337 Project – A Temporary Labor of Love

Photo by Rich Legg

Temporarily exhibited from May 19-27, 2007 was the 337 Project. A project in which 144 artists descended upon the soon to be demolished building to create images, graffiti, performance art, and sculptures. The Salt Lake Art Center was invited, along with other artists, to decorate the large building.

Art Center Director, Ric Collier, says:

At 337 South 400 East, stands a bland, derelict, grey stucco two-story building. A reuse of a residential dwelling as an office building, this narrow, labyrinthine collection of rooms, hallways, stairs and closets will be demolished soon to make space for Utah’s first all-green, mixed-use loft-style condominiums. Before this exemplary development begins, the building has been turned over for use as a 20,000 square foot canvas, hosting the largest single collaboration of Salt Lake area contemporary artists ever to be gathered and directed toward a community installation, performance and happening: a high-profile art project entitled 337.

While the Art Center did not initiate this project, we were invited to be active participants alongside artists from myriad experiences and educational levels, disciplinary and ethnic backgrounds, and ages. We had no curatorial control over the selection of artists, the themes of their respective contributions to the overall project, or the place of the art work inside and outside this rawest and challenging of spaces.

Artists put their names into a lottery and then as their names were drawn they were allowed to enter the building and “reserve” a space, wall, or room for their project. Admirably, these artists poured their hearts into this short lived exhibit. The images are imaginative and powerful.

Photo by Rich Legg

When asked what it takes to create something of this stature, Mr. Collier replied, “Courage.” Indeed, there is courage of character to create something temporal when most artists yearn for creating art for long-lived fame.

Visit the following links to learn more about the project and see images from the exhibit:

- 337 Project
- Flickr Photos by Rich Legg

10 Ways To Get More Out Of del.icio.us

From Lifehack | By Kim Roach

Del.icio.us is an excellent system for archiving your favorite information from across the Net, tracking hot topics, and discovering new and useful sites. The power of del.icio.us comes in the form of it’s “collective intelligence”, which is constantly adding, reviewing, and filtering new information.

The community of del.icio.us allows you to find some of the best resources on the Internet without having to trudge through all of the junk.

It also gives you a centralized management system for organizing information from around the Net. However, many people are unaware of it’s complete list of features and valuable add-ons. Here are 10 ways that you can use del.icio.us to its full potential.

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How To Prevent Blogging Burnout

From Lifehack | By Craig Childs

If you’re not familiar with Lifehack.com, get familiar with it. It boasts a wealth of resources and articles. – ebrown

Something that almost inevitably happens to bloggers starting out their own niche site, is they run out of stuff to say. Generally, as a new blogger, you can shoot for around 3-4 months of solid content until the ideas begin escaping you.

This could possibly be caused by the lack of one or more of these:

• Inspiration
• Motivation
• Confidence

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20 Ways To Capitalize On Your Free Time

From Lifehack | By Leo Babauta

If you’ve got a big block of free time, the best way to put that to use is to relax, have fun, decompress from a stressful day, or spend time with a loved one. But if you’ve just got a little chunk — say 5 or 10 minutes — there’s no time to do any of the fun stuff.

Put those little chunks of time to their most productive use.

Everyone works differently, so the best use of your free time really depends on you, your working style, and what’s on your to-do list. But it’s handy to have a list like this in order to quickly find a way to put that little spare time to work instantly, without any thought. Use the following list as a way to spark ideas for what you can do in a short amount of time.

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Brand Your Blog For Success

From Lifehack | By K. Stone (This has become one of my favorite sites for tips and productivity)

Why Brand Your Blog?

Do you get frustrated when visitors to your site don’t convert into subscribers? For many bloggers, not all, success equals an engaged and high volume readership, and/or making money from their blog. If you fall into either of those categories then you can benefit from improving the brand of your blog. This post will show you how.

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Pick The Right File System For Your Mac Storage Device

By Iljitsch van Beijnum

When you put a new hard drive in your Mac—or connect an external one—you need to decide how to partition the drive and what file system to put on it. The easiest way to do that is with the Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities. Disk Utility shows a list of all available disks along with all the volumes (partitions) present on those disks. If you want to keep things simple, just select a disk, click on the “erase” tab and you can create a volume that uses the entire disk with a few mouse clicks.

However, if your needs are more complex, select the “partition” tab. There, you can divide the disk into several partitions. The advantage of having multiple partitions is that if one fails, the others may be unaffected.

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Launch A New Business Without Spending A Dime

New entrepreneurs love this idea — spending very little up front but having the potential to earn big returns!

For you innovators and business developers, Lifehack.org has some tips for you:

The biggest mistake I see first time entrepreneurs make is that they spend too much money.

They rent an office or retail location, pay big incorporation fees, hire employees, and build an expensive website (just to name a few). And all before they’ve earned their first dollar!

Each month their cash reserves get lower and lower while they struggle to make sales to cover their expenses. Eventually the fledgling business dies with no cash flow, leaving the owner hurt emotionally and financially.

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Generate More Blog Comments

From: Communiteer.com

Looking for some ways to generate more comments on your blog? Here are 3 articles listing tips to jump-start your comments:

• Ten tips for attracting more comments (Performancing.com)
• 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog (ProBlogger.net)
• Ten tips for getting more blog comments (BloggerTalk.net)

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Weta® Gets Punk’d

Well…not in the sense of the MTV show made popular by host Ashton Kutcher. Weta Workshop, of New Zealand, best known for the incredible and magnificently detailed effects and props for the Lord of The Rings Trilogy, has gotten into Steampunk.

What is Steampunk? See my article, Steampunk: Old is New Again, or visit the Steampunk Workshop for more information.

WIRED Magazine even covered the geekery in their latest issue (on News Stands today!) or you can visit Wired Online for a peek at the cast metal toys.

This line of toy laser guns started out as drawings by artist Greg Broadmore; they then were crafted by modelmaker David Tremont and cast in metal.

Related Links
- Weta Workshop
- Wired Online
- Steampunk

Yukio Miyamoto – Master of Adobe Illustrator®

Illustration by Yukio Miyamoto

You have to see these images to believe them!

Yukio Miyamoto has been working with Adobe Illustrator from the beginning and it shows. His illustrations are incredibly photo-realistic.

By using the gradient mesh tool, Miyamoto-san brings 3D life to 2D drawings. In some instances he uses the pen tool to trace a photo of the subject on a separate layer. He then adds his blends, colors, lines, and shading for a truly remarkable finished product.

Visit Miyamoto-san’s Web portfolio to be inspired. His work will challenge you in your use of Illustrator. Have fun!

Reward Your Community MVP’s

Jason at Communiteer says:

MVPs (Most Valuable Posters) are key to maintaining a strong community on your site. These folks are likely your top posters, most recognized experts, have the most respected opinions, and are probably feeding you ideas for new content or sending you links to articles they think your readers might enjoy. In short, they are the lifeblood of your site!

MVPs do all of this for free, so why not give them a little extra recognition everyone now and then?…

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Elliott Maise on Delivering a Keynote Speech

Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie | Diary of a Keynote Speech

A number of TRENDS readers have asked me to write a short diary about how I go about giving a Keynote speech. I thought the one that I delivered yesterday to the senior leadership of the Coast Guard would be a good case study.

The Background

About six months ago, my office was contacted by the U.S. Coast Guard to see if I was available to present to the very senior leadership of their organization. They were having a Leadership Retreat that would include Admiral Thad W. Allen, Commandant of the United States Coast Guard, their top 56 Admirals and a few dozen spouses. The Coast Guard is embarking on a major reorganization and one of the key challenges is generational change as well as continuous learning…

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Tangler – Is This Community Discussion 2.0?

I just saw on Web Worker Daily this interesting article on forums. Here is a possible step in next generation of online community building app.

Ever felt that forums just didn’t do it for you? That IM didn’t have the permanence? Problem solved! Aussie startup Tangler, which has recently gone into public beta is, in the words of its CEO, Martin Wells:

…[blurring] the lines between what you might think of as traditional instant messaging, chat, mailing lists and forums. We’re web-based and topically structured like a forum, but interaction is real-time, like instant messaging.

Tangler also has a desktop tool, the Notifier, available on Windows, OS X and Linux. You can use it when you’re busy with other stuff to keep up with what’s happening with your Tangler Groups and Contacts.

Albeit, Tangler is not finished yet and is still building out its tool set. Consequently, one question that comes to mind deals with the issue of moderators: If a user can toggle back and forth between message and post mode, how much hands on work will a host need to have to watch out for flamers and trolls?

I, for one, will certainly be interested in seeing where Tangler heads. I will also be interested in seeing how the usage plays out over the course of the next six months. Users will no doubt adopt the tool, but for how long? What will be the backlash of unbridled discussions in this new forum?

Time will tell.

UPDATE: Read the upcoming interview with Tangler to find out more about the company and the future of the product!

Hurry! Apple Camps Taking Reservations Now!

During the month of July, Camps will be open to ages 8-12 (recommended) who are within driving distance of an Apple Retail Store. Apple Camp 2007 is a great way for kids and families to spend an afternoon getting experience working with Apple’s set of media authoring tools.

There are four tracks:

1. Podcasting
2. iWeb and iPhoto
3. Music
4. Movies

Each camp consists of two and a half hours of hands on learning. Campers will complete their own projects and will take them home on CDs or DVDs.

You can sign up for any two absolutely FREE! Sign up today — the camps fill up quickly and space is limited to first come first served!

News About Banner Ads

No matter how you feel about them, banner ads are here to stay. However, what forms they may take in the near future are subject to debate from designers, marketers, and psychologists alike. One study shows that banner ads may not generate much in the way of “click-thru’s” but they do help shape opinion regarding a product and/or service.

John Timmer, on Ars Technica says,

There is a long history of experiments that show that repeated exposure to a stimulus that’s barely perceptible can enhance a person’s feelings towards what’s otherwise a neutral object. These feelings can include a liking or more subjective things such as “fame, truth, duration, loudness, stimulus brightness and darkness.” The authors hypothesized that banner ads should work well as such a stimulus, given that “most viewers pay minimal attention to banner ads.”

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4 Principles for Online Community Management

The Future of Communities Web site posted this brief article by Francois Gossieaux. I recommend you download and read the PDF.

Partick Duparcq, professor at the Kellogg School of Management at NorthWestern University was kind enough to share one of his research papers on community design with the audience of this blog (download PDF here – 90K).

The four principles of community management according to Duparck are:

1. Purpose
2. Participants
3. Platforms
4. Policing

Most people and sources I know would agree on using “moderator/moderating” over “policing”.

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6 Ways To Better Community

From Communiteer.com comes this little jewel on learning more about your online constituents in order to build better communities. Enjoy!

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in operating online communities is that it’s important to know my users on multiple levels. The more you know about your users, the better you can tailor your site to their needs.

Here are 6 simple ideas for helping you get to know your users better…

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Quotable Quote – Walt Disney

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

- Walt Disney (Fun promotes learning)

Robots & Monsters – For Charity

RobotsandMonsters.org is an effort by Joe Alterio, to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Marathon that will be on July 29th. As a part of the fundraising efforts, Joe has put together this site in an effort to trade original art for donations to a good cause.

You get the original piece of 6″x 6″ art, signed, of a robot or monster or both (your choice), as defined by three words you provide. An image of one robot or monster is $25, a picture of 2 things, either robots or monsters, is $40. Your art will be drawn as per your specifications and mailed in a flat mailer to your address. Your image will also be uploaded to the menagerie gallery, with your name and the cause you donated to, unless you specify otherwise.

All fundraising will go towards the SF AIDS Foundation, which is dedicated to helping individuals and families afflicted with AIDS in the SF Bay Area, as well as the Pangea Foundation, which finances the global struggle against AIDS, in Africa and elsewhere.

As the site develops there will be a variety of artists available for you to choose from, who have all decided to generously donate their talents for a good cause.

Check it out!

Adobe® Finally Kills FreeHand

By: Jacqui Cheng | ARS Technica

Adobe’s John Nack made an announcement on the Adobe Blog that we all knew was coming: FreeHand has reached the end of its lifecycle. FreeHand, which was acquired when Adobe and Macromedia merged in 2005, was a vector illustration application that used to compete with the much more powerful Illustrator. But nevertheless, FreeHand did have its followers—I used to be one of them, as part of my graphics education in college revolved around FreeHand.

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Here is the end of an era. I too remember using FreeHand back when it was first released with Aldus. One of my close friends was the programmer behind the  type-to-paths and color blending (which were trend setting and catapulted FH ahead of AI that year).

It is funny, I still have the FH keyboard shortcuts in my brain and sometimes forget that I am “trying” to use them when I am in Illustrator.

Alas, poor FreeHand, I knew him well…