How information moves in today’s society

December 30, 2009 by Ben Shoemate

I made a graphic that shows how I think information moves through our society today. At the top is the discovery, on its way to becoming common knowledge at the bottom it has to move through several phases. Each phase is an ecological niche that is occupied by a different species. Each creature on the list feeds off of information and uses it for energy to do work. Without information it dies. Take any topic and you can trace its path through the information ecosystem. Global Climate Change, Health Care, Peak Oil, Asbestos concerns, Water on the moon, etc…

Information Ecosystem and hierarchy

A lot of people may question the placement I gave to Social Media, which I just called “Status Updates”. Social Networks are the current darlings of the internet and a lot people rave about the information they learn from the random utterances of their social network. Be that as it may, the information is mainly in the form of links to one of the above sources, so it can’t be higher in chain since it requires the others to exist so I place it just further down and to the right (more popular). The placement of spam above political speeches was done for one reason – by the time a political speech contains a piece of information, not only does everyone already know it (a politician will only say something he thinks you already know and agree with), but by the time he says it, there has been spam about it for a long, long time.

Let me know if I left out any major categories or if you think I should swap the order of anything in the comments.

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Base 22 – Logo inspiration

December 14, 2009 by Ben Shoemate

My company is sponsoring a logo contest over at logosauce.com. We put up a $400 prize and anyone on the internet can login and maybe win. It is an exciting to watch so many designers submit ideas for a logo design, but also a little frustrating. A lot of the designs are uninspired. So I put together a collection of some of my favorite icons from around the web that are inspiring to me.

The way I see it, a name like “Base 22” lends itself to these possible directions:

  • Mathematics  – Base 2 is binary, Base 10 in the our most common counting system, Base 22 is a math system with 22 symbols and where “22” is the new “10”
  • Building – Base – as foundation or a building block
  • Science – Base – in science – the opposite of an Acid
  • Teamwork – Base as a home for a team – military base, army base, moon base
  • Home – Base as home – as in baseball – first base, second base
  • 22 – atomic number of titanium
  • “Base 22” as a set of letters to play with

Most of the designers have only focused on the last of those and made variations of Big 2, Big B, ect. So I wanted to explore what they could do with the other options.

Base as a Building

A base is a fort, castle, headquarters, home, launch pad, or team living space. So there are a ton of ideas there.

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Base as a foundation or building block

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B’s and 2’s

   If your just going to play with the name, don’t just play with the “2”
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Then there are logos that have nothing to do with the name that would still be awesome.

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Time to take another look at GWT

December 9, 2009 by Ben Shoemate

Cody Burleson and I looked at Google’s Web Development Toolkit (GWT) when it cam out in 2007. We even build some small applications to test it. We liked it because it seemed like a good bridge between the enterprise world of J2EE development and the lightweight, web 2.0, AJAX driven applications of today. Now Google has released the 2.0 version of the product. What remains the most promising of this is that complier. Which takes code and compiles it for the web and applies all kinds of magic to make it lighter, faster, and better in many ways. Take a look at the video below. To me the most telling part was the testimony from the Google Wave team – with 100’s of developers working on dozen of feature the JS code alone grew to over 1.5mb. I’ know from experience that when you get just 2 or 3 people working on the same complex application, optimization and looking for reuse opportunities becomes a project in and of itself. Delegating some of that work to a smart complier looks like a brilliant idea.

 

I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.

 

If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.

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