Kentucky GRILLED Chicken?

Are you kidding me?

This is Dunkin Donuts all over again

Poor Bunnies

Don’t miss this beautiful video, perfect for moments of post-Easter reflection and solemnity.

5 Things To Think About

1. Are there more days between today and your next birthday, or today and your last birthday? If the former, be happy, your birthday is coming up! (Like mine! Woo hoo!) If the latter, what the heck happened to all those awesome toys that you wanted so badly?

2. How many books are you in the middle of reading? If 0, get thee to Amazon! If 1-2, why are you spending so much time watching American Idol and enduring some excruciatingly awful mellismatic atrocities, when you could be enduring some excruciatingly bad examples of critical thought or science fiction writing? If 3 or more, take your bookmarks out of all three, go buy a John Grisham novel and read that this afternoon. Don’t stop reading until you know if it was the Assistant District Attorney or the 9th Circuit Judge.

3. When is the last time you made yourself your favorite dinner from childhood? If your answer is “more than a month,” you either need to go visit your parents, or stop ordering Chinese food every night. However, if your favorite meal consisted of 15 scoops of Neapolitan ice cream, hot fudge, nuts, whipped cream, and a cherry all piled on top of a “Big Foot” pizza from Little Caesars - go another 10 months, at least, before indulging in that awesome creation. (Let me know yours in the comments!).

4. Why do you spend the last hour of every night watching videos on YouTube instead of going to bed “early” for once? I don’t have much insight on this, as I am trying to figure it out for myself...

5. How long has it been since you last listened to the opinion of someone with whom you strongly disagree and didn’t attempt to argue back? Try listening without judging. Show the person that you respect him/her as a human being. That you care about what s/he has to say. This person probably already knows you disagree, but will be startled and shaken by your genuine attempt at understanding. You’ll probably learn something, too.

Fucked By Free

Subtitled: Kicking Yourself Ain’t Worth The Knee Strain

Backstory: Back in November, “Web2.0 Blog of Blogs,” Mashable held a teensy little design contest to avoid paying a fair market price on a look for a t-shirt (snicker). The prize: An iPhone and some other boringish stuff. But mostly, the reward would come from the glory obtained by rising to the top of the community-generated content heap, and being deservedly recognized by the A-list crowd for one’s mad skillz. This was one of those half-assed design competitions that didn’t even include the usual “all intellectual property rights are hereby relinquished and exclusive commercial rights granted to [Company] upon submission of design work” disclaimer. Nope, just a super-casual, super-laid-back, “meh” of a contest.

And it ended up getting some pretty nice entries. The winning design - a cute little potato (get it? Mashable?) - is really polished, and a few of the others are remarkably wearable.

Naturally, I entered this contest (otherwise, why blog about it?). I couldn’t sleep, had read practically everything remotely interesting that had been posted to the internet that day, and decided - what the heck! - to fire up Adobe Illustrator to design a couple shirts.

This was 2:00 a.m., mind you.

At 3:00 (a mere 4 hours before I was to get ready for another grueling Monday at my former job), I submitted my designs. All 15 of them.

I went with a pretty tried-and-true form for all the designs: clever, slightly off-color slogan, centered on the shirt - and a simple, but cool giant M! on the back. Totally original, I know. Still - they felt appropriate to the Mashable brand, and I quite like a couple of the slogans I came up with (particularly the “Mashable is sexy in Helvetica, too.” shirt, which is the only one with a different layout, and not set in Myriad Pro.). But would I win? Nah. Never would’ve expected to. I contributed the designs partly as an embrace of the culture of free, partly out of boredom, and partly out of some insomniacical mania.

You see, growing up I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. And in my waking hours - especially those spent in high school and college - I found that I was drawn to extreme amounts of repetition and, in this, creativity. One night, I somehow managed to write 30 pages (single-spaced) of statements that began with the words “Staying up to...” Get the picture?

OK, now, fast-forward to today.

Mashable has opened a cool, new t-shirt shop using Zazzle.com (Zaz-what?!) that contains “40 different designs to choose from to show your love for all things Mashable, including submissions from our t-shirt design contest.”

“Sweet,” thought I, “Maybe they used one of mine.”

Well, yeah. Actually 12.

Twelve of the forty designs are mine. Take a look:



Oh, but wait!

These aren‘t my designs at all! What in God’s name is Arial Rounded doing in the place of Myriad Pro in some of them? I cry foul! Sure, Arial Rounded is oh-so-typically Web 2.0, but come on, guys. Eww. But yes, all of those corny slogans are mine.

OK, now what’s my point? Am I looking to be compensated for my grievances? No, no, no. Nor am I trying to bash Mashable for their behavior.

What I am doing is trying to provide a tiny bit of caveat emptor to folks who might decide to enter similar contests in the future. Rules are important. Rights are important. Your creative work is important and has value. And if you wish to give it up, you should do so willingly, knowingly, and with a clear understanding of what it means to relinquish control of your intellectual property without fair compensation.

In my case, this means I have to watch as Mashable launches an online store from which they stand to make thousands of dollars in profit doing little more than leveraging their (deservedly-strong) brand, with an inventory of products created at no cost to them. Brilliant for Mashable. Shitty for the ladies and gents who did the hard work designing the shirts. Shitty especially, for me, upon realizing that fully 30% of their catalog is work I produced, and for which I received not even a mere hyperlink to my blog. I was credited for my designs on the Flickr pool, but not linked. Meh.

Certainly, all of this would have been nice: a link, share of the revenue, free copies of my shirts, a free iPhone to supplement mine which is looking a little sad after doing some pavement surfing a couple months ago, fame and glory. But I’m not asking for any of that. And I am surely not asking that Mashable remove my designs from their store. A part of me thinks that it is seriously awesome that my work is being sold by one of the biggest blogs on the web.

All I want is for a few of you out there - in situations similar in some degree to mine - to be careful. Free is a business model. Which means thinking long and hard about how choosing it benefits you, benefits your intended market/audience and benefits the world.

Looking back, I still would’ve made the same choice, even if the moment of “sticker shock” was profoundly unsettling.

Oh, I nearly forgot: here is the store.

Racial Infographic Whimsy

Or is it Infographical Racial Whimsy? Whimsical Infographic Racism?

Another stellar infographic from the New York Times, though this one scores major points for illustrating a concept (The Words We Use to Talk About Race), rather than empirical data.

Encyclopedia Of Life

Easily one of the most exciting new sites to launch recently (along with 23 & Me, which I’ll get around to writing about one of these days) is Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org). Hold on, no cutesy Web 2.0-style name? Nope. This site is business. Beautiful, inspirational, important business.

In their own words:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species—that provide the entry points to this vast array of knowledge. The entry-point for each site is a species page suitable for the general public, but with several linked pages aimed at more specialized users. The sites sparkle with text and images that are enticing to everyone, as well as providing deep links to specific data.

The EOL dynamically synthesizes biodiversity knowledge about all known species, including their taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being, and distribute this information through the Internet. It serves as a primary resource for a wide audience that includes scientists, natural resource managers, conservationists, teachers, and students around the world. We believe that the EOL's encompassing scope and innovation will have a major global impact in facilitating biodiversity research, conservation, and education.

The EOL staff is made up of scientists and non-scientists working from museums and research institutions around the world. We currently have 20 full time employees, but as this project grows, so will the EOL family.

In my own words:

Wow.

Here’s a screengrab of one of the species pages:


I truly love the web design work here. The site is clean and sophisticated without being boring or overly dense, like one might imagine an encyclopedia page to be (particularly if Wikipedia is used as an example). And the “Detail” slider, which lets you adjust the amount of information displayed about the species, is one of the coolest new interface elements I’ve seen on a site.

There’s way to much to say about the Encyclopedia of Life project, so I’ll leave it to the folks involved to do so in video form. Please do watch the two videos below, check out some of the exemplar pages, which show the fullness of the entries that will one day exist for all species on Earth, and imagine this resource 5, 10, or 25 years from now.


EOL Video 1


EOL Video 2