Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Often times when being approached by small businesses designers have a lot of ability to make a lot of strategic decisions in the benefit of their client. For numerous reasons, this can be both good and bad. A recurring trend I have seen when working with these clients is that often times they are so focused on obtaining new business that they almost completely forget about their existing customers/clients/patients. Usually it takes some persuasion, but the idea of building an email marketing campaign to leverage existing customers is adopted by the small business.

While I normally try to avoid work that is strictly SEO, it sure does seem like it is on client’s minds a lot lately. We have received a number of calls requesting proposals for SEO work, and the behavior seems to be consistent with a neighboring agency. Normally proposals like this would come our way every once now and again, but it seems like they have been pretty steady lately. After talking with these clients, what I have realized is that in all of the cases I could achieve what the client wanted however the results would never meet the expectations.

I have written before to ask the question “How will the adoption of eBook Readers affect designers?” but now I can’t help but think about how it will affect the entire practice of design. Are the fixed dimensions of print design a luxury that we are going to have to let go of? The printed page has been disappearing around us for years, but now more than ever this is beginning to manifest for designers.

Technology is rapidly changing the way the information is received and absorbed in a way that may be even more profound than the widespread adoption of the Internet. Never before has the printing press been challenged so admirably. With the printed mediums being replaced with small lightweight devices that are high resolution and arguably more convenient to use how can we expect anything less?

When I started Positive Space I may have been a bit naïve, I thought that Adsense could result in some decent pocket change, if only I could get a couple hundred unique visitors a day. Boy was I wrong, but at that time I could really care less I was more interested in blogging for the sake of self-education and personal development. While my reasons for blogging haven’t changed much, my faith in online advertising has.

After Monday’s announcement by Amazon about the new Kindle 2, the Internet and blogosphere has been ablaze in eBook articles. Without a doubt the technology is very easy to be impressed by, however is this the “electronic book” experience that is going to replace the printed book as we know it? As a designer I find it hard to believe, at least as it currently stands. It is also very easy to see the future of this technology and how it could quickly progress to reach mainstream adoption.

Jason Santa Maria recently posted an interesting article about blog comments that I found intriguing and really had me thinking. In his article Jason explains a very common occurrence in which a blog article has received so many comments that new responses get lost in the clutter. The time necessary to read through such a large number of comments and then respond is so great that most people would rather not, or they might respond without reading. Jason has a devised a hypothetical solution, however I can’t help but draw a different solution.

I was lucky enough to attend a free webinar two days ago hosted by Seth Godin, discussing the concept of the meatball sundae. If you are unaware of the meaning of the “meatball sundae” then I suggest you check out Seth’s Squidoo lens on the subject. The overall concept of the meatball sundae is that you can’t just take an old product and apply it to a new medium and expect success. Midway through this webinar it became apparent that the iPhone app store was a perfect example of people creating meatball sundaes.

The holidays have really had me thinking about technology lately. If you have read over the items I would like for Christmas most of them are undeniably techy in nature. The funny thing about technology is how a ton of it only exists to replace non technical items that are actually much simpler and arguably more efficient. I have also noticed that this same mentality is applied to marketing as well.

Today I was watching CNN’s Green Warriors program when they did a feature on an interesting piece of software called GreenPrint. The idea behind the software is that it can help reduce the waste caused by typical office or home printing, by automatically identifying pages with little or no text on them and flagging them not to be printed. The software conserves both ink and paper by allowing the user to select exactly what makes it to the printer. However what really caught my attention and had me thinking was the online demo of the software.

I recently begin experimenting with Sweetcron for my personal website zinnidesign.com. As a lifestreaming tool I have found Sweetcron to be both easy to use and functional. Installation could be easier or better documented (cpanel addon domains are tricky), but overall it has proven to be a solid product.

While experimenting with Sweetcron it occurred to me that while the idea behind the software was to collect personal feeds, it could easily be used to collect other feeds as well. Depending on your needs, some of the features present in Sweetcron may be overkill for a mashup, but those can just be avoided. This tutorial will show you how to create a Sweetcron theme that grabs the titles of articles collected from feeds all around the internet and display them as a list of links.