addi+ions blog: Insights from the Internet Obsessed

Hi, everyone. Hope that you all had a great weekend (I know I did!). This past Friday, I had the chance to listen in on the teleconversation with Daniel Pink, hosted by Learn From My Life.

Pink’s intelligence is almost breathtaking. His credentials are stunning: honors undergraduate degree from Northwestern, law degree from Yale, NYT best-selling author, chief speechwriter for Al Gore. When Pink speaks, his words are brilliant, relevant, and concise.

Brilliance and drive is exciting, but it’s been seen before. I like Pink because he is interesting. His form of innovation is the most unique: Pink doesn’t just create new final products; rather, he uses ingredients that nobody ever considered combining. If Pink were to make meatloaf, it would incorporate tofu, orange, and paprika—and it would be delicious.

But my absolute favorite thing about Pink is his personality. He is secure enough to think bold, devoted enough to honestly discuss the impact of his professional choices on his family, and down-to-earth enough to imbue the conversation with humor. And he was really, really good at answering questions.

With that, I’ll turn to Pink’s actual work.

The book up for discussion on Learn From My Life was Pink’s Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, which is the first American business book to be created using the Japanese comic style of manga. Pink was awarded a Japan Society Media Fellowship for the project, and teamed up with Rising Stars of Manga competition winner Rob Ten Pas for illustration.

The book follows the story of Johnny, a college grad stuck in a dead-end job. During yet another miserable work-caused all-nighter, Johnny heads out for some sushi and grabs a handful of chopsticks. He returns to his desk, and is shocked to learn that ethereal career-guidance sprite Diana will appear to him each time he cracks open one of the remaining six sets of chopsticks.

Throughout the course of the book, Diana teaches Johnny six career lessons:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

As Pink discussed the lessons, and as I read them later at home, they really struck a chord. Everything made sense. They were either things which I’d learned but had not yet articulated, or situations which I could readily believe would occur.

With that, I think I’m going to sign off—this has been a super-long post. But, I hope I’ve managed to convey how highly I esteem Pink, and how excellent—and truly valuable—a project this is. The book is an engaging and quick read, and I definitely recommend it.

Hey, everyone. I don’t believe we’ve formally met: I’m Lauren, dt’s new Event Planning intern. I’m loving my time here– everybody at dt is absolutely rockin’ (but I’m sure you already knew that!). I just wanted to let y’all know about an awesome event that’s coming up. The event is titled Net.Working, and it’s presented by StartUpSD and sponsored by MindTouch. It will be taking place on Monday, June 23, and is an opportunity for recent college grads to network with employers in web-related fields, including entrepreneurs, developers, designers and startup businesses looking to hire. The Art Institute and Platt College are already promoting the event to their students, with more schools to follow. So come on out and get to know San Diego’s top businessowners, web-sters, and grads—and me! See our events page for more info, and I hope to see you there!

Additional info about the event:

When: Monday, June 23, 2008 @ 6-8pm
Where: J6Bar, 616 J St. San Diego, CA 92101, (619) 531-8744
Cost: Free!

RSVP here!

You may have noticed that we recently redesigned our site. The redesign was mainly a push by the designers (Gema & I), but eagerly supported by everyone here at dt. We are our most important client and are constantly looking to improve and adapt to changes within our insanely fast growing industry. Our website is never done. It is constantly evolving and getting better. Remember in school when you would turn in a paper and the teacher would immediately assign you another?(I used to hate that!) That’s how we treat every page of our site. It keeps us fresh and makes us constantly critique and improve our process. Here are some of the changes we made…Hope you like them!

Old Site:

New Site:

1. We increased the overall width of the site - Due to the increasing size of the average computer monitor, sites have been getting wider over the years. This is nice for us designers because it gives us more real estate above the fold, less scrolling and more breathing room. Wider just looks better (if you disagree, look at the tv industry).
2. We broke free from the “page” look - Our old site was contained within the boundries of a rounded rectangle. Our new site is nice and open with headers and footers tiling the full width of the monitor.
3. We switched the emphasis of the homepage – Our old homepage was very product-heavy. Our new site puts the emphasis on us as a company. We highlight what we are doing by showcasing our latest projects, our blog, and upcoming events that we are attending, participating or hosting.
4. Our footer has a footer! – A lot of companies are breaking free from the boring “privacy policy & copyright” footer. We incorporated a nice big footer that highlights our social media links, employment opportunities and information on our co-working space. It balances with our large header and gives the page a solid foundation.
5. We gave it a flexible layout – We are using a slightly modified 3 column layout that allows us to be flexible using a 2/3 1/3 column structure for most pages, while our more graphic heavy pages (projects & side dishes) use all 3 columns.
6. We focused on simplicity – We shortened our copy and removed unnecessary pages. We have lots to say but we want our website to be clear and simple. We feel that the details should be discussed in person.

These are just a few of the changes that I wanted to highlight. Look for more changes in the near future. They are coming!

This evening I will be presenting to the iMarketers Association along with Larry Marine of Intuitive Design. We’re going to be tackling the widgetsphere, from the origins to today’s big players. Who’s doing it right and what are the correct widget strategies to use when creating your own pieces of the web served a la carte. There will be free drinks and lots of time for networking and questions. Hope to see you there!

Here’s a description from our events page:

We’re all familiar with widgets – we’ve used them in MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Yahoo, and the list goes on. But what does it all mean to your business and what are the strategies you can take for the most profitable & effective implementation? Before you jump into building, designing or implementing widgets you need to decide how they will meet your marketing and business objectives. At this event we’ll discuss the critical marketing components to consider before, during and after creating widgets.

Join the discussion on Wednesday, May 28 at 6:00 – 8:30pm

Event: Topic: Widgets: Strategies and Effectiveness

When: Wednesday, May 28th, 6:00 - 8:30 PM

Where: University of San Diego — Degheri Alumni Center 120

Who: - Alex Funk, digital-telepathy - Larry Marine, Intuitive Design

Cost: $30 online.

Register Now!!

Here’s a sample digg story I ran across this morning,
Standard digg-bait headline, average 954 diggs, but 228 comments.

I CAN understand why the 954^th person dugg it, it shows up in their profile, it pushes the story further up, algorithm etc.. etc…

What I CANT understand is why the 228^th person commented on it. What is their motivation ?

Digg only shows the first 50 or so comments by default, so its highly unlikely someone will click through 4 pages of comments to get to their comment. If chances of anybody noticing their efforts are so slim, Why do they do it?

This is not a rhetorical question, I don’t have the answer to this, I would like to open it up to discussion and see if someone can shed some insight on why commenter #228 even bothered, or why people leave 10,998 comments on YouTube videos.