"You need to communicate these 5 things within 10 seconds / 1 screen of text:
When the change is coming
How this affects you (or “This does not affect you unless X”)
What action you need to take (or “You do not need to do anything”)
Why this decision was made (can be high-level/’spun’)
You can complain here"

RT @shiflett: Hey designers, stop using Campfire and use real IRC. Source: http://twitter.com/

RT @sramji: Apple on Location & iPhone < one of the best pieces of corporate communication I've seen since Jobs ...

"There may be no greater ongoing source of confusion, mis-set expectations, and outright deception than the ubiquitous software product road map. Are you tired of road map heartburn? Then take the Road Mapper’s Anonymous pledge and swear off bad habits forever"

nice blog post about downtime

A guideline for post-mortem communication Prerequisites Admit failure - Hiding downtime is no longer an option (thanks to Twitter) Sound like a human - Do not use a standard template, do not apologize for "inconveniencing" us. Have a communication channel - Ideally you've set up a process to handle incidents before the event, and communicated publicly during the event. Customers will need to know where to find your updates. Above all else, be authentic

gun control comic, very well done

Collection of blog advice. Most of this is well known, but this collects a lot into one place.

How being playful can improve response rates

Lifehacker approved: live video, audio, and screen-sharing chatroom for up to 12 people at once

private microblogging. "Socialcast is free for 10 users and $1 per month for each additional user Special rates for companies with 50+ users and non-profits"

"Educational - A speaker should provide enough new information that members of the audience walk out of the room with a new insight, perspective or even simple fact that they did not have when the session began. Authentic - A speaker’s authenticity is their currency with an audience. If, for even a moment, a speaker appears or sounds inauthentic, their content — no matter how good — can lose credibility. Emotionally Connective - A speaker’s ability to emotionally connect with an audience — whether by being vulnerable, by making them laugh, or by motivating them into action — is what an audience will ultimately remember most. Human beings are emotionally-driven creatures, and a speaker who ignore that aspect of the human experience never be as compelling."

"It’s busy in a kitchen. It’s impossible to find the time to tell the world that the best hot rolls just came out of the oven of your bakery. Welcome BakerTweet. Spin the dial to “Hot Rolls” and press the button. A message goes out via twitter to tell the world of your delicious rolls."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why."

"Bell’s biographers have gone to heroic lengths to explain away all the evidence. Refusing credit for the telephone just showed Bell’s humility; not being involved in the corporation showed his dedication to pure research. The fact that both patents were filed on the same day is a grand historic coincidence — or perhaps Gray stole the idea from Bell. As a result, Gray is forgotten and Bell is remembered as one of history’s great inventors — not as he should be: a hobbyist and a fraud, forced by love into stealing one of the greatest inventions of all time."

"a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social network user can have many people following them without a need for reciprocity. Assmmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other (newsletters are a clear exception here)." the comments are just as interesting.

"onversation and dialogue are not simply the means that informal educators use, but are also what educators should seek to cultivate in local life. They may be approached as relationships to enter rather than simply as methods."

pass it an rss feed and it will IM/SMS/Email you when it updates

Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team.

with word clouds and everything

records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter.

free in/out faxing

"[use] short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again."

While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don't want to admit to our own weaknesses.

Cleverness is overrated. It’s mostly a good way to feed your own ego.

Excellent summary of the mistakes you can avoid and the strategies that will make for better presentations

Don't use absolutes - never say "never", "always", "should" or "shouldn't". They're irritating and often inaccurate. (never use them! :)

the government is arguing that the contents of your emails have been voluntarily conveyed to your ISP and that you therefore have no privacy rights to it anymore

Differences between print and digital design Presentation made at the AIGA National Design Conference in Denver, CO on 13 Oct 2007

"The only sustainable value you bring to an organization is what you show and teach and inspire in other people you work with."

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages?

To use language, people must have thought and reflected on their own interpretive frameworks and those of others

an open community of chatrooms. You can chat about anything you want, in public or private rooms. No account is required

How to change the way the world sees you, one thank-you note at a time

Using SharedView, you (or anyone else in the session) can share your Desktop or an application.

address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media: 1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth) 2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings) 3) Societal contribution (aka "adults") 4) Reflection and

Bonnie Bassler discovered a secret about microbes that the science world has missed for centuries. The bugs are talking to each other. And plotting against us.

Individuals assess the likelihood of an event and try to judge whether the market is miscalibrated. The very act of buying "stock" in an outcome adjusts and calibrates the market. While any individual may be wrong, and may not be taking all the different

Frames organize central ideas, defining a controversy to resonate with core values and assumptions. Frames pare down complex issues by giving some aspects greater emphasis. They allow citizens to rapidly identify why an issue matters, who might be respons

If you could send a message to aliens, but it could only be 1679 bits long (less than the size of this headline), what would you say? Here's what Carl Sagan and the inventor of the Drake Equation came up with.

enables sharing files directly among computers, playing multi-player games, chatting, and collaboration over both Wi-Fi and home/office networks.

provides you with a free phone number

VoIP customers around the world are discovering that their calls cannot be connected because telecom companies are blocking the movement of such traffic across the net. Jane Dudman finds out why

This collection of tips was transcribed from a seminar given in Seattle by Edward Tufte. He attributes these tips to another author (but I can't remember who it was).

Are weblogs really that different from message boards? How?

This white paper compares and contrasts asynchronous forums, particularly threaded forums with synchronous chat, and then proposes a hibred of both to provide the advantages of each.