A Gel of a Conference

Gel ConferenceToday was the first of two days of the Gel (“Good Experience Live”) Conference, a production of Phil Terry and Mark Hurst of Creative Good. It’s the fourth year for the conference but my first year attending. I’ve always found the tickets to be somewhat prohibitively priced, and if it weren’t for the fact that lots of my management peers at the Times are very enthusiastic about their prior experiences attending, I’m not sure I would have spent the money for a ticket — even though it doesn’t comes out of own pocket but rather from my group budget at the Times. But the advance word was good enough for me to give it a try; so far, so good.

Continue Reading …

+

Illustrations Select

Maira KalmanI suspect not a lot of readers of this blog are also subscribers to NYTimes.com’s Times Select, a service that allows access to the Times’ opinion and editorial columnists, access to up to one hundred articles per month from the archives, access to special, Times Select-only blogs written by guest journalists, and assorted other goodies. It’s a pretty divisive feature, I know, and I’m not trying to sidestep the arguments against it here — but today, under the heading of “assorted other goodies,” we debuted a new, monthly feature from the legendary illustrator and designer Maira Kalman which I think is pretty great.

On the first Wednesday of each month, Kalman will publish a new set of her quite amazing drawings and paintings in an “illustrated column” called “The Principles of Uncertainty.” There are six of them posted today, and they’ve already garnered over seventy reader comments posted to the page, which, I think, is pretty amazing for pay-only content.

In general, I’m pretty enthusiastic about illustration appearing just about anywhere on the Web, so I’m very happy about this. It’s unique, somewhat unexpected stuff, literate and playful at once, and one of the reasons I came to work at The New York Times. You could make a pretty convincing argument that “The Principles of Uncertainty” is made possible only through the particular economics of Times Select; it’s Web-only content that might otherwise be a tough sell to advertisers (as part of Times Select, it’s advertising free). But I’m not trying to invite a critique of the service. Really.

Continue Reading …

+

Going Back on Friends

Social NetworkingAmong social networking applications on the Web, one thing has puzzled me: why is it so difficult to go from friend to friend? Take Flickr, for example: a tremendously successful example of social networking that relies heavily on the idea that it’s your friends who are producing the content (photos) in which you’re most interested. The very latest of your friends’ photos are available in a meta view, which is handy, but there’s no apparent way to simply skip from one friend’s photos to the next without using the browser’s ‘back’ button to return to your list of contacts.

This seemed wrong to me somehow, and, admitting that I’m hardly the world’s foremost expert on constructing interaction models for social software, I thought I’d try and understand better why I was so frustrated. I quickly determined that, when it comes to organizing your network contacts — friends, basically — in a social networking application, there are basically two models.

Continue Reading …

+