iconolith

Super Happy Funtime Friday

There isn't much to say about this week other than, "OMG can I please stop being busy for a little bit?" I think the answer is yes, and I'm counting on it seeing as how we have a holiday right around the corner. Even with stuff happening all around there are a few notable things for Funtime Friday:

Google’s Webmaster Central - Lately I've been feeling a little out of touch with how things work in behind the search engine scenes. It's just one of those necessary evil things one has to constantly keep up on. In an attempt to get off my a**, I've started going through the Google webmaster tools and have been spending a little extra time reading SEO articles - as much as I can stand anyway. SEO… SES… so many acronyms make me sleepy.

Getting Real - 37signals' book about the philosophies that have enabled them to accomplish what they have in so little time. You can buy the book PDF or read the entire thing for free online.

viki.works has released a second set of round social-web icons. I'm not so sure I’m a fan of the roundness or the largeness of these icons, but they are a welcome change of pace from the minuscule sets that are all over the web.

thinglink - a web site that allows you to upload images of things you make, add details about those things, and tag them with a unique identifier. They have updated their site with some new functionality and a facelift. Why is this cool? Well, aside from the obvious tagging coolness, it is a great way to connect more information about an object - what it's made of, the history behind it, or even the inspiration. I baked a cake once and connected the recipe to it on thinglink. The image wasn’t so hot, but the cake was yummy.

Walk2Web - Internet Degrees of Separation

Walk2Web is an incredibly addictive (though not time efficient) web-based surfing tool that allows you visually browse the internet using links that connect one website to the next. As if that wasn't engaging enough, it is also possible to create a user account that can contribute to the rating, tagging, and commenting on any site you happen upon. There are also icons to send pages to digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Hatena.

*Note that there is a text reader that is enabled by default on the system that will read page titles aloud when you click on a link. If your speakers are cranked it is quite a surprise.

Just What IS iospace Doing?

This is a question I have been mulling in my head for a few weeks now - somewhat passively…and certainly not so much that I would call and interrogate them. Iospace are the clever geniuses behind the ever-growing Etsy.com, a site for independent crafties and artists to display and sell their wares to the rest of us.

The evil genius in Etsy.com isn’t only that they offer access to such a diverse community of talented creators - it is how they have managed to tackle issues of organization, UI, and search for many thousands of pieces of user-generated content. Search on this site is definitely about the journey more than the destination - with visualizations that not only let you discover items by tag, but by color, time, artist location, and artist/item metric. If fact, it is hard to STOP searching at times because the experience is so intriguing.

The shining star of this site is their Treasury, a “member-curated featured items” collection of temporal lists. The Etsy community shares among itself in the Treasury - but there is something even more amazing - you can actually see other Etsy members browsing the lists in real time. OMG - you can chat with others browsing the same list as you and leave comments as well. Most amazing, from a designers pov is that it is possible to actually observe how people are browsing the area.

There is more information and screenshots available on using Treasury on the Etsy Treasury Demo blog, but why go through all that - just check out the site. This is how browsing/shopping SHOULD be.

Tag Intersections Over Time

Research Chronology 2 is a project by Aaron Siegel that allows del.icio.us users to visually map their tags chronologically and outline tag “paths”. The visualization that is created provides insight into tagging trends and intersections. [via visualcomplexity]