Flat Hatter Collaborative

New Job as a Technical Director at Methodologie

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2008/01/10

Started a new job on Monday. I have joined the wonderful team at Methodologie in downtown Seattle as “Technical Director, Interactive Manager”.

Methodologie is an incredible brand design firm with a great specialty in Corporate Social Responsibility communication and Annual Report design.

I get to work with an award winning interactive team and am looking forward to a great 2008.

Also to note — I’ll probably be posting less on elearning specific topics (when I post right :) — will be moving more toward the identity of the blog becoming “Bryan Zug’s Flat Hatter Collaborative”.

My Chumby Just Arrived

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2008/01/07

My Chumby just arrived — here it is (except mine is black) — and yes, this is a realtime reflection of what it is showing –

Way cool physics engine for the iPhone

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/12/06

A physics engine for the iPhone — just play the vid –

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/11/09

I wish they had embed code for this video, would go wider much faster. Since they don’t, just go visit the site — Make My Logo Bigger Cream — so funny because it is so true.

Mike Wesch discussing “Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us” video at Web2Open 4:00

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/04/17

So when I saw this video, I just about peed my pants. It’s a Ken Burn’s-esque animated screenshot/text/typography video that tells the story of the web up to today.

Just found out that the guy who made it, Michael Wesch, will be discussing the video at the Web 2.0 Expo today today at 4:00 pm.

It all takes place at the Web2Open gathering that is an unconference running in parallel (and in conjunction) with the main conference.

This is the kind of loosely coupled teaching/training that is going to take us into the next “age”.

Frozen moments in an age of technological wonder

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/04/17

There are moments that, ages from now, you will remember exactly where you were at when you heard the news.

Like last night.

I was driving back to my hotel in Palo Alto from the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West. I turned on the alternative station and heard Loveline come on with Dr. Drew.

I could tell something was different as they started the show — there was a quick note that they had rescheduled the guests for the evening (two porn actresses) and were going to take calls about the Virginia Tech shooting.

What ‘Virginia Tech Shooting?’ I asked myself.

I listened for a few minutes. Not much info. I scanned the FM stations. Nothing there but entertainment. I switched to AM and moved from news site to news site, picking up details.

What a sad moment.

This AM as I listened to CNN while getting ready to head back to the conference, I heard an account from a professor in the building where most of the murders occurred.

He described hearing gunshots and barricading himself into his office. He detailed how he went to watch video on CNN’s web site to get an idea of what was happening around him.

And I am at one of the biggest tech conferences to ever focus on how we, as an industry, create things like streaming media tools, etc. — and how they might be used.

I honestly never imagined that one — streaming video to monitor a massacre in your immediate proximity.

Stranger still is the fact that, after the Dot Com Crash, I worked at Real Networks for a year — monitoring the live performance of those CNN feeds — rallying the troops when surges brought things to a halt — triaging the system when it all went to hell.

I was the guy who woke up the Real news chief when the space shuttle broke up on re-entry in 2003. The team I was on monitored the video readiness as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq and the fall(?) of Bagdad.

Sigh — may you live in interesting times is both a blessing and a curse.

Creating Passionate Users: Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video…

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/16

God bless Kathy Sierra.

Over the last few months I’ve found myself trying to explain the deepening (and real community) aspects of meatspace interactions that my wife Jen and I have been drawn into as a result of participating in online community.

Usually we are trying to explain to business colleagues or friends or family or members of our church that, yes, indeed — online community is a part of real community and not the equivalent of social cheese-whiz that some describe it to be.

But, yeah — as I’m working to explain it I often see eyes begin to glaze over — and I can tell that folks are either not buying it or I’m not communicating very well.

Which leaves me — searching for ways to compellingly relate how online community has become real community for us — looking for the stories and patterns that engage both the emotion and the intellect.

Enter Kathy Sierra.

This morning I read her post from yesterday describing her keynote at SXSW. The post is called Face-to-Face Trumps Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, Video… and is full of great passages on how all this social web software drives a deeper desire for face-to-face community.

My favorite quote –

…all our globally-connecting-social-networking tools are making face-to-face more, not less desirable. Thanks to the tools y’all are building, we now have more far-flung friends–including people we’ve never met f2f–than ever before. We now have more people we want to connect with in the human world, often after years of electronic-only contact.

Nice insight — sticking that pattern in my bag of tricks — something tells me the “online community isn’t real community, is it?” questions aren’t gonna stop anytime soon — this stuff is continuing to disrupt everything.

Did I mention that my mom who just got her first computer for Christmas is now IM’ing all the time — the world really is getting flat.

Great Primer on Open Source Folkways

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/15

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that two good friends of mine here in Seattle were cross posting on their blogs about Flash/Flex momentum and how a healthy open source governance structure might be helpful in pushing momentum even further.

My natural question — have you guys met face to face? Wanna grab some food?

So last night I met Ted Leung and Ryan Stewart for dinner down at Ivar’s on the waterfront. Great time, great view, great conversation.

Though Ted and I both work in the tech industry and have been friends since Mind Camp 1.0, I had never heard him talk about his long history with open source communities and governance (Apache, et al).

All I can say is that I learned a ton about that and distributed project/team folkways in general.

Great, great evening.

Whitespace: 34% More Retention in Half the Time

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/03/14

Cool article this AM from the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. It’s a review of an eyetracking research study called “Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design“.

Best quote –

“What if you could engage users in a story for about half the time, yet have them remember about 34 percent more of the content?”

Visit the article for cool screenshots of the noted before and after design. Main takeaways are that retention increased with a redesign that emphasized –

• Increased white space
• Concise main idea
• Removal of unnecessary images
• Shortened lines of text
• An added graphic for each restaurant ranking

‘Made to Stick’ Cover Design

Posted by Bryan Zug - 2007/02/17

My wife Jen and I were at Powell’s in Portland today and the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was this book ‘Made to Stick’ with a piece of duct tape on the cover.

Psych.

That’s cool cover design. And it got me to look at and buy the book. The six points of stickiness it covers –

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotion
6. Stories

I was just having a ‘discussion’ the other day about stickiness with a colleague of mine — what are the things that get an idea or a presentation to stand out and stay with? What are the characteristics of ideas that, when released into the world around us, make them take flight and establish a life of their own?

Hard questions — especially amidst all of the ‘noise of the age’ that clutters our current generations, from MySpace to Baby Boomer to Seasoned Citizens.

Me? I come down with most of the things on this list — so it’s timely.

Him? Not so much — instead he called catering to such things entertainment — and, well, he’s in the education business, not the entertainment business.

I was surprised again at how some lies die such slow deaths.

If you are in any kind of educational endeaver please drop this from your language — we are not in the entertainment business — we are in the attention span business.

And if you are not working to make your material sticky, then you are just wasting a lot of people’s time.

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