Current Cites for July 2011

 

Current Cites for July 2011 is out! You can find the issue here...

MetaFilter - Happy 12th Anniversary!

MetaFilter was the original community blog. It's where everyone went to discuss everything from web design to politics. Last week it celebrated its 12th Anniversary.

The site was originally put together by Matt Haughey and frequented by techies. There was a lot of discussion in the early days about web design and development. Adherents of Jacob Nielsen and web designers would trade barbs particularly over the use of Flash (hence the 'Flash Wars'). This was a dispute not settled until the arrival of more reasonable adherents of usability like Jared Spool who knew how to speak to designers and thus had a far more positive impact.

Later on as membership grew, topics of more general interest such as news and politics became more prominent. MetaFilter was where we went to discuss the fall-out from the Bush-Gore election results in 2000 as well as the aftermath following 9/11.

Anyway, the local alternative weekly where Matt Haughey lives in Portland has run an interesting article on him called, "The Blogfather". Also, MetaFilter has its own page of user-submitted reminiscenes called, "MetaFilter Memories".

Give Me a Chicago Butt - Or No Butt at All!

You know, when we look up the dress of a 26-foot statue in the middle of downtown, we have every right to expect the butt we see there to scream, 'Chicago' from cheek to cheek.

So if they ever do this again, I suggest they use Mrs. O'Leary maybe or Oprah Winfrey -- clad of course in nothing but a bra and girdle. That way they'll have someone with connections to Chicago (finally) while still appealing to boys in 5th grade.

When Design Gurus Clash: Edward Tufte vs. Don Norman

I was going through an interesting article on (quantitative) design guru Edward Tufte when I came across this interesting spat between him and (simplicity) design guru, Don Norman that -- despite a cheap shot by Tufte -- seems to wonderfully address polar opposites:

"Some designers have questioned whether Tufte's reverence for elegance and accuracy can verge on dogmatism, with too little consideration of context or audience. "The world is not filled with professional statisticians," said Donald Norman, the codirector of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University and the author of The Design of Everyday Things. "Many of us would like a quick glance just to get a good idea of something. If a graph is made easier to understand by such irrelevancies as a pile of oil cans or cars, then I say all the better." (Tufte deflects this criticism by pointing out that Norman has been a paid consultant to Microsoft; Norman says his consulting work has nothing to do with his own thinking and writing.) "

'Er Kommt' - Or My Short Stint as a False Prophet

Of the many encounters I had in Berlin recently, one of the more interesting was with a woman who I had never met before. It was at the Bauhof Anniversary Party and she came up and gave me a photo which she had taken over twenty years earlier.

The photo was of a poster of me with the words, 'Er Kommt' (i.e. 'He's coming'). She had seen the poster plastered all over the neighborhood and like a few others at the time, had interpreted it as the harbinger of some significant event.

The truth was far more mundane. I had spent much of the year (1987) in New York and when Tony Millionaire heard I was coming back, he grabbed a photo of me from my expired passport, enlarged it and proceeded to paste photocopies of it all over Kreuzberg. So I guess you could say it was a significant event -- but more along the lines of Tony Millionaire finally getting his American drinking buddy back. I hope she wasn't disappointed.

Berlin SO36

Popular tourist destination.