Designosophy » Uncategorized

It’s a poster, it’s a t-shirt, it’s…

Mike — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:13:26 +0000

Someone once told me that if I put this on a t-shirt, they would wear it. So I’m thinking of submitting this to Threadless.com (slightly altered for the medium, of course). Click for larger image.

Won’t you be?

Mike — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:12:06 +0000

You may have encountered the story of Jon Engal, a freelance designer trying to make an honest living who was ripped off by a powerful corporation and then ruthlessly attacked legally. Oh wait, you also heard that might not be true?

This isn’t about the dispute, however. What I want to talk about is the fact that within a few hours, there were hundreds of people tweeting about it and dozens of blog posts, and then there was $1800 in a legal defense fund for Jon. Not only that, but certain highly-followed Twitterers have raised thousands in short order for charities just by tweeting about it.

Meanwhile, I recently found out that my next door neighbors, prior to their sudden disappearance, had been living in their house without any electricity or running water for two months. I had no idea anything unusual was going on. Huh. Who knew?

So, which is the real community? The people we live next door to, or the people we follow, friend, blog about, IM, etc? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there is a shift happening. Granted, we all still know people locally. I helped my other neighbor shovel his walk last winter. I go to work and I have friends I see whenever possible. But I spend a lot of time interacting with people I’ve never met, or people I know but I see more online than IRL, as they say these days.

I heard a story on NPR about the effects of the folding of newspapers. Apparently, with fewer reporters, more stories are being shared (sold to) multiple papers. I’m not sure how many papers will survive, or in what form, but I believe that more coverage of news and events will be through bloggers and other online transmission.

Via cyberspace we can talk about whatever with someone from Jakarta, Austalia, Iceland… or next door. So how will the exponentially increasing virtual connectedness affect communities — where we spend our time, what we talk about with whom, where we expend our resources?

I’d love to hear what you think, wherever you are. Because if you’re reading this, you’re my neighbor.

Discovered a handy Firefox feature

Mike — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:32:05 +0000

If you’re at all like me, you’ve constantly got three or four windows open in Firefox, each window containing 10-15 tabs. As you bounce around from tab to tab, window to window, did you ever come upon a tab with a page that’s just mind-blowing, and you want to tweet or post about it, but you can’t give proper credit because you can’t remember how you got there? This happens to me all of the time. I just recently wished out loud on Twitter for a feature or plugin to help me with this problem. And then I discovered that the feature is already there.

If you go to the Tools menu in Firefox, and then select Page Info, this will bring up a surprisingly informative pallet. Not only can you see what the referring page is, but you can see (and save!) images contained in the page, see any RSS feeds available on that page, determine permissions for that domain, check out cookies associated with that page, and more.

Perhaps I’m the only one who has never noticed this remarkably versatile tool, but I have a feeling I’m not. Oh, and that Twitter URL in there is for real.