn’t so funny.” But then a subtle twist occurred. People began to use the @ convention to simply refer their username as their identity. “I really wish @billder would lay off of the snowman jokes.” In fact, the @ symbol is so strongly identified with Twitter identities that only saying “@billder” is enough of a way to contact somebody. The @ symbol then adopted its current meaning: Identity.

Pound sign, number sign, hash. The main two meanings of the # sign prior to the Internet were either number or pounds. Essentially, # meant Quantity. But again, Twitter provided a way for this symbol to evolve. Early on, people recognized that people talked in topics and desired a way to track certain topics. Chris Messina then proposed using the # symbol to mean “topic.” It worked. People used it, and software developers responded to this organic evolution of the # sign and built tracking functionality. Voila! # means Context.

The tilde (~) started it off. Normally it’s a diacritic above characters to indicate change in pronunciation, mostly commonly in Spanish and Portuguese. But it’s mathematical sense of approximation seemed to be the theme, i.e. ~50 means “about 50″. ~ To indicate dating. Bob~Mary means that Bob and Mary are sorta dating, just hanging out. Of course, Liv=Mel means they’re married. Was engaged ~~? ~ When writing a list of things to do, ~ indicates something started but not quite finished. ~clean office. ~write this blog post. It’s approximately done. ~ In Unix, it means home. My first webpage was www.nowdefunctdomain.com/~billder ~ means Approximate. I am ~French-Canadian. It is ~raining.

The exclamation point (!) or “bang” didn’t generate much interest. It’s already used to mean emphasis, dammit! It did used to mean “route” in early Unix UUCP days, used similarly to @ today. The typical wow! usage of the exclamation point is a bit opposite from its mathematical sense of “not” or “false”. It goes from extremely positive! to !negative. The Earth is !flat. George Bush is ~!President. ! means Opposite.

The caret (^) is another diacritical used in a lot of languages above vowels to indicate different pronunciation. Way too many examples to dig into. It also has the math meaning of power. 2 multiplied by itself 3 times is 8, 2^3=8. All math symbology is highly condensed shorthand to convey complex relationships. One person in the crowd uses ^ to conjoin disparate ideas to see what happens. Take any two words. Digital. Vegetables. Now conjoin them, digital^vegetables. It’s a way to invent ideas. In fact, it’s similar to a great sci-fi book called The Futurological Congress from Stanislaw Lem wherein futurologists combine words to discover new ideas to predict the future. The caret even looks like it’s joining^words. It’s two little arms connect each word and then points up to ask, this + that = what? ^ means Conjoin or Juxtapose. Belgian^piston. Wool^clock. Symphony^party. Touchscreen^cat.

In math, ⊄ means “not a subset of”, paired up with ⊂ “a subset of.” Pugs ⊂ dogs. Oranges ⊄ lizards. But others had some great ideas for ⊄ I cut my finger. “Oh frack, I ⊄!” Don’t go back there. “⊄ that dude. He’s no good for you.” Not magnetic. I love this one. “This orange is ⊄” But the best idea was to represent a wall plug. In airports, cafes, ⊄ indicates “electricity here.” ^ means Power Available.

Snowman with a Fez probably generated the most hilarity. And why not, it’s a snowman with a fez, or at least that’s what I saw. Somebody else saw Spicy Food for Gringos. In general, it’s a wtf? Ever seen a snowman in the desert? This this really isn’t possible. So, it’s an oxymoron, a non-sequitur, a wtf? “Dude, you’re being a snowman with a fez.” Can it be a symbol of sarcasm, maybe even replacing <sarcasm> HTML tags? Oxymoron.

The knight is a chess symbol, indicating, well, the knight. First idea, transportation. Sure, but a bit literal. “Condoms available here.” Wow. But then somebody threw out the gem. It’s a threat. A classic Mafia I’m going to leave a horse head in your bed threat. Perfect. So maybe being knighted isn’t such a good thing anymore? Threat.

The musical symbol was generally a happy symbol for most people. It’s music, song, singing. There were a few downer ideas. Painful like a tooth nerve? A redundant person, because they’re a one noter? But it’s a happy symbol. It’s sometimes used with statements to add a Wheeee! quality to it. Wheeee! The sun is shining! Happy.

Finally, a hand holding two fingers up. It’s simply the number two. Or most commonly, Peace. I’m not a crook. Breeding like a rabbit. But with two of them, used in pairs to surround a word or phrase, AIR QUOTES. Read more at www.pushclicktouch.com

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