Sunspots: The nautilus edition 37signals 05 Sep 2006

6 comments Latest by Joshua Blankenship

What happens when Jason Kottke links to you
"Kottke, and then about 50 other blogs pointed to my blog post and flickr photos from my stolen phone, and I instantly had about 40k unique visitors and 78k pageviews on the post. The story got 2100 diggs. My blog's server crashed. My comment mechanism went down (and is still down, sorry)...I had about a dozen obscene emails, 20k+ views to my photostream, and a handful of calls to my desk phone at work with people saying things like 'what the fuck are you doing?' in the space of three hours. Many weird words were used. I think it's over now. Whew. I will be happy to get back to obscurity."
Khoi Vinh advises designers to take "a more conscientious, pro-active approach to participating in meetings"
"So much of what drives design is minutiae or highly contextual in nature that it may come across murky and obstinately obscure. A good designer or art director will use the forum of a meeting, where the team or stake-holders are gathered and primed to listen, to translate that intangible visual vocabulary into lucid, digestible business terms." Previously at SvN: How to make meetings useful.
Adaptive Path designs interface for blog search tool Sphere
"Tony expressed concern that anything more than a search box on the home page might distract users. He joked that he wanted 'no more than thirty words' on the page, and while the comment wasn't meant to be taken literally, the notion resonated with us. The phrase wound up on a note stuck to my monitor throughout the design process, and it was a constant reminder of the spare approach we wanted to pursue with this project."
Seeking profit in Wiki business models
"Ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans...Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million."
Circuit diagram or "Customer-Friendly System"?
"Every once in a while, some one shares with me the story of an unimaginably convoluted system. A system so complex, so twisted that the mere thought of maintaining it has driven many a men insane...[So I] share with you the story of The Customer-Friendly System."
VideoJug "visual survival" guide
Useful and quick video how-tos. [via The Morning News]
Carson Systems launches Amigo
Amigo is a service that matches advertisers with online newsletters, and vice versa.
Poseidon resort in Fiji
"The Nautilus Suite is an ultra-luxury accommodation with stunning undersea views that would impress even Capt. Nemo."
"What were they thinking?" home decors
Flickr photoset featuring examples from "The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement (1970)."
Video: Jeremy Piven takedown of Billy Bush
Best Emmy moment: Jeremy Piven slams Billy Bush as the Access Hollywood reporter relentlessy asks Piven about celebrity babies. "You need another job. You have potential as a human being." Oddly satisfying.

6 comments so far (Jump to latest)

Paul 05 Sep 06

I could only hope that Kottke make a mark on my server… :P
These things never happened to me… I guess only BoingBoing can do more damages to servers and Kottke.

Anon Coward 05 Sep 06

Yeah, he should have built it in Rails and not in Wasabi.

BS&S 05 Sep 06

Jeremy Piven kicked ass with what he said.

Joshua Blankenship 06 Sep 06

Having been linked by both Kottke and Rocketboom (in it’s Amanda Congdon heyday) at various times, I was kind of underwhelmed at the amount of traffic they sent my way. I just chalked it up to being uninteresting.

I’d wager that DIgg did more to crash his site than Kottke, though Kottke spread the story fairly quickly so that it was picked up by other blogs.