Link digest. December 2008

First up, a few small agency sites. Company are focussed on predominantly visual identity projects. Thier print work is lovely and really outshines their digital stuff. Rather like Company, SomeOne produce some lovely print communications and some visually interesting work.

The end of the year invariably means lists of ‘best ofs’, ’stats of the year’ etc etc. Well, blogosphere search engine powerhouse Technorati has published their ‘State of the Blogosphere 2008‘ for your statistical viewing pleasure. Apparently, of the 133 million blogs indexed since 2002 only 7.4 million have been updated in the last 120 days and only 1.5 million in the last 7 days.

I don’t know where the information comes from, but the Twitter Facts blog has a mine of usage statistics from Twitter users across the world. There are 3429 Twitter users in Malaysia, for example. It’s mainly focused on countries with smaller usage statistics as opposed to looking at Western Europe and America markets.

Tube Graph in their words…

Videos are not equally funny all through their length. TubeGraph allows users to rate videos dynamically, instead of giving a final global mark. The average of different users opinions is a graph that shows the most interesting parts of the video.

More detail about how it works is given on their blog.

Talking of blogs. Want to know which are the most trusted corporate blogs? There’s a list of them over at Future Lab’s Marketing and Strategy Innovation blog. Original posting on the Blog Council’s err… blog. Why are they so trusted? Pretty obvious really. They put the customer first and exist to help solve their problems rather than a vanity publishing project by the marketing or comms team.

Bit of data visualisation porn. The Guardian’s Carbon Atlas says in a few clicks what a 1000 word article never could.

Some visually stunning and intelligent work over at Mads Jakob Poulsen’s portfolio. Particularly like the film poster series and the D&AD selected, IF awarded, Print Magazine awarded and Creative Circle shortlisted hearing aid packaging.

[Update: If you want some more detail on Twitter usage across all users then HubSpot have just released a report. As Techcrunch say, it's the best we have until Twitter release their own figures. The figures are from Twitter Grader which won't provide difinitive stats but 500,000 (10%) is a half decent sample.]

Link digest. November 2008

Instead of automating my delicious links to appear on this blog in a rather lazy way, from now I’m going to post a selection of my best bookmarks manually each month with a little explanation and context. After all, my delicious links are rolled into the right hand side of the blog anyway so it seems a little fatuous to duplicate them in the same format in the body of the blog.

So, for the first installment I thought I’d post the latest additions to my RSS reader.

I must admit to having a slight obsession with conferences and talks, inparticular Ted. But if, like me, the two videos a week posted on the Ted site aren’t enough for you then you should go and check out the Pop!Tech conference videos. Along the same lines as Ted, it’s just more of the same sort of stuff to help pass the commute. In their words…

Pop!Tech is a one-of-a-kind conference, a community of remarkable people, and an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas.

The Lift conference is also worth a subscription and has a huge back catalogue of videos from both their Europe and Asia conferences dating back to 2006. In their words…

Lift is a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn changes into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meeting the people who drive them.

On a more design related note, Noisy Decent Graphics from Ben Terrett is a great digest of his thoughts and opinions on design work and the odd rant on things that get on his goat. Very visual (something this blog could do with more of) it’s always relevant and unpretentious. This post reviewing some recent identity redesigns is a great example of the type of stuff he writes about and how he’s not shy of airing his opinions. Even the title of the post is great!

As a source of design inspiration, FormFiftyFive is a constant stream of links to portfolio and agency sites exhibiting some exceptional work. With contributions by many designers from around the world, FormFiftyFive used to be The Serif.

Viewing life ‘filtered through design’ is Michael Surtees’s DesignNotes. Inparticular, his Link Drop posts are great for discovering yet more design related goodness from around the web.