This is an interesting idea, but I’m on the fence about the approach. While the site is a coherent whole, it’s an automatically generated coherent whole; the author herself may not even be aware of the state of her site at any given moment in time. In effect, it seems to me to be a very well-designed, well thought-out feed aggregator. A fan of Jeremy Keith‘s approach, I’ve always tended to see these services as extras, at most supplemental bits of not-necessarily-related content.

On the other hand, this isn’t a bad thing. If the aggregated web services are often used by the author, then it’s most likely no chore for her to log in to four or five sites instead of one CMS: one to add photos, one to add bookmarks, another to blog, etc. While I’m so busy doing other things that I don’t have time to attend to this site [I haven't even really designed the thing yet], Denna is creating bits of microcontent which are combined into something bigger, perhaps more meaningful in surprising ways. Her site is updated as she tweets. That seems quite effortless.

Perhaps I need to get over the fear of the fragility of web services, the idea that they can and sometimes do hiccup, burp, vomit or completely self-destruct. The dependency on these sites. Maybe it’s a matter of choosing the services owned by the big players, just to play it safe. But wait! We want control. Our own favorite content management system, tweaked just so. Argh.

Web 2.0 is about reusing information, and Web 3.0 will be about making information more meaningful by defining and discovering relationships between all these bits of information. The Jons are onto something with Denna’s site. There’s a transition here. And now others will follow.

It’s such a logical, natural approach. It’s the gorilla on the table. I like it. I think.

Assuming that Web 3.0 involves the emergence of practical Semantic Web applications, we can expect to see plenty of logos based on a visualization of graphs depicting nodes within a network. Ehm, like this:

Don’t underestimate the highly creative use of the dot on the lowercase letter i as a node within the network. Real cutting-edge designers will possibly use the letter o. Oh, and for goodness’ sake, use orange and blue in the logo, okay? Dare to be different.

If you want to really turn Web 3.0 on it’s head, join me in designing square, tree-hierarchical logos for semantic web applications. In Microsoft Word. No, make that Powerpoint. No, Paint. No, ASCII. Just to keep these people on their toes.

[On a serious note, I'm testing the Twine beta and find it an awesome concept. These types of apps will change how we as end users approach information. To their credit, they are also one of the first apps in this space to utilize the network-graph-logo-with-the-dot-on-the-i-as-a-network-node design meme.]

• Joseph Sullivan’s favorite book covers of 2007. There are some gems here. I especially like One Red Paperclip and Chip Kidd’s design for After Dark.
• Seems that November 26 will be Blue Beanie Day. Holy shit. I love Zeldman, but people, we just barely recovered from everybody talking like a f*cking pirate. Besides, I don’t have a blue beanie. Photoshop.
• Feel a little more intellectual the next time you decide to throw a sheep at your Facebook buddies. Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison dive into the history of social network sites.
• While everyone else is spewing fire about frameworks and such, Andy Clarke ponders instant cake mixes. Come on, Andy, get with the program. This just proves you’re a nut.
• Joe Clark coins Clark’s Law, which is in part why I love open source. Not to be confused with the other, less important Clark’s Law.

• The 10-minute Playmobil Pirates of the Caribbean, in French. (Via Dack.com)
• 43 folders: The “perfect” iTunes equalizer setting. I’ve got to try this one.
• If you develop Drupal-based sites, help Dries put together his yearly State of Drupal stats by participating in his survey.
• Steve Rubel ponders the future of friendship as defined by web applications. See also my post on the same subject.
• Two Twitter-related links: Chris Messina’s proposal for Twitter Tag Channels and Plagiarism Today’s Twitter debut.
• Robert Hodgin’s latest visual experiment with Processing is terrifyingly awesome, as usual.

That’s enough for today!

Update: Company X have changed their site as of May 22, 2007. They seem to have removed our material.

Note: This is my personal reaction to Company X’s violation of Cinnamon’s copyright, and is not necessarily the reaction of our company. Cinnamon’s post can be found at the Cinnamon Blog (in Dutch).

I hate it when people call themselves designers and then blatantly steal the work of other designers and imply that it’s their own. And that seems to be what Company X Design (“Design” is perhaps an overstatement) has done with elements of the Cinnamon design. It’s so blatantly done, it’s laughable. I mean, at least tweak the damn design—change the color or something—like any self-respecting talentless hack would. Once again, we seem to support my theory that most copycats are complete idiots. As opposed to the last time, I’m now armed with screenshots.

[screenshot removed]

This is not a debatable point. It’s not a question of if copyright has been violated, but in how many ways. Three, from my first observations. All in the header. Let’s examine this using some comment overlays.

First, the type image. [screenshot removed]

Secondly, the tagline under that image. [screenshot removed]

Thirdly, the small images used to lead to our portfolio. [screenshot removed]

I wrote a polite but firm e-mail to these people requesting that they remove the offending elements within 24 hours. They did not. (Update (2007.05.20): I did receive an e-mail from them today, dated May 18, in which they ask me to specify exactly which images and text I am referring to. No contact information and no name was given. I promptly sent a non-sarcastic version of the above screenshots.) I threatened appropriate action if they did not. Obviously this made no impression. Now I’ve posted this. Company X, it’s your own fault. This was the appropriate action I was going to take. A simple blog post. Everything I know about search engines tells me that when people search for you, there’s a decent chance they’ll see this post. Since every time someone comes to your site they see elements of our work passed off as yours, it seems a fair trade. Enjoy the free publicity.

Now I’m willing to bet a few things, and I’ll update this post as they happen, just to increase my Nostradamus-factor:

1. Company X have at least one very good reason to have not answered my e-mail (beware: I will post your sorry excuse here). I have received an e-mail response. See above.
2. They will indicate that someone else did the design for them, or they bought it, or some such worthless bullshit, and that they had no idea that copyright infringement had taken place.
3. Who? What? Huh?

I don’t mind if people allow themselves to be inspired by my work and the work of my team, but don’t steal it and pass it off as your own.

Have a nice day.

Some of these apps could be useful, but the best ones seem to complement and expand on the contacts one already has. My colleauges and I del.icio.us each other all the time, almost always yelling across the office, “I’ll post it to your del.icio.us”. But with del.icio.us, Google Calendar, GMail, Flickr, and a few useful others, I’m on the web for an hour just checking all that. I don’t have the time for that every day (or week), so what often gets me even to del.icio.us is one of my co-workers saying, “Steve, I posted that link to you like two weeks ago.” You only need to check out Emily Chang’s immense eHub to get a small glimpse into the unholy amount of web apps being developed all the time.

Want to make a cool web app? Make one which integrates all the crazy shit I join, measures what I use for what and how often, helping me consolidate my web app workflow and make useful choices about which apps are worth using, which aren’t, and which are harmless fun.

Note to Twitter: Stephen just finished writing a blog post.

The idiocy peaks with the apparent lack of a decent search-and-replace job, as the name Cinnamon is to be found on the very first page.

These people can’t even do a decent job of copying a website, let alone build one. You can hire them, if you can even find their contact information.

Cursor Webdesign, if you want to run your own business, write your own copy.