I have no good reason for discovering this (actually, I was checking to see if the United States can compare to India's trifecta of awesome national symbols: tiger, peacock, and lotus), but I came across an image of a Leafy Sea Dragon on Wikipedia.

Holy cow! Check out the photos, they'll blow you away.

But it gets better: there's also a Weedy Sea Dragon.

For a user, the Internet is just a dynamic application. All of the websites and apps and everything else add up to the same abstract features that are present in any desktop app:

1. Store/read data
2. Query for data
3. Write/edit data

That's a useful conceptual framework for planning a successful startup in today's internet.

This video made the rounds in June, but I've only come out from under the rocks recently and was happy to find it.

Am I the only person who prefers the kid's handwriting?

This is a week late, but I've been busy. Last Sunday morning at 637am, my daughter Winifred Martha Keane surprised us all by showing up 20 days early. Delivery was the easy part. More later.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, spread the word, dugg, petitioned, blogged, gave cash, etc. Cat's free. More details here.

Lately I've been surprised to hear people say something to the effect of "when it comes to social networking and UGC, SEO doesn't matter" in a number of different conversations. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, SEO is more important to a successful social networking and user-generated content than for editorial content.

Update: Cat has been freed.

Fitts' Law is one of my favorite UI concepts (even though it is often overlooked), so it was cool to see Particletree's recent visual description of the law. One small item they didn't mention was the answer to question 3 in Tog's quiz, which surprised me a bit, since AJAX-y interfaces like Wufoo's make it easy to keep buttons close to the mouse pointer.

As part of my 2008 goal of getting out of admin work and back into more creative endeavors, I recently subscribed to the Designers In House mailing list. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad and I decided to unsubscribe when I recently saw someone post advice to designers looking to get ahead in the world. The author suggested that

[Creative] Directors do not wear band shirts, ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors. If you are looking to move up in the industry, dress for where you want to be, not where you are.

Aw yeah.

Despite some social networking juggernauts' efforts to become global standards, a quick survey of the most popular social networks seems to indicate that social networking experiences cannot easily be optimized for ubiquity.

Why is Fotolog a relatively photo sharing site in the US but wildly popular in Brazil? Hi5 and Bebo are both able to capture the attention of many social networkers in India and the UK, respectively, despite the hype around MySpace and Facebook here in the US.

After doing some research, I realized there was a major flaw in my previous post regarding the potential of OpenSocial - the new standard will not allow member data to move between the various participating social networks. For now, the gardens will remain walled. Cattle? Safe!

So what this means is that if you build an app, you can plug it into any social network that participates in the OpenSocial standards, but not across multiple participating social networks.

With the recent launch of Broccoli & Cheese, David "Basco" Hertog has joined the the few, the proud, the navel-gazing dilettantes who make up the blogosphere. Write loud David!

This clip from the people at Quirkology that illustrates the difference between vision and perception. It was mentioned during a discussion of eye-tracking technology in the IxDA forums, and it has an obvious parallel in what we're now calling "banner blindness" - a phenomenon where web-savvy users unconsciously ignore content they believe to be banner advertisements.

Update: check this for a clarification on a seriously flawed assumption in this post.

Initially, I spent a lot of time thinking about OpenSocial in terms of Widgets/Apps/Gadgets, which is I think where people want us looking: it's in the big graphic on the Google documentation and it's what made Facebook so sexy to developers.

John Musser offered a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo titled Open APIs: Big Picture and Best Practices (that's a PDF link).

His slides #4, explains why publishers should care about APIs:

• Ebay uses them to make money: Over 45% of all products get listed via their APIs
• Google Maps uses them to build their brand, seeing 300% growth vs 20% MapQuest

A nice little summary of the forthcoming Hulu launch appeared on a PC World blog today. Simply offering editorial content isn't necessarily enough to outdo YouTube, but I was very interested in this passage:

Social networks are valuable two big reasons:

1. They cheaply attract eyeballs to your pages
2. They provide heaps of data about your audience

For reasons to be addressed in a later post (or in my recent FOWA presentation, if you were one of the five people in the audience), both of those benefits are best achieved via targeted, niche communities. That means YOUR community, not those big social networking warehouses. Until recently, setting up a scalable social network with plenty of rich media, Widgets, and whatever else was a big pain in the ass.

Alan Schulman's recent "Algorhithmic Creative — A Formula For Feeling?" article warns against the promise of algorithmically-generated ad ideas, copyrighting, and design. It makes sense for a paid "creative person" to fear a trend that may cost him his job, but I'm not sure his Skynet prognostications are a bad thing.

I've been browsing through Seth Godin’s brain farts recently and came across his argument for no anonymity on the Web. It goes something like "when people are anonymous, there are fewer social enforcements for good behavior, so they get bad. Real bad." He points to ebay's reputation system as a great example of accountability providing a foundation for successful social transactions.