The Flicker Blog and Podcast

37Signals post on using A/B software to optimise copy on the sign-up page of Highrise. Intesting that there was a 30% improvement achieved just by changing the wording in the headline and subhead on the page.

A new (and probably Google Analytics biased) blog about online conversions. Worth watching to see how it develops though.

Cennydd Bowles, user experience designer for Clearleft talking about the agile development process from the product design perspective.

An excellent talk by Leisa Reichelt at dConstruct 07 on the failings of the traditional waterfall development process. She touches on Agile - not as a silver bullet solution, but why many of its approaches are better that ‘throwing things over the fence’ to the next discipline. One important (paraphrased) point: Design decisions continue to be made at all stages of any process - with or without designers.

Link to the slides from Alan’s talk in Toronto, 2008.

A presentation by Maria Guidice on slideshare discussing the pros and cons of the agile and waterfall product development methodologies.

Smashing Magazine run a nice feature on creative use of grid-based layouts - with some great illustrations of how a grid need not be constrictive.

Absolutely stunning kinetic sculpture that utilises magnetic particles in oil and water. I recommend watching the video.

Elegant, simple and accessible data visualisations using nothing more than the data and CSS.
See www.alistapart.com/d/accessibledata/ for instructions.

A rather impressive prototype from Mozilla Labs that (to my mind) takes the idea of the semantic web, and brings a great deal of contextual utility to users via language based instruction. Put simply - embedding relevant material from the web (instead of links) becomes trivial and very, very useful. Exciting stuff!

Great idea - and taking a cue from Marty Neumeier's statement about brand - 'it's not what you say it is, it's what they say it is':
User generated tag clouds created for established brands that can give insight into public sentiment.

A rather useful photoshop template for designing iPhone applications.

Great piece on the benefits of content owners relinquishing control online, and opening up content for distribution on the terms of the consumer.

Trouble, in this case, meaning lack of viable business model that can be retrospectively strapped onto a speeding juggernaut.