Trying out tumblr

Check out DV on tumblr — a new platform for DV?  (Not saying I’m leaving WP and Twitter for tumblr, but I might.)

Conserving words, and time

I have a blog. My thoughts … they go in the blog. I take time to write them down. I hope people read them People are supposed to read them.

So when a colleague asked me the other day what I thought of the Modernista! redesign, I said, “check Debatable Value, my blog. I wrote about it a few days ago.”

Yes, that’s right. I took the opportunity to end what would have otherwise been an interesting conversation with a blatant plug for my blog.

Offensive!

But it could have been even more so. Therefore, effective immediately, I will be replacing the aforementioned lengthy plug for my blog with something more concise:

BLOG!

I’m proud of this achievement. It is the best worst best example of a behavior that I inherited from my parents, and then advanced: a few years ago, my mother started answering conversation-starting questions with this confounding conversation-ender: “Do a search.”

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Also:

• More on the benefits of brevity; from the design blog, A Brief Message.

Drunk guest editors … a bad idea?

So I opened up this site (under duress) to guest editors (drunk friends) at a dinner party that my wife, son and I hosted.

While there is a part of me that enjoyed letting go, and actually testing what happens when you give yourself over to members of your community, I can’t help but feel like I let drunk people paint my car.

The Dinner Party

Molly:

Mister Bradley Noble is in the midst of hosting a dinner party. I am licking the fudge off my fingers from our hot fudge Sunday desserts. The keyboard is a disaster. Why i volunteered to start this blog entry is beyond anything I can comprehend, but I am going to treat it like a Yankee Swap…I am number 1, which means I get to go LAST. But at least I could open the topic for discussion and debate. Brads blog. It just wouldnt be right for me not to comment with, “NNNNNNNEEEEEEHHHHHhhhhhrrrrrrddddddddDDDDDDddddd.” And to add on for his forgetful mind: www.Ava-Bava.blogspot.com On to the next…..

Rich:

To recap some dinner discussion – Point Break – listed as a great movie. I don’t agree – One of the worst surf movies of all time – hated by all who practice the sport. ” I’m surfing….!!!!!” – not cool. Apocolypse Now – thats a great surf movie – ..its a great peak – (Duval) A peak – there’s not a good peaK in this damn countrty… yeah its got a long left…..quick right….with a huge bowl section…. IT’s tube city….

The deuce:

I would argue that “Endless Summer” is a better surf movie, but I will digress. The most interesting discussion point at this dinner party was Brad throwing a hissy fit about us all posting on his blog. But aren’t we doing exactly what he espoused in his first post, about modernista.com? Wouldn’t he simply be “letting go” of the content of his site by allowing us to do this? Just as Modernista is allowing people to comment on them? In other words, isn’t Brad being a whiny kid? I LOVE WRITING ON BRAD’S BLOG ABOUT BRAD! DUEZZZGE!

P-Funk:

Why I carry A Knife

Because Snake Eyes was so fuckin dope

So i just moved to a new town and i have met some really solid people…..people i know i will be close with for years……so any way one of them is my other friends dad…..he goes to nepal every now and then and we are kindered spirits i guess…..so he comes back from one of his trips over there and gives a sweet hat and kirkin (not sure if the spelling os right on that one but i bet it’s close)…..but it is a knife that some of the tripes over in nepal use in defense….it is pretty sweet…..and i ment something….so i tucked in my pocket and just felt good there……and it has stayed there……..and it continues to feel good…..so that brad nobel…is why i am sitting at you table…consuming your fine food…..and partaking in delicious bevarages of my choice…..and keeping my knife in my pocket……

Melvis:

Hi there. Wishing contentment. Laughing. Buzzing. Dog is at my feet. Happiness abounds.

love. our hearts bring, the blog delivers.

Molly, redux:

I feel this quote deserves deliverance from the multitude of conversations that have corresponded tonight between many conversations small and heated. Point Break, Roadhouse…..” Dear ALL, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday evening in a slight mind of detention for whatever it was we did wrong-perhaps right. But we think you’re crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us… In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain……and an athlete… …and a basket case… …a princess……and a criminal… Does that answer your question?… Sincerely yours, the Dinner Club. Bradley, the inter web sis for sharing thoughts ideas, random ideologies no matter how random and dumb they may seem…we are your friends, your life……your future. You cant erase us, only further help define us.

Design vs. (nature vs. nurture)

Nature versus nurture. Which one determines one’s lot in life? It’s a never-ending debate.

But maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s somewhere in-between. My hope: Design*.

My son Will. By design, he’ll be useful and engaging. How’s that? He’s underpinned with a strong and sturdy constitution: a sitemap† (color-coded, in radial format††).

Nicole, thanks for the onesie!

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* Not to be confused with the notions of intelligent design popular in areas in which I will never live. Go Barack!
† An outline that includes all of the pages of a web site
†† Optional

Twitter litter

Anyone who has a Twitter account knows that twittering into the void gets old fast. And by twittering into the void, I mean, twittering without anyone responding. It’s somewhere in between having an IM conversation with yourself and having a blog with no readers. (I had 83 page views yesterday. WOO HOO!) To my friends who have Twitter accounts, who are following me, and whom I follow, let us each muster up the requisite watt of brainpower and feed this thing with our twitter litter, lest we leave the content of this stretch of the Albert Arnold Gore Jr. Information Superhighway to other travelers, who are offloading less interesting trash.

Friends! Deal with my twitter litter, and I’ll deal with yours!

cmadden, mxmaione and petetschudy: you have iPhones. You have no excuse.

Modernista! reinvents the online agency brochure

I’ve been impressed by agency web sites before, but never have I been truly inspired by one … until now. Modernista! has opened its kimono, as it were, by cobbling together the so-called web 2.0 web sites that could feature their work — flickr, youtube, del.icio.us — and news about them — google.com/news — and including them under a persistent and minimal Modernista! banner.

Why am I inspired?

• They didn’t make just another agency web site (JAAWS?)
• They incorporate news from a news source that could easily include unsavory news about M!
• As an agency, this site demonstrates a command of not only “web design” or “web technology” but more importantly the internet as a medium
• They found a way to take powerful and proven tools and make them their own, instead of “rolling their own” and missing the mark

Is this web site perfect?

No, I don’t think so. It could be improved … but only in noodgy, executional details.

As an idea, it should constitute a mark in time.

I’m sure this design will provoke advertising executives everywhere to rethink their “strategies” for their own sites: thinking anew about “transparency” and the savings in time and money that “leveraging existing frameworks” can provide. Soon, a brochure that pulls feeds from the 2.0 sites above instead of bringing those entire sites in will emerge, and so on, and so on …

Thanks to mxmaione for the link.

Baby food

My wife Kari uses the word “eating” to describe what my son Will does when he’s breastfeeding. But people “eat” things like corn niblets. And cream of wheat. Neither of which are produced by my wife’s breasts.

The word eating seems wrong to me in a literal sense, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s the place in my brain where breastfeeding meets corn niblets that bothers me.

Photo courtesy of XRRR