Soldier Ant 

I'm making tentative plans with friends to go see the Jeff Smith exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Saturday (timed to both take in the exhibit and also catch Jeff's conversation with Scott McCloud.) Smith is, of course, a Columbus native. His studio's right in my neighborhood, in fact. Though I'm not sure if he lives down here as well.

I'm playing a bit of catch-up before Saturday, because—I have to admit it—I've only recently caught the Bone bug. Of course, I've been aware of the title: its presence looms large in any indy-friendly comics shop you might walk into. Especially any good comics shop in central Ohio. But something, until now, has just always kept me from reaching for it and diving in. I'm not sure what.

I think it's the design of the Bone family themselves—that kind-of "schmoo-ish" look has always subconsciously said 'for kids!' to me. Of course, now I see the world through Edison's eyes and that's no longer a label that scares me off. And I don't know what the hell I was thinking, anyway!

I picked up trades #1 & 2 the other night at The Book Loft (on one of our weeknight neighborhood jaunts with the Boy) and they're wonderful so far. Gorgeous artwork, and obviously an appeal that extends far beyond 'just kids.' My friend Rob tells me that they're selling the One Volume Edition at the exhibition (which, at $40, is a steal.) So I'm gonna plow through the first couple of trades, then gift them to someone, and hopefully pass the bug along.

He doesn't post as often as I'd like (I know, I know—pot kettle black) but when he does, boy does John Tolva have a way with a phrase:

Living in a house with three small children, I ponder silence as an abstraction, without empirical evidence. If nature abhors a vacuum, children abhor noiselessness. It’s instinctual, the reptile cortex responding to a threat of nothingness. Clear a space of quiet in my home and some child will yelp for no good reason. Like dangling meat in front of an animal that’s just eaten. It’ll still lunge.

Geez what rock have I been hiding out under for the last month or so... my ol' chum Ben has a spiffy new site design (courtesy Eugene Kuo.) I like it.

And Ben is finally blogging! (And has, therefore, retroactively—4 years after the fact!—made a non-liar out of Andrei Herasimchuk.)

Coming out of the IA Summit this year, and following thought-trails down twitter-paths, new friends' blogs etc. It's obvious that design patterns were a huge topic at the Summit. Social design patterns, possibly even more so. Also heard (and stated myself) a couple different times: sharing anti-patterns may be even more critical right now than collecting and cataloguing all the possibilities.

My own talk featured a handful of reputation patterns (coming soon to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library—I promise!) But, if you were listening closely, you probably picked up on a theme. The patterns themselves (Points, Levels, Trophies, Badges, etc) have incredible potential to do harm to your community dynamic. So, taken another way, these patterns can also stand as effective cautionary anti-patterns.

Anyhoo… all of this made me vow (to myself, and now to you) to try and share more after-the-fact analysis, dissection and anti-pattern identification of social media trends. Have you ever noticed how good our industry is at noticing (and praising, and downright trumpeting) “the new” in social media? New product launches get extensive TechCrunch coverage. New Facebook features put the analysts in overdrive. But what about the quiet re-jiggerings? Or outright feature failures?

This, for example, was passed around at work recently. Inside Facebook has noted that FB recently pulled the thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting mechanisms from the News Feed interface. IF notes:

While Facebook has always allowed more general Facebook preferences (like More About These Friends/Less About These Friends), this feedback was much more granular and potentially powerful.

It's too bad Facebook wasn’t able to get more value out of the explicit preference data users were generating. For now, Facebook will need to rely on more implicit data.

Continue reading "Facebook Pulls Their Thumbs" »

Prepare yourself for the new Indiana Jones movie, and read up a bit on the Legend of the Crystal Skulls. (Found via The Daily Grail.)

My talk from the 2008 IA Summit. I hope to add more to this entry later, and upload an updated version to Slideshare with abundant notes. But, until then… enjoy!

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Bloody Frogs, originally uploaded by soldierant.

Tapped out quickly, cause it's on my mind: if you get the chance, you should definitely check out Warren Ellis' Crécy. It's a you-are-there retelling of the humiliating defeat that the French King Philip and his chivalrous army of nobility suffered at hands of… well, what amounted to a 12,000-strong marauding force of armed peasantry. The battle took place at—where else?—Crécy, France in 1346.

The volume is slim (~40 pages, maybe?) but ambitious. In one taught, economical tale Ellis explains exactly why the English hate the French (and the Welsh hate the Cornish. And Suffolks hates 'em all. And… you get the idea) The narrator, William of Stonham, is a foul-mouthed wonder. (Best line—"Old English proverb: if you keep on being their cunt, they'll keep fucking you.")

You learn a lot about warfare and strategy of the day. How longbows work; why crossbows were feared. (Some really nasty strategies for spreading infections to wounds, too. Yick.) In fact, for the educational value, Crécy kind of reminds me of another series of books I really enjoy by illustrator Stephen Biesty The Biesty books, btw, are much more kid-friendly than this one—in fact, don't get this comic for your kid. (Didn't the quote convince you? Also—David Macaulay treads this same territory, too, though I think I've read-but-not-bought some of his works.)

Crécy is great storytelling, and well worth the 6 bucks and change. Check it out! (Or ask me to borrow it.)

It all started with a simple question (as most great—and less-than-great—adventures do.) My friend Christian wond'red aloud on Twitter: "any way to tell who has favorited one's tweets (if anyone has)?"

Which took me through a series of twists, turns, and at least one significant misunderstanding. Which I'm not going to bother to recount! Cause it's boring! (Honesty in blogging is so refreshing, idn't it?)

What I ended up with, however, is a way to share your favorites back to the community, so at least the folks you've favorited might see that fact, and get a tiny bit of Christian's desired ego-boo.. I've been doing just that for a little over a week now, and here's how you can, too.

One: First, head on over to the Yahoo! Pipe that I've created for this purpose: Feed your Favorites. Enter your Twitter name and password, and the Twitter name of the person for whom you'd like to fetch favorites.

Now, this Pipe is a little over-engineered. For our purposes, you probably want to fetch your own favorites, so the third text-entry box is probably extraneous. But I plan on extending it down the road to do some other cool things. So, for now, just go ahead and enter your own Twitter name in that third box, too. Then click 'Run Pipe'…

Two: From the resultant… um, results… that… result… from having clicked the button, you should see a 'More Options' link.

Click that, then click 'Get as RSS', which will return an RSS feed. You want to copy the URL for that feed and save it for the next step…

Three: Visit TwitterFeed and set up a new twitter feed, using the URL collected in Step Two.

I'm not going to go step-by-step into using TwitterFeed. It's pretty straightforward. But I have a couple of recommendations. I would recommend setting a patient interval for updates—I've got mine set to 6 hours. This has two benefits: it's easier on Mario's bandwidth; and it helps prevent near-instant re-tweeting. (I think sharing your Favorites is more impactful if ppl aren't seeing them hit your stream mere minutes after the original observation was made. It's noise at that point.)

Also… I recommend prefixing each tweet with the hashtag '#Favorited'. Please do this, even if you're amongst the possible majority of people who hate hashtags. Because then I can—to some degree—track the usage of this hack.

Finally, where Twitterfeed asks you to Include "Description Only" or "Title Only"… pick one or the other, but not both. For this feed, they're completely redundant, so only one is necessary. And check the checkbox to include an URL. So people can view the original tweet.

Four: Go and Favorite some tweets on Twitter! Then wait for whatever interval of time you specified in the Twitterfeed setup screen. Sometime during that interval, you will see exactly one (the newest) of the items you've favorited be re-posted to your Twitter-stream. It should look something like this:

After that first run, you should see up to 5 favorites tweeted each time Twitterfeed runs. (It depends on the number that you configured at twitterfeed.)

Five: If you continue to let this hack run, you should donate some sheckels to Twitterfeed, to ensure that it keeps on runnin'! Cause bandwidth ain't free, homes. There is a 'Donate' button on their site which—particularly if you followed Step Three, above—you couldn't have missed. I would just link straight to the Paypal donation form, but for some reason that feels kinda phish-ey to me, so go find the button and show Mario some love. (Yes, I did already.) He's built a fun and wicked-handy little service for us all.

Oh, and if anyone actually follows these directions and starts re-tweeting your favorites, please leave a comment below with your twittername so I can follow you!

Babe, originally uploaded by soldierant.

This is Babe. An old family friend and one of the sweetest dogs you'll ever meet. She finally reached the end of her road today and has gone on to be with someone who loved her dearly. Goodbye, Babe. We'll miss ya, gal.