Creative Community Bulletin 28 May 2009 Through 29 May 2009

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 28 May 2009 through 29 May 2009:

  • Spy Vs. Spy: The Spymaster Backlash Begins And Twitter Needs To Fix It – Spymaster, the Twitter-based game that we cov­ered last night, is spread­ing like crazy today. It’s been a trend­ing top­ic on Twitter through­out the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this pop­u­lar­i­ty though, some Twitter users are get­ting inun­dat­ed with tweets from the ser­vice in their streams. It’s not real­ly spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoy­ing. Former Digg lead archi­tect, Joe Stump, is par­tic­u­lar­ly pissed off.
  • Why Spreading Twitter Across Your Social Profiles Is So Important – Do you do so? | Blog of Mr. Tweet – Have you checked your inbox late­ly for email sub­scrip­tion updates from the ser­vices you’re using? If you have, then you’ve seen plen­ty announc­ing sup­port for Twitter com­ments and/or replies. From Disqus’ Social Media Reactions and Twitter Sign-In, to 12seconds.tv’s recent inte­gra­tion of @replies and DM’s in your real-time feed, ser­vices are aggre­gat­ing as much of Twitter as they pos­si­bly can into the dash­boards of your social pro­files. Why are they doing this? How does this ben­e­fit you?
  • 20 Futuristic 3d Scenes | Abduzeedo – It’s very hard to imag­ine how our cities and land­scapes will look in the future, but on this post you can get a taste of what may be com­ing in a long future. There artists have enough imag­i­na­tions and skills to cre­ate their own view of the future.
  • 8 Toxic per­son­al­i­ties to avoid – Manage Your Life on Shine – Although we like to think that the peo­ple in our lives are well-adjusted, hap­py, healthy mind­ed indi­vid­u­als, we some­times real­ize that it just isn’t so. Personally, I’ve had moments where I’ll be skip­ping through my day, hap­py as can be, think­ing life is grand and BAM, I’ll be blind­sided by some­one who man­ages to knock the hap­py wind out of my sails. Sometimes it is easy to write it off and oth­er times, not so much.
  • Apple vs. Microsoft – A Website Usability Study – Today we’re going to com­pare the web­sites of two mon­u­men­tal com­pa­nies: Apple and Microsoft.

    The two giants pride them­selves for pro­duc­ing cut­ting edge con­sumer and busi­ness prod­ucts, and are lead­ing the devel­op­ments in soft­ware and hardware.

    But what about their web­sites? How do they both com­pare, and more impor­tant, which one is bet­ter and more usable?

  • 9 Things You Didn’t Know About Newspapers – Very inter­est­ing read for news­pa­per design and edi­to­r­i­al per­son­nel, as well as for any­one who sim­ply appre­ci­ates the world of news­pa­per publishing.
  • So Much For Twitter’s Trending Topics To Indicate Breaking News – We already know Twitter can be quite the source for break­ing news, but crit­ics have in the past cor­rect­ly point­ed out that one should be aware of the fact that the mob isn’t always right, and unver­i­fied claims on the micro-sharing ser­vice – often from a sin­gle user or even a sin­gle mes­sage – can quick­ly lead to false or incom­plete sto­ries cir­cu­lat­ing rapid­ly and vicious­ly until the dust set­tles and the truth sur­faces. And even then, it’s often too late as most peo­ple will have prob­a­bly moved on unless it was a top­ic they have a con­tin­ued inter­est in. Case in point: the Prop8 debacle.
  • Unique Baby Names May Portend Narcissism Epidemic – American par­ents are giv­ing their chil­dren increas­ing­ly unique and unusu­al names, while the most com­mon names are no longer as pop­u­lar or wide­spread as they once were, accord­ing to a study of baby-name trends out of San Diego State University.

    Researchers cau­tion that, while this trend indi­cates the increas­ing val­ue par­ents are putting on unique­ness, it could lead to nar­cis­sis­tic behav­ior that could iso­late chil­dren from the crowd their par­ents hoped they would stand out from.

    For the study, researchers ana­lyzed the names giv­en to more than 325 mil­lion babies born in the US between 1880 and 2007. They found that – while Jacob is the top boy’s name for 2008 and Emma is the top moniker for girls – these famil­iar names and oth­ers are being giv­en to a small­er per­cent­age of new­borns overall.

    At least none of them got named Pariah.

  • Bryan Tamayo’s Portfolio – Krop Creative Database – Krop Creative Database is a data­base of cre­ative professionals.
  • The Vendor Client rela­tion­ship in real world sit­u­a­tions : Eerily Familiar to Freelancers
  • BREAKING: Time Warner Splits From AOL – New York Post – Time Warner Inc. is dump­ing AOL after spend­ing near­ly a decade try­ing to build a new-age media empire only to wind up in a weak­er posi­tion than when the mar­riage began.