From Marty Zwilling, Startup Professionals:

“It is true that motion in any direction is often better than no motion at all. But motion without momentum is even less productive than no motion at all.”

Link: Startups: Motion vs. Momentum

- Images from the artist Juan Salas’s website

Over 100 variations of illustrations created from the logo of a fried chicken restaurant in Venezuela by artist Juan Salas. It’s been a while since the last time I saw something this interesting.

Link: Transmutation: Los Primeros 100

Twitter cofounder and CEO Evan Williams was invited by the White House today to join a “young business leaders” summit to discuss the economic crises.

Link: Searching for the wisdom of the twits (VentureBeat.com March 5th, 2009)

*Update from EV on Twitter: Lessons from today: Obama’s team: smart and committed. Learned a lot and was inspired. Also: people should take my tweets less seriously.

Seth Godin says:

If you want to grow, you need new customers. And if you want new customers, you need three things:

1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
2. A group with a problem they want to solve using your solution.
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.

Posting here to remind myself for future projects.

Link: Three things you need if you want more customers

mama!milk is a Kyoto based jazz group with two key members Yuko Ikoma (生駒祐子) on accordion and Kosuke Shimizu (清水恒輔) on contrabass. Their new album Fragrance of Notes, released in Japan in Aug 2008, was selected as one of the 5 “Jazz album of the year” at Gilles Peterson Worldwide Award ‘09 (BBC Radio 1).

Just bought the CD today. Amazing stuff.

Link: mama!milk on MySpace

==Playlist 2009.02.23: mama!milk==

01 Rosa Moschata
02 Avant Fermentation
03 Antique Gold
04 Pale Anise
05 Anise
06 Intermezzo OP 32
07 Kujaku
08 Hourglass
09 Mano Seca
10 Rosa Mundi
11 Smokey Dawn
12 The Moon
13 Two Ripples
14 Sometime Sweet
15 Waltz, Waltz

-Image from ReadWriteWeb.com

The NYTimes.com’s recently announced article skimmer prototype (yet-unnamed) is described by its developer as “an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime”.

The keyboard browsing feature is simply a wonderful idea. Another proof of less is more.

Link: Sunday Browsing (on NYT.com Feb 13, 2009)

Remembering James Dewitt Yancey, aka J Dilla / Jay Dee (Feb. 7, 1974 – Feb. 10, 2006).

Image from Deviationmusic.net

==Playlist 2009.02.10: J Dilla==

01 JLJ Intro - Jay Loves Japan
02 Walkinonit - Donuts
03 Crushin’ (Yeeeeaah!) - Ruff Draft
04 Anti-American Graffiti - Donuts
05 Two Can Win - Donuts
06 Baby (feat Madlib & Guilty Simpson) - The Shining
07 So Far To Go (fet Common & D’Angello) - The Shining
08 The Official - JAYLIB
09 The Mission - JAYLIB
10 Let’t Take It Back - Ruff Draft
11 The Clapper - Welcome 2 Detroit
12 Featuring Phat Kat - Welcome 2 Detroit
13 Body Movin (feat J Rocc & Karriem Riggins) - The Shining
14 Won’t Do - The Shining
15 Don’t Cry - Ruff Draft
16 One - Welcome 2 Detroit

A few days ago I came across a great conversation between two well-known bloggers Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis on the topic of life in public and the costs associated with it.  Thought it’s a nice topic to share.

With a tragic story told about his friend Josh Harris and the Sundance-winning film We Live in Public, Jason wrote on his newsletter:

We’re all canaries in the coal mines now … We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online. We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.

Fred, in response, points out that our social behavior evolves with changes in technologies and communication methods, and we as a society will be able to build real accountability while adapting this process. He then concludes with a following set of rules based on his own experience:

1. Keep your family out of it until they want to be in it

2. Be nice

3. Demand that others are nice back

4. Encourage the community to police the comments. Early on Jackson was my “bouncer” and now Kid Mercury has assumed that role

5. Take the nasty comments lightly and use humor to defuse them

6. Do not delete comments unless they are hateful to others, porn, or spam

7. Ignore the trolls even though it kills you

8. Be careful with photos. They greatest lesson I got was when I posted a photo of me on vacation looking smug. Bad move that I learned a lot from

9. Give more than you take

10. Enjoy yourself. Talking, discussing, and debating is fun. Keep it that way

The two articles can be found here. Great reads:
We Live in Public (and the end of empathy) - by Jason Calacanis
Living In Public Doesn’t Have To Be Destructive - by Fred Wilson

Image from Semantic Studios

A fun, easy-to-digest visual representation of User Centered Design (UCD) process and its deliverables.

Created by Jeffery Callender and Peter Morvilled. PDF download available on the author’s website.

Link: User Experience Deliverables

I noticed that a few of my posts lately were associated with a somewhat depressing tone … not sure if this was because of the up-side down thumb image that pops into my eye every time when I revisit this blog, or I am simply worried reading the biz news everyday.

Now this is funny, thanks to the video maker Joe Nicolosi and BoingBoing.

Link: Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it)

Via Susan Mernit’s blog:

“Part of being a successful artist is to make amazing art– seemingly effortlessly. But this is the rub– to make amazing work you have to make a lot of stuff that kinda sucks. That may seem obvious, but when you reach a place where you’re work is selling at a consistent pace and supporting yourself and your, ahem, habits, it’s very easy to feel like you’ve got it all dialed out. Making work that sucks suddenly doesn’t seem like an option, it feels like a waste of time. It’s very easy to convince yourself that everything that comes off your fingertips should be good and reflect your masterful craftmanship. When it’s not, failure is something to be disposed of quickly.”

Link: This Artist’s Life, Whitney Smith

Leave politics aside, the Obama campaign logo was a popular topic among design blogs during the election time. The interview with the design lead Sol Sender was just out on YouTube a few days ago (from the design agency VSA Partners). It’s great to hear the creative process and see the various design options being laid out in one page.

I really like the one in the final list (at 6:15). It is surprisingly inspiring.

Video Part 2: Sol Sender - Obama Logo Design Part 2 of 2
Related Article on NYT: The ‘O’ in Obama
Related Article on LogoDesignLove: Obama logo ideas that weren’t chosen

I couldn’t get this illustration out of my head after seeing it with the NYT article on economy … I wondered what it takes to become an optimist.

Link: In Dark Days, They Let the Sun Shine In (Oct 18, 2008)
Illustration by Jennifer Daniel

This week’s Sunday Business section on New York Times has an interesting article about Yahoo!’s approach revamping their homepage: one bit at a time.

Comparing to having a beta page that migrates users gradually, changing things bit by bit is not the practice that I am very familiar with. But the idea itself - to let users to adopt new usage patterns in a step by step fashion - does seem very practical and convincing to me. For websites that have millions of customers (including my company), any change, whether it’s good or bad, runs a huge risk of alienating existing users, and the impact is sometimes unpredictable.

Well, think Facebook’s recent profile / app platform changes.

“If you go from light to dark by flipping a switch, your eyes may hurt for a minute or two, you may end up being able to see faster if you use the dimmer.” - Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!

Link: Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps (NYT Oct. 17, 2008)

Today’s buzz word is Google Chrome. After trying it out for a few hours, I can say my experience was mostly good. Love the clever UI (finally, combination of the Address and the Search bar), speedy as advertised.

Forget the positive/negative comments on your favorite tech blogs, here is a really nice article from GigaOm on why a Google browser matters:

On GigaOm: Google Browser Puts the Cloud To Work
Related Article on Wired: Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Map of Moon Exploration - How Far Did Armstrong and Aldrin Walk?
Image from Strange Maps (source from NASA)

Good data visualization should convey simple messages to viewers. Quite often I see examples of information design that are overly complex or focus too much on presentation than communication goals. I think the mistake is that these designs fail to tell a comprehensible story, or to say, lack of a central idea that explains the purpose of the data.

This is probably why Map is such a unique and compelling form of communication. Not only it visualizes the relationships between elements, but also it represents one’s mind. It is the journey behind the lines and numbers that fascinates people who love to explore.

Link: Strange Maps