Best Careers of 2009

Today, U.S. News and World Report published their annual article ranking the best, ahead-of-the-curve and most overrated careers for 2009. I was directed to the article by a friend Lori Perucci, whose current career choice of Occupational Therapist was among one of the 30 ‘best’ careers selected. The list is generated by ranking each career’s:

1. Job outlook - taking into consideration a long-term downturn in the economy and an accelerated worldwide focus on the green economy
2. Average job satisfaction
3. Difficulty of the required training
4. Prestige
5. Pay

What really caught my interest, though, was the inclusion of Usability Experience Specialist, which apparently encompasses the entire range of possible job titles I have really been striving for: interface designer, information architect, user-centered design specialist, etc. Although, the category doesn’t seem to refer specifically to web and technology related position, it was still nice to see it up there. Although apparently, while we have great job satisfaction, we only scored a B for training difficulty, prestige and job market outlook.

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Photography Fundraiser - Silent auction to benefit lowernine.org

Thanks to Angela for finding out about this.

This Thursday, December 4th, I will be attending a Photography Fundraiser at The Union Gallery, 62 Walker Street, New York from 6:30 to 9pm. This Fundraiser will benefit lowernine.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to training residents and volunteers in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the numerous skills necessary to bring the century-old historic neighborhood back to life in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Photographs will be sold to the highest bidders through a silent auction format. Each artist has generously donated their work, with 100% of the proceeds from sales and donations benefiting lowernine.org.

I believe that it is extremely important to help organizations like this one because of their commitment, not simply to provide assistance to residents, but to educate and train people in ways to help, support and revive their OWN community. Efforts like this one not only ensure that the community has a voice in their own recovery, as opposed to being spoken for by land developers, politicians and outside agencies with good intentions but little knowledge of neighborhood dynamics, but also ensures sustainable community growth from the ground up and the implementation of lasting change.

This should be an interesting event. Come! And bring your check book

The Earth From Above

Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has recently announced that he will bring his work, The Earth From Above, to New York City for the first time in May, 2009. The exhibit of 150 of his absolutely breathtaking 4 by 6 foot images will be on display at the World Financial Center Plaza and along the Battery Park City. The exhibit will last until June 28th and will then travel to California in 2010. It has so far been displayed in 120 cities throughout the world, and has been recognized as one of the most influential environmental art events of the 21st century.

Read the rest of my post at greensear.ch

Plodt - Charting Tweets with Tags and Ranks

After seeing mysterious asterisks appear in tweets for a couple of weeks now, I finally discovered what was going on yesterday; people are charting their tweets on Plodt. Plodt is a utility that allows you to visualize your tweets using tags and ranks by including ** around a tag and ranking number. (Example: *mood 10*) It is the first product from Seawinkle, which includes Mike Buhkin, an ITP alumni from my year of 2007. (Forgive me if I am leaving out others who are involved in the project).

Although it seems that the project has been live for some time, it was officially announced on the ITP alumni list in the context of charting last night’s presidential debate. The resulting chart is quite interesting, as one can not only easily see which candidate was favored overall but can also clearly ascertain when during the debate each candidate did well or faltered. Mousing over each dot on the chart provides you with the twitter user, time, rank and message in a pop-up box. While this put the experience of the debate for these twitter users into an interesting context, I can imagine that this kind of charting could start to become even more powerful for individual users tracking multiple tags across an extended period of time. I do wish, however, that there were additional ways to visualize the data. I imagine the site’s creators are probably working on that right now

The question that is raised when thinking about this kind of a service, however, is what is it’s actual value? What is the value, not only in tagging and ranking our daily thoughts, but in transforming them into a visual picture? Does this provide an added and more interesting context? Or is twitter really only valuable as an ongoing time-sensitive stream of small pieces of information that one must follow to gain an accurate perspective?

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I finally gave in and bought an iphone

I am actually writing this post from my iPhone using the wordpress application. Initial reactions? It took along time to connect the damn thing at my local AT&T store, mostly because of the whole upgrade nonsense (I stole my mom’s upgrade on our family plan). I’ve only had it for an hour but the on screen keypad is definitely alot less annoying then I thought it would be. Downloading apps was also really easy. I will have to give an update after I use it for a while but so far I am pretty happy…

My Love of Tag Visualizations…..TagCrowd.com

I saw a tag cloud on Shawn Van Every’s blog and so, of course, given my love of tags, I had to go check out TagCrowd.com and visualize this blog. Very interesting:

New York’s Internet Industry began with ITP

In his keynote entitled “New York’s Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent” given at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, venture capitalist Fred Wilson called out ITP in a big way. In giving an overview of the NYC internet industry, he stated that everything began in New York when Red Burns founded the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.

“So how did this happen? Well I think it goes back to 1979 when Red Burns opened the ITP…the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. This program has churned out so many important people in the Internet community, and the interesting thing to me is that it started in an art school, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU…and I don’t know any other important academic program that has been influential in entrepreneurship that comes out of an art school…and I think that still to this day defines a distinguishing characteristic of the New York Internet community.”

Nice!

Visualizing your sex life

About a week and a half ago, I read an interesting article in the Washington Post about BedPost, a website that allows users to track their sexual activity over time within a project management type interface. Although at first, this seems like an incredible invasion of privacy, in a reality where people manage every aspect of their lives online it actually may make sense that a visualization of such intensely personal data, and the resulting trends and patterns it could produce, could be very interesting and helpful. It reminds me of an information visualization by Gregory Dizza in which he plots all of his relationships on a graph and represents bits of information about these relationships with various symbols.

I have applied for a beta invite to Bedpost and will hopefully get one so I can check out the interface.

Web 2.0 Expo

This morning I attended the Web 2.0 Expo at the Jacob Javitz center, arriving quite early to see Tim O’Reilly’s keynote speech entitled “Web 2.0 Meets World” and Clay Shirky’s keynote “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”.

I was pleasantly surprised by O’Reilly’s talk which was equal parts informational, providing some thought provoking information about cutting edge and interesting projects, equal parts inspirational, outlining ways in which non-profits and socially responsible companies are changing the status quo, and equal parts a call to action, with the quote of the day being “You better be working on something you believe will make a real difference”. In addition to focusing on the problems confronting financial markets and issues surrounding the looming election, O’Reilly also discussed environmental issues and climate change. You can read my full analysis of some of these projects on the greensear.ch blog. He also highlighted some very interesting non-profit endeavors, including Botanicalls, a project from ITP alums Kati London, Kate Hartman, Rob Faludi and Rebecca Bray and Witness.org’s Human Rights Video Hub, which I was fortunate enough to work on during their research and pilot phase with members of freeFormed.

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The New Flickr Homepage

Thanks to Steven Jackson for tweeting about the new Flickr homepage a few days ago. Naturally, since Flickr is one of my all time favorite sites, I decided to log on and check it out.

The folks at Yahoo are definitely in re-designing mode as the new delicious was just launched not too long ago. But, unlike delicious, which received a reasonably extensive user-interface upgrade, the new Flickr home page is much more subtle. One of the things I could never stand about the old design was all of the advertising and system messages in the left hand column. Now, all of that information has been moved to a smaller right hand column in favor of a larger and more defined focus on a user’s activity and network. One of my favorite, albeit not particularly surprising, additions is the ‘recent activity’ stream (which lists comments made by you and others as well as friends added etc). It integrates seamlessly into the home page design and is much more functional then the ‘comments you’ve made’ or ‘comments made on your pictures’ streams that used to be the only way to access this kind of information before. It makes perfect sense that Flickr would follow the band wagon and provide this kind of a feed but I do wish that they provided a way to respond to comments on photos made by others within this stream, rather then forcing you to go to the photo’s page.

The other really nice addition is the photos that accompany group updates. I still think more focus on groups would be nice. But this is definitely a welcome change from the small link that used to be present at the bottom of the old home page.

Overall, while not much has changed, the user-interface is definitely more functional, easier to navigate and highlights information that is undoubtedly the most relevant to the user.