• Junior Web Producer
• Senior Copywriter
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Check Vantage’s site for details.

I’m willing to make introductions for people I know sufficiently well.

I came across this amusing mistake from Urban Outfitters.

The site doesn’t recognize me, so it flashes up a SUBSCRIBE TO E-MAIL pop-up… On the e-mail unsubscribe page!

Oops. Don’t do this on your site!

Augspace is growing!

Today, Shareable.net ran Five Ways Augmented Reality Is Making Your Life More Shareable, part one of two guest posts I wrote on augmented reality. Part one focuses on present day AR applications. Part two (running tomorrow) speculates on applications we could see over the next two decades.

These posts are part of a series called Shareable Futures. The other guest posters include science fiction luminaries such as Corey Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Paolo Bacigalupi. I highly recommend checking out their posts, too.

Still, there are people out there who still think Gantt charts painstakingly rendered in Microsoft Excel are the only way to do things. Old school project documentation has its place, to be sure, but it can’t touch some of the ways I’ve used Basecamp. A few examples of these uses will explain why I’m a huge fan of 37signals.

• E-mail Papertrail. “I said, and then the vendor said, and then I said…” …and then there’s a gap in the correspondence right where you thought the vendor had agreed a given feature was in scope. Oops. Even with modern e-mail clients, keeping track of all of the conversations that fly around during a project can be nigh impossible. My solution for a while now has been to have these conversations in Basecamp, and if they don’t start there, to move them there as soon as they look  important. Having important discussions in a threaded, searchable repository is much better than keeping them in e-mail, especially when you go looking for them two years later.
• Bug Tracker. For some projects, there’s no substitute for an industrial strength bug tracker like Bugzilla or Mantis, but sometimes you don’t need the level of detail provided by Bugzilla. It can even make the QA process more cumbersome. Basecamp can be a nice alternative. My approach is to create a new project specifically for tracking bugs, then create categories corresponding to bug status.
  For example, on a recent project where I was tracking issues in a large batch of e-mail campaigns, I created one category for “open” and another for “resolved.” I further divided them by the subject matter of the e-mails, and I ended up with something like this:
  • Finance e-mails/open issue
  • Finance e-mails/resolved
  • Call Center e-mails/open issue
  • Call Center e-mails/resolved
  • etc…

  I then opened a message thread in the relevant category each time a new bug needed to be addressed. The beauty of Basecamp in this role is that you can change the category of a message thread. So once I had an issue resolved, I just re-categorized the thread to the relevant “resolved” bucket.

• Face Book. The “People” feature in Basecamp does something awesomely simple that you don’t get from e-mail or business cards: it lets you put in your picture. I love this feature, and I wish everyone would use it. On big projects where one company or both might be quickly introducing large teams to each other, you’ll probably remember the people from the other side whose roles dovetail with yours. But it can be hard keeping track of everyone else, and it’s not as if people automatically exchange LinkedIn profiles. I’m good at remembering people, but I’m sure this feature has helped people remember me a few times.

Finally, I love 37signals’ commitment to keeping this product simple. If I need a Gantt chart, a list of resources with billable hours, or some other feature Basecamp lacks, it’s easy enough to supplement what it does with documents produced in other products. Meanwhile, the core app remains fast and easy to use.

Basecamp isn’t just a tool. I’d say it’s more like a secret weapon, but most smart people with big projects know about it by now… and that is all to the good.

I totally did not get this xkcd strip from 19 May 2010 -- and that's awesome!

I have a lot of feeds on my Google Reader account, but one of the few that I read religiously is Randall Munroe’s xkcd.

I’m going to risk some major geek cred here to make an embarrassing admission: I don’t always understand the punchline in xkcd strips.

It’s like that old game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. Just about every episode is an intelligence test disguised as a joke. When I get it, it’s funny — and genuinely funny, not funny in an arch, “Oh, aren’t we so smart because we get this?” way. When I don’t get it, I always google the punchline. Invariably it’s something interesting, even if it’s not related to my field or my interests.

Today’s strip inspired this post. How IP addresses are assigned isn’t your usual fodder for comic strips, and like most punchlines, it’s not as funny if you have to do research to understand it. But I do get the punchline in xkcd strips often enough that it makes me want to figure out what I missed in the ones where I don’t.

I love it when comedy works hard at making us smarter. I wish there were more comic strips like this.

I also just turned in a pair of longer posts on the topic which have a more speculative angle. These will be appearing on another blog in March. I’m looking forward to being able to link to them.

A month ago, I was fretting over the semantic fate of augmented reality, a technology which I believe passionately has critical implications for the way we learn, play, do business, and interact with other people. The first month of AR’s life as a tech buzzword had involved it being co-opted to describe what I call pseudo-AR. Esquire’s AR issue and the toy line for Avatar aren’t true AR; they’re more like at-home greenscreening using fiduciary markers.

Was AR in danger of being identified with a bunch of limited scope parlor tricks, things that only scratch the surface of what this technology is really about? This is a dangerous place for an emerging technology, so I devoted the first part of my talk to Social Media Club Boston last month to disambiguating true AR — the stuff that overlays digital information on your perception of the real world — from pseudo-AR.

Well, I guess I needn’t have worried. Sure, there were already some dynamite true AR apps out there, like Super Pages, Layar, and Wikitude World Browser, but, well… they weren’t made by Google. The conversation was being dominated by the gimmickmongers — until Goggles reared its Googly head and set the conversation back on course. Those who’ve already used Goggles, which I’ll be talking about more in a coming post, might point out that it lacks some of the real time qualities of other AR apps. That said, the essence of true AR is there: a device, in this case your Android phone, takes your perceptions and enhances them with data from the Net.

So, now that we all know that AR is not about pointing your web cam at an action figure and watching it flit around on your computer screen, I can concentrate on writing about why it’s so important and how it will change our lives.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts about the state of augmented reality technology and likely future developments.

Pages of which you're a fan now appear for Everyone.

This morning brought an updated privacy policy with Facebook, together with some changes to how your profile is displayed. I was disappointed to see that the one feature for which I’d really been rooting — controlling who can see what groups you belong to — wasn’t added.

Here are some things you should check on:

• The one that really annoyed me is that Everyone can now see your fan pages. There are lots of good reasons why users should be able to keep this secret. From a business standpoint, I don’t want competitors who’ve identified me to necessarily know which pages I’m a fan of. I also don’t necessarily want potential employers to be able to see all of my fan pages. Having them know I like Dungeons & Dragons is okay. I work in technology; it’s a given that I’m a raging nerd, right? But what if I want to join a political or religious fan page? Showing fan pages to everyone can have a chilling effect, and it’s a bad move on Facebook’s part.
• Check your photo album settings. Photo albums that were hidden under your old settings might appear to Everyone now.
• Check your notes settings. Old notes might now show up to Everyone.
• Check your post comments settings. This seems to be a new setting; the default allows Everyone to see your post comments.

Most other privacy settings should remain as you had them if you choose the “Old Settings” option on the privacy page you’ll get when logging in to Facebook today.

One thing I do like about this change: you can now override your defaults for individual posts. So if your default is to only show wall posts to friends, as mine is, you can now opt to have certain posts show up to Everyone. I like this level of control, even if I’m unhappy with some of the other changes.

I can haz more than one demo for people over 64?

“Who wants to hang out with 70 year olds?” my grandfather asked once. He was 81 at the time.  It was a funny rhetorical question for a 25 year old to hear, and it’s stuck with me ever since. I’m pretty sure that up until that point in life, I’d lumped everyone who could claim a senior citizen’s discount into the general category of  “old people” and left it at that.

I was lucky enough to get this take on demographics from my granddad, and it’s served me well. My current employer sells travel to customers who average in their mid-seventies. These folks are different from people already well into their eighties, and they’re really different from the Baby Boomers who are now entering their mid-sixties.

So when is Facebook, that coterie of lovable scamps, going to wake up to this? Facebook’s ad targeting and demos for fan pages lump everyone over 64 into one category. That’s 3.3 million people by the Facebook ad creation widget’s own estimation — roughly the population of Uruguay or Lithuania.

One demographic. Really, Facebook?

Listen to my grandpa. Then give me a tool with which I can actually target an ad to my demo, and maybe you’ll make some money off of my employer. ‘Til then, fuhgeddaboutit.

Photo credits for this post: Baby in Sunglasses (Vincent Valenti)