If you want to explore good stuff, forget about Explore, just browse your contacts' favorites. Chances are you will like because that's why you added them as contact in the first place. Finding other people's source of inspiration (the process) goes hand-in-hand with looking at their work (the result).
You can also usually get a fairly good read about the person from looking at their favorites: for example, did the guy like my photo because of the composition? Or do they like it because they just like the subject matter?
Dijubos de Molina (Daniel Molina is one of my all-time favorite photographer on Flickr, and I usually find really good stuff on his favorites:
Browsing a single person's favorite is great, but when you wish to track multiple people's favorites, it becomes rather time consuming and annoying. There isn't yet a function on Flickr to allow you to track all your contacts' favorites yet - but FriendFeed does.
FriendFeed tracks a person's individual stream as well as their favorites, which is a very cool feature. If you track your contacts photo by the default Flickr RSS, you will get single image blocks, which is somewhat annoying, so what I do instead is creating two Imaginary Friends on Friendfeed:
Imaginary friends is a great feature on FriendFeed which allows you to track people even if they are not on the FriendFeed network. Feeds from imaginary friends are only viewable to the logged in users (private).
Now each person is individually tracked by the imaginary friends, they will show up as a row in clusters:
Related SML
+ SML Flickr Favorites
+ SML Friendfeed
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Flickr Faves Browsing = Best way to discover new talents
Friday, June 27, 2008
How do you design? by Hugh Dubberly
www.dubberly.com/articles/how-do-you-design.html
In this 147-page book (available for download as PDF), Hugh Dubberly collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes in hopes to foster debate about design and development processes.
The book asks interesting questions:
+ How do we design? Why do we do it that way?
+ How do we describe what we do? Why do we talk about it that way?
+ How do we do better?
...with practical goals in mind:
+ reducing risk (increasing the probability of success)
+ setting expectations (reducing uncertainty and fear)
+ increasing repeatability (enabling improvement)
It's an interesting and inspiring read. Highly recommended.
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Orange: First internet balloon race
Orange launched another advertising campaign: the world's first internet balloon race.
The game is a little bit different than most other internet games in that the game does not occur on one site, but instead occurs among multiple sponsor sites. Anyone can be a sponsor--all you need to do is submit a URL to the game.
Anyone can join the game and get a balloon. The only way to move ahead though, it appears, is when you visit a site, or when anyone decides to give you a boost or when you landed on a site that would give you extras.
The whole experience feels a little bit like web-ring meets 1010wins. If you are determined to win the race, you ended up visiting a ton of sites that you normally won't get to. The 'sponsors' in turn get some brand exposure. In this sense Orange is providing a free advertising platform in the name of an internet game, and through doing so create brand awareness for itself... power to the users?
via CrackUnit
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Notchup = Get paid to interview for jobs
At a time when you are getting bored with yet another social networking site with a professional twist following LinkedIn's success, Notchup joined the game with a truly innovative twist to the game: get paid of interview for jobs.
That's right folks: Notchup asks the companies to pay up for a time of you sitting in for an interview.
How much is your time worth? Apparently a whole lot. In fact, it looks like that I can possibly make a living out of going to job interviews.
Here's more: the company gives its users incentive to invite their friends who might be interested in other jobs: for each friend you invite, they'll pay you a bonus equal to 10% of what your friend earns on every interview they do for a year.
It sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme to me but I signed up anyway. We'll see what happens. Like Ziki, Notchup has a LinkedIn profile import option, which is very handy because who wants to enter yet another profile these days?
In my opinion, all network data ought to be stored on the user's end and an open API ought to be made available to import user data instead.
There's no direct profile linking yet and the site is fairly barebones--the news of its availability also appears to be causing some server load issues, but the idea is sound and I look forward to seeing how well it goes.
via email from Kit Latham (Flickr / SML Wiki)
Related SML Universe
+ SML LinkedIn
+ SML Network
+ SML Ziki
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Stuffed animals go social
I find myself browsing Interesting Items on Google Web History a lot lately as it managed to dig up fairly great stuff that I didn't know about that's actually related to my searches (thus interests).
Yesterday I discovered Webkinz.
Webkinz are just like any other stuffed animals that we have come to grow up with. But Webkinz are special in that they have a "Secret Code" on their labels that allow owners to "adopt" a virtual version of the toys to interact with online.
Here's a screen-capture of the tour:
I don't have a Webkinz yet so I can't speak from first-hand experience, but based on the tour it looks pretty neat. It is a lot like The Sims, where you get some money where you can upgrade your room with new decoration, food, furniture, etc. It also has some social features to allow kids to hang out via chats.
I tried to login yesterday but I could not because I don't have a special code. Trust that I shall look forward to getting one from Amazon soon.
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
LinkedIn store now open
How do you make money off of social networking sites? Besides selling AdSense ads, here's another way to do it: open up a store and sell branded materials. Professional social networking site LinkedIn is doing just that. As I hook up with my 380th connection today on this popular site, I noticed this banner ad on the page:
which links you to the LinkedIn store. Right now the items are not very imaginative: but one can just imagine the magic of it all if they would allow customization. Something like See-ming Lee, proud LinkedIn user. Connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seeminglee would attract customers like never before.
Truth be told, you don't even need a high-tech solution to do the job: You can do as as simple as giving people the option to write their URL or their name on a designated area with a water-proof marker (which can come with the shipped package) and people can create customize content by drawing directly on the t-shirt. That'd be fun!
©2008 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Uniqlo Grid = Branding through interaction design
http://www.uniqlo.com/grid/
YouTube: Uniqlo Grid / Inspirations Are Everywhere
SML Thank You
I would like to thank Tom Ajello (Blog / Facebook / Flickr / LinkedIn / SML Wiki / Twitter) for alerting me to this on his recent tweet.
Related SML Universe
+ Inspirations are Everywhere
+ SML Collection
+ SML Ideas
+ SML Interaction Design
+ SML UI
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
365 Special Days = Celebration of Life and Humanity
Fernando Luis Lara is a brazillian artist living and working in the US. He draws the 365 days of the year based on stories submitted by people around the world. Each day will only be drawn once. For $182.50 USD, you get an original drawing (9 x 12 inches = 23 x 31 cm) by mail, and your story and drawing will also be shown on the site. The idea is that over time the site will become a collection of special days around the world, thus serving as a reminder of how special each and every day can be.
It's a genius marketing idea for an artist, and it utilizes the mechanisms of the collaborative theme seen today in the rise of Web 2.0. Very inspiring. Check it out!
365specialdays.com
Related SML Universe
+ Inspirations Are Everywhere
+ SML Fine Art
+ SML Ideas
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
UGC = Love + Culture + Free Speech / Larry Lessig / TED Talks
Stanford professor Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.
TED Talks: Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Flickr Social / 2007-11-11 / SML Pipes
Yahoo Pipes: See-ming Lee: Flickr Social
Updated with additional fields for permission filtering.
See Flickr screenshot for module details:
Here's a screenshot of the additional fields. They are all optional. Again, see Flickr screenshot for notes.
More information available on SML Wiki
SML Wiki: Flickr Social
Related SML Pro Blog
+ SML Pro Blog: Flickr Social / 2007-11-11 / SML Pipes
Related SML Universe
+ SML Flickr Tags: Yahoo Pipes
+ SML Ideas
+ SML Pipes
+ SML Wiki: Yahoo Pipes
+ Yahoo Pipes: See-ming Lee
SML Copyright Notice
© 2007 See-ming Lee (Blog / Facebook / Flickr / Google / LinkedIn / YouTube)
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Yahoo Pipes: Meta Search Alerts: RSS feed from search engines / 2007-10-27 / SML
Change Log: 2007-10-27
Added Del.icio.us and Flickr as search engines.
About Meta Search Alerts
SML Wiki: Meta Search Alerts
1. Aggregates these search results simultaneously:
+ Del.icio.us
+ Findory
+ Flickr
+ Google Blog Search
+ Google News
+ Google Search
+ Icerocket
+ Live News Search
+ Live Search
+ Technorati
+ Yahoo News
+ Yahoo Search
2. Filters the results and ensures that the links are unique.
3. Sorts the results by date such that the latest addition onto the pool will appear at the top of the list.
In other words, it acts as an RSS feed alerts for all these search engines.
© 2007 See-ming Lee / SML Universe
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Economist special report: Innovation
The Economist published a special report on innovation on the October 13th-19th 2007 issue of the magazine. The report is broken down to seven articles spanning 20 pages and I don't want to distill it too much, so I will break it down to seven posts.
Something new under the sun
Something new under the sun | Economist.com
Innovation, long the preserve of technocratic elites, is becoming more open. This will be good for the world, argues Vijay Vaitheeswaran
Listen to Audio / Buy PDF / Interview with the author
Highlights / Digest
- "The energy and car industries have not been innovative in many years because they have faced no real crisis, no impetus for change," [Vinod Khosla] inists. (Mr Khosla helped to found Sun Microsystems)
- Larry Page, co-founder of Google, had earlier hosted a gathering of leading environmentalists, political thinkers and energy experts to help shape an inducement to get things moving: the Automotive x Prize, to be unveiled in early 2008. The organisers will offer at least $10m to whoever comes up with the best "efficient, clean, affordable and sexy" car able to obtain the equivalent of 100 miles-per-gallon using alternative energy.
- Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation, as this report will show is becoming both more accessible and global.
- North America still leads the world in research spending, but the big labs' advantage over their smaller rivals and the developing world is being eroded by two powerful forces.
- Globalisation, especially the rise of China and India as both consumers and, increasingly, suppliers of innovative products and services.
- The rapid advance of information technologies, which are spreading far beyond the internet and into older industries such as steel, aerospace and carmaking.
- One way to arrive at a useful definition [of innovation] is to rule out what innovation is not. It is not invention.
- New products might be an important part of the process, but they are not the essence of it.
- Clever ideas have always been everywhere, of course, but companies were often too closed to pick them up. The move to an open approach to innovation is far more promising.
- "We firmly believe that innovation, not love, makes the world go round," insists John Dryden of the OECD.
- With manfacturing now barely a fifth of economic activity in rich countries, the "knowledge economy" is becoming more important.
Read the full article on Economist.com
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Adsense as Blog Analytics Tool / 2007 / SML Ideas
Aside from generating petty change every month, Google Adsense can also serve as an ambient device for you to figure out how well your blog posts are without jumping into Google Analytics.
I use the 728x90 Adsense units on my professional blog, and I noted that:
- When I first installed it, it had four random text ads on it.
- Then I wrote a good blog post, and the four ad units turned into three text units
- Then the spot hosts two ads
- Until finally it turns into one giant ad.
When it turns into a single ad, I noted that:
- The first time it turned into a single 728x90 banner, it's usually an Ameriprise ad
- Then I'd start getting Circuit City ads
- And then I'd get Yahoo ads (as seen above)
- Until finally I get Google ads!
And when my blog posts aren't that great, it will start to dwindle back to 2-4 ads... when eventually it might even get to public service ads, which, thankfully never happens anymore. :)
SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Teamwork / U.S. Marines
Recently I had lunch with a retired U.S.Marines veteran with more than 28 years of experience (LinkedIn: Joseph Brennan). The topic of teamwork came up, and he talked about what it means to be a team on the military:
- Same ability. The military trains its soldiers to possess the same skills as everyone else, such that when one falls down in the field, another soldier can carry on the same tasks.
- Same knowledge. To maximize the efficiency of communication, every soldier in the field have access to the latest information regarding the battlefield.
- Interpret instructions the same way. Authorizations (the briefs) are always written in a clean and clear manner such that the action carried out will be the same regardless of the person asked to carry out the instructions. In a war scenario, when the person given those instructions dies, the next person given those instructions ought to be carrying out the same actions
- Efficiency of the team depends largely on the team members having the same knowledge, speed and strength. To do so, they need access to the same information
- The team can be as soon as its weakest member.
- To evaluate performance of teamwork, take out half of the team and evaluate the length of time that team can still survive given the same condition
- The military does not create specialists.
If we are to apply these methodologies into the business world, it will look something like this:
- Everyone working at the same company ought to have the same level of knowledge related to works done by the company
- In this ideology, designers should know how to write programs, and programmers ought to know design principals
- Efficiency of the work force will be greatly enhanced if every bit of information is shared among the team
- New acquired knowledge will be shared among all members of the force through either corporate emails or blogs.
- When you can get everyone to have a working style that has almost the assemblance of a single person (hive mind), projects will be much easier to handle
Related SML Universe
SML Notebook: Teamwork / 2007 / SML Notebook
SML Flickr: Teamwork / 2007 / SML Notebook
This post needs some tweaking
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
tinymap.net
TinyMap.net = Google Maps + Tiny URL!
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
TinyMap.net = Google Maps + TinyURL
I was doing some research on maps mashups recently and I found this little gem called TinyMap.net which can best be described as a marriage of the awesome tools utilized in Google Maps: My Maps and the ingenious everyday Web tool Tiny URL which transforms long URLs into short byte chunks.
As according to the official step-by-step tutorial, Tinymap.net allows the user to create maps, trace way-points, mark out points of interests with graphic icons and add notes on the Google map.
Content creation is surprising easy, and I created my custom map in record time, much quicker than using Google's native UI.
One thing I really like about the Tinymap is the ability to create password-protected maps, which allows you to share your map with others without sharing with everyone on the Web. Unless I have mistaken, The My Maps feature on Google Maps can only create private maps that are viewable by one person.
When you save your map, the site returns a short URL for you to send to your friends:
http://www.tinymap.net/xYiAKgNj5Q4/
Highly useful. Highly recommended!
Related SML
SML Del.icio.us: Google.Maps
SML Del.icio.us: Google.Maps + Mashup
SML Del.icio.us: Mashup
SML Flickr: Google Maps Mashsups
SML Wiki: Maps
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
100 Most Interesting Notes / Flickr Analytics / SML
SML Flickr: Collections: Flickr Analytics: 100 Most Interesting Notes
(Thumbnails / Detail / Comments)
Set automatically generated daily by dopiaza's set generator
100 most interesting notes from the SML Notebook sorted as according to Flickr's interestingness algorithm.
See-ming Lee 李思明 SML = Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy
Notebook
See-ming's notebook of choice is Moleskine
Pen
See-ming's pen of choice is Faber-Castell PITT artist pen superfine
Related SML
SML Google
SML Ideas
SML LinkedIn
SML Pro Blog
SML Universe
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee / SML Flickr / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Is more better?
Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
— Albert Einstein
Is more better? Depends.
More data is better, when you have the means to adequately mine the data in usable terms. If you don’t have the means to mine the data, they possibly will end up being unusable.
But life, experience, and data-mining tools are all iterative. In other words, they will get better
There will be a time where you have discovered a way to get to those data efficiently.
When that day comes, you will want data. There’s no reason not to collect data now.
SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Focus vs Unfocus
Some people say that my professional blog is very focus. Actually, it's not. It's very unfocus. It focuses on being unfocus.
When you create synergetic energy, everything comes together. That's what liberal arts education is about, right?
Related SML
SML Del.icio.us: Synergist
SML Del.icio.us: Synergy
SML Synergy
SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
Friday, September 28, 2007
SML Google: Web History: Interesting Items / 2007-09-26T21:41-04:00 / SML
SML.Screenshot: SML.Google.Web-History.Interesting-Items.20070926T2141-0400.png
SML.to.Google.2007-09-26T20:09-04:00
1. It appears that your algorithm on machine-learning is doing quite well. These items are indeed interesting!
2. I recommend that your tweak your modifiers. For example, in Top-Queries.5, Propellerhead.Reason.4 is obviously related to my audio software searches, but you should be smart enough to know that I don't torrent.
Torrent, like data, information, website, etc. is a modifier and as such should probably not be used. Focus on the subject, which, in this case, should be Reason 4. In other words, make sets out of your queries for (reason 4)* instead.
3. SML.initHHI(Google.Algorithm.Machine-Learning.Author);
Cheers,
See-ming
Searches
Recent top queries related to your searches
1. columbia university
2. david deutsch
3. demonoid
4. leah culver
5. reason 4 torrent
6. revolution money
7. sonnox
8. feedhub
9. attendi
Pages
Web pages related to your searches
1. NeHe Productions: Main Page
2. FT.com / World - Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
3. NATIVE INSTRUMENTS : Home
4. Become an SEO Professional & Dominate Google's Search Results ...
5. kirupa.com - Shocked Resource for Making Designers better Developers!
6. Schema Tutorial
7. A Picture is Worth... Being Nice to Cyclists in Toronto (TreeHugger)
8. MTA Metro-North
9. Lamictal (lamotrigine) - The Good, The Bad and The Funny. From ...
10. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Videos
+ Using Data to "Brute Force" Hard Problems in Vision and Graphics
+ Canon Shutter sounds ranging from Canon 1DS MARK II to the 350D (Rebel XT)
+ skydive life
Google Gadgets
+ Rob Galbraith DPI: Digital photography news, reviews, tutorials and discussion forums for professional photographers
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee / SML Flickr / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas / SML Universe. All rights reserved.
