hey, it's noah

I’ve always always always wondered about this. What is the...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:33:23 -0400

I’ve always always always wondered about this. What is the real footprint of New York as “the city”.

(via 22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America - Business Insider)

This cracks me up. (via heyitsnoah on Instagram) ...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:02:06 -0400

This cracks me up.

(via heyitsnoah on Instagram)

"For a generation, institutions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Pompidou Center in..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:23:07 -0400

“For a generation, institutions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Pompidou Center in Paris have been collecting digital art. But in trying to restore the Davis work, which was finally debugged and reposted at the end of May, the Whitney encountered what many exhibitors, collectors and artists are also discovering: the 1s and 0s of digital art degrade far more rapidly than traditional visual art does, and the demands of upkeep are much higher. Nor is the way forward clear.”

- On the upkeep challenges of digital art.

When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test — www.nytimes.com — Readability

jamesgross: domgoodrum: Percolate Moving Day Portraits Today...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:12:11 -0400

jamesgross:

domgoodrum:

Percolate Moving Day Portraits

Today we packed stuff up at Percolate HQ ahead of our move this weekend.

Plenty of good times have gone down since we arrived at 481 Broadway a little over a year ago. For this moving day post, I’ve broken down our time on Broadway by the numbers:

Percolate HQ was based at 481 Broadway for 458 days, that’s a wonderful 659,520 minutes between me and you (March 12th 2012 - June 7th 2013).

We survived 1.5 sweltering summers and one fairly mild winter. The whole gang of us worked remotely after Sandy for about 9 days.

Our team size has grown 490%, from 10 to 49. We’ve been lucky to add some amazing people across design, engineering, talent, communications, brand strategy, account management and sales.

We’ve evolved our software product to help more brands create content at social scale. In software release terms, we’ve gone from version 2.1 to approaching a fine looking 4.0.

We had our second hackday, and launched 6 clubs; Yoga, Running, Space, China, Artz and Cooking. We even started a new monthly happy hour for Community Managers, called Speakeasy.

Our next adventure is a trip round the corner to Percolate’s new home on Grand St. The good news is we’ve got room for you too.

Boom.

Afternoon meeting in the new Percolate office. Awesome.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:30:16 -0400

Afternoon meeting in the new Percolate office. Awesome.

The 4 Levels of Designers

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:54:46 -0400

The 4 Levels of Designers:

I wrote a post over at 99U about the levels of designers and how I think you build a great design team. You can read the whole thing there, but here’s a snippet about states:

If level two comes naturally to most designers who have grown up in a digital world, level three most definitely does not. States are about understanding all the different possible outcomes of a given task within a product and being able to design for all of them. Things like errors are obvious, albeit often forgotten, while actions like escapes and backs are much less frequently planned for.
To draw a parallel, a great engineer thinks in states. Before they write a line of code they have come to understand all the different outcomes and use that understanding to design a fault-resistant system. One of my favorite lines from one of our engineers recently was, “when I start typing the work’s done.”

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/11ZhcZB ..

Why did you say that?

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:09:43 -0400

Why did you say that?:

I really liked one of the comments in this NYTimes interview with Roman Stanek, the CEO of GoodData. In response to “Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for in your organization?” Stanek answered, “I have a really low tolerance for people making comments, especially managers, without actually positioning them.” When asked to explain he said:

Somebody might say, for example, that our competition has a new product. But is it good news or bad news? Should we do something about it? I always expect my managers to have an opinion and they should not be just messengers. A manager is not a messenger. I don’t like my managers essentially talking to their people without being able to express their opinion and position what they’re discussing.

This is perfectly articulated and drives me crazy as well. It’s so easy to send emails that people have a tendency to just shoot things off with comment or context. I don’t want to know the news, I want to know what you think about the news and why you decided to send it to me.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/13CE3Y1 ..

"In 2006 In his greatest of games He wrestled the ball From the sad Edgerinn James The Bears won that..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:16:06 -0400

“In 2006
In his greatest of games
He wrestled the ball
From the sad Edgerinn James
The Bears won that night
A miracle? Sure.
But we know they are
Who Denny thought they were”

- From “54, an Ode” by DaBearsBlog
54, an Ode | DA BEARS BLOG

Selling Argyle Uniforms

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:09:41 -0400

Selling Argyle Uniforms:

I really like situations that help describe the fact that lots of factors ultimately go into the way you feel about a brand/design/marketing. I wrote a bit about how Jony Ive feels about it last week and I thought this was another interesting example from a very different place. In the early 90s a designer named Alexander Juilian was given the opportunity to redesign the UNC Tarheels basketball uniform. He was a huge Tarheels fan and thus felt a ton of pressure to deliver something amazing. Not wanting to leave things to chance, he looped Michael Jordan into the decision (Jordan, at the time, was just starting his ascent to the greatest player in the history of the NBA but he was already UNC royalty). Ultimately Julian sent all the designs to Jordan to let him sign off on his favorite:

“And guess what? As soon as Michael [Jordan] said that [the argyle design was his favorite], then the entire team also liked the argyle best. So we made the first uniform in Michael’s size, sent it to Chicago, he worked out in it, then we sent it down to Chapel Hill. There was near frenzy, I’m told, in the locker room as to who was going to be the first Carolina player to put it on after Michael because they wanted Michael’s mojo. Hubert Davis (photo, above right) won, he was the same size and he was the model. Now he’s a great sportscaster.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/11aMDK4 ..

Thoughts on Tumblr/Yahoo!

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:38:14 -0400

Thoughts on Tumblr/Yahoo!:

percolatehq:

Starting Friday the tech world was abuzz with talk of Yahoo! buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. At the time it seemed like just a rumor, but it quickly coalesced, ending with a press release this morning trumpeting Yahoo!’s “promise not to screw it up“.

We’ve been working with Tumblr since we started and have been one of Tumblr’s A-List partners since they introduced the program in November of last year. A number of our brands are quite active and successful on the platform including American Express OPEN Forum, Denny’s and GE.

Anyway, since everyone is discussing the news this morning I thought I’d share some of my thinking around what this means for Yahoo!, Tumblr and brands.

First off, there is one main and simple reason Y! is buying Tumblr: It’s an entree into social and one of only seven global social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and G+ being the others). With all consumer attention moving to social it would be impossible for Y! To compete without a car in the race.

With that said, there are a few specifics tumblr brings that are worth pointing out:

Streams: The consumer expectation for content these days is best summarized by the “pull-to-refresh” action. Streams are the primary way people are consuming these days and to compete at the platform level (which Y! clearly wants), you need to own your own stream, not just have your content live in the other platforms’ streams.

Mobile: One of my favorite quotes from David Karp was when he introduced Tumblr ads to the audience at the AdAge Digital Conference last year. What he said was, “You’ve already seen our ad unit,” it’s the post. This sort of content-as-ads is clearly the future of digital advertising, but not just because it works on the web in your dashboard/newsfeed/stream. It’s also the future because its the thing that works in mobile. While so many others are looking for silver bullet ad formats, the social platforms have recognized that promoted posts make the perfect leap to the small screen, something that’s clearly crucial to Y!’s future. Yahoo’s banner ad business just won’t work in mobile in its current form.

Data: Marissa Mayer has talked a lot about personalization since taking the helm at Y! To do personalization successfully in the next era of the web is going to be about combining the implicit data of clicks and cookies with the explicit data of the interest graph and the content people are producing day-in-and-day-out across social (if you want more evidence of this look at Google’s huge investment in G+ to fill the hole for them). While this data will be used to make content recommendations, it’s ultimately most valuable to the platform as a way to infer what brands and products people are interested in before they have shown any intent to purchase them. This is about top of the funnel advertising, the creation of intent, and to compete successfully Y! needed a way to deliver this sort of consumer insight to brands.

Always-On: One of the biggest challenges in modern marketing is moving beyond episodic, campaign-based thinking and into social content that is always-on. Like most traditional publishers, Yahoo! has the challenge that all banners are bought and sold around campaigns. With Tumblr, Yahoo! is now part of helping brands create an always-on content model.

Overall this is a big win for social and further proof that marketing is continuing to move towards real-time content creation at the intersection of brand voice and cultural relevance While everyone is focused (and concerned) that we’re going to start seeing Yahoo! ads on Tumblr, I actually think the opposite is much more likely. As more and more brands come onto Tumblr as organic content creators and pay to promote their content, Yahoo! will find a way for this original brand content to live in the context of the broader platform, giving marketers expanded reach and engagement.

Overall a big congrats to the Tumblr team. It’s awesome to see continued success for NYC startups. We’re excited to continue to work together and see what’s in store.

I was on WSJ TV this morning talking about the sale. Here’s the video:

from Blog @ Percolate http://bit.ly/12PeXVz

pakyouare: Evidence! Your fingers x your iPad x various tablet...

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:23 -0400

pakyouare:

Evidence! Your fingers x your iPad x various tablet sorts of activities.
(via Pinterest)

tabauchery: @Percolate’s love affair with @Sriratcha!

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:32:44 -0400

tabauchery:

@Percolate’s love affair with @Sriratcha!

Unique Perception

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:54:47 -0400

Unique Perception:

Ran across an interesting quote (reportedly) by Jony Ive about the difference between measurable (speed, hard drive size, etc.) attributes and the non-measurable ones:

But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

I think about this a lot. One of the things that inspired Brand Tags originally was a similar quote from my friend Martin Bihl’s 2002 AdWeek article: ”The way I look at it, a brand only exists in the consumer’s mind. That other product isn’t a brand yet because consumers don’t really know about it. It’s still a product.”

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/102RUba ..

(via National Geographic Traveler Magazine: 2013 Photo...

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:37:06 -0400

(via National Geographic Traveler Magazine: 2013 Photo Contest - The Big Picture - Boston.com)

This is pretty crazy: 3D website with WebGL (via...

Fri, 10 May 2013 12:49:07 -0400

This is pretty crazy: 3D website with WebGL

(via Minimal tQuery Page)

Thursday at the office

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:02:06 -0400

Thursday at the office

Building for States

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:38:44 -0400

Building for States:

I’m playing around with publishing in a few different places these days. Trying out Medium for the first time where I wrote a piece on designing and building for states:

Although I may be bastardizing the term from an engineering point of view, when I talk about states I mean all the possible outcomes of a new feature: What happens when you press this button, or that button, or those buttons together, or we get this data back but not that data. Bugs, for the most part, are a matter of overlooked states. From a design perspective, states are about thinking through all the different ways the elements on the page might live and interact. This includes obvious ones like empty states and error messages as well as not-so-obvious ones like random button combinations or accidental page refreshes.

You can read the whole thing over at Medium.com.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/10ItE9u ..

Social’s Impact On Scale, Pace And Pattern, And What Brands Can Learn From It

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:39:38 -0400

Social’s Impact On Scale, Pace And Pattern, And What Brands Can Learn From It:

I wrote a piece over at Forbes.com about some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately, specifically how to start to understand the shifts we’re seeing in social. Here’s the opening two paragraphs:

A few months ago I was asked to put together a presentation about the future of social. As would be expected, I was pretty overwhelmed with the topic and turned it over and over in my head trying to figure out the best way to approach the question. Whenever I find myself in a situation like this I turn to my personal intellectual hero and the person I believe to be the greatest media thinker of the 20th Century, Marshall McLuhan. While he wrote long before the web existed, his theories around how media evolves and interacts with culture are more relevant than they’ve ever been.
At the heart of McLuhan’s theories is his most famous saying: “The medium is the message.” Though like most things McLuhan it requires a fair amount of unpacking, at its core is the idea that we’re affected more by our interactions with the medium itself than we are with the content we experience on it. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan explained, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” In his book “Understanding Media” he goes on to give an example: “The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.” In other words, it realigned personal expectations and culture and expanded the definition of local.

Go read the rest over at Forbes.com.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/16onX8V ..

Is that time-saving task actually saving you time? (via...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:47:07 -0400

Is that time-saving task actually saving you time?

(via xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?)

Testing Media Literacy

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 17:24:28 -0400

Testing Media Literacy:

Last week I sent myself an email with this quote from Felix Salmon’s blog post about the media’s response to the Boston mayhem:

There’s an art to working out where to find fast and reliable information, and to judging new information in light of old information, and to judging old information in light of new information. And there’s an art to synthesizing everything you know, from hundreds of different sources, into a single coherent narrative. It’s not easy, it’s not a skill that most people have, and it’s precisely where news organizations add value.

I have been thinking (and talking) a fair amount about media literacy lately and this quote seemed to sum up the challenge really nicely. Media literacy is a very hard thing to nail down because, unlike regular literacy, it’s pretty hard to test for. Ultimately I think it’s about making sure people understand the role of media (whatever that might mean) in the way they experience and interact with the world around them. That can mean simply being aware that the order of the Google results you’re seeing are most likely not the same as mine (even for the same query) to, as Felix says, “working out where to find fast and reliable information.” Media literacy, like regular literacy I guess, is a scale (one with an ever-moving endgame, but I guess the same could be said of language).

Anyway, when I read this quote from Felix I thought of a few different games I like to play with myself that, although I never really thought of them that way, were sort of mini media-literacy tests:

The Snopes Test: When you read something, especially an email from a distant family member, you can immediately sniff out whether you’re going to be able to find an entry for it on Snopes. Knowing whether it’s been proven true or false is good for bonus points.

The GoDaddy Test: This is a funny one, and definitely less useful than the Snopes test, but it’s interesting to predict whether a random domain name someone comes up with is already taken or not.

The Wikipedia Test: This one is actually important I think. If I gave you a random topic, say Snoop Dogg, could you predict whether or not Wikipedia would be the top result? (Bonus points if you predict the actual top result.)

Anyway, all these things help illustrate the challenge with media literacy, which is ultimately it’s an “I know it when I see it” skill. With that said, it’s one that will continue to have a larger and larger impact on culture as more people’s voices (and information) become a part of the news we all sift through on a daily basis.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/17ruHkq ..