Sixties City has some interesting flipbook-style examples of dance moves:

The cool thing about the images above is they’re scannable at a glance. If these were videos, you would have to watch each one in order to know what’s going on. The multiple frame view, on the other hand, gives you an instant overview.

Small multiples
In Envisioning information, Edward Tufte discusses how small multiple designs answer the question “Compared to what?”

Small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful, answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives. For a wide range of problems in data presentation, small multiples are the best design solution.

Illustrations of postage-stamp size are indexed by category or a label, sequenced over time like the frames of a movie, or ordered by a quantitative variable not used in the single image itself. Information slices are positioned within the eyespan, so that viewers make comparisons at a glance — uninterrupted visual reasoning. Constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames.

Getting to “Aha!” ASAP
While the sort of multiple frame technique shown above has many applications, online videos seem like a natural home for it. As the number of videos available grows, people will seek quicker ways to grasp what’s going on in a clip and whether it’s worth viewing.

So what if YouTube posted multiple frames instead of just picking one frame?

For example, the frame YouTube chooses to show for this Conan clip doesn’t prepare you at all for the clip’s actual contents.

Multiple frames do a much better job:

The time has come. Today we begin to open the kimono on Highrise (formerly known as Sunrise).

The name is Highrise
The first order of business is the name. We were advised against using Sunrise because of potential trademark conflicts. Highrise was actually the name we came up with before Sunrise so we’re going back to the original. Now on to more exciting things…

The schedule
Over the next few weeks we’ll be revealing screenshots, descriptions, concepts, stories, videos, design decisions, and more. Then we’ll launch. We’ve been using Highrise internally for the past couple of months. We’re very happy with it and excited to let you use it too.

So what is Highrise?
Highrise is a shared contact manager that helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next. Like Basecamp helps you collaborate on projects, Highrise helps you collaborate on people. You can use it alone or with your co-workers. You can think of it as a company-wide, web-based, shared address book with a few twists.

Why did we build it?
We talk with a lot of people. Vendors, lawyers, accountants, journalists, customers, etc. Keeping track of who said what, when they said it, and what needs to be done next is complicated. A jumble of notes on paper, in email drafts folders, and post-it notes is a surefire way to miss this and forget that. Further, we wanted to build a shared tool so I could read up on conversations David had with John Doe before I called John Doe. Knowing the history of a company’s past interaction with people is a great way to save time and make future conversations more valuable.

Scenarios
Highrise was built to satisfy common scenarios like:

• See all follow-ups scheduled for this week
• Review Susan’s notes before calling her contact at the printer
• Set a reminder to write Steve a thank-you note next Friday
• Review all conversations I’ve had with Chris from Apple
• Organize interview responses for potential candidates online
• See a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past
• Enter notes from a call with a potential client
• See all the people your company knows at The New York Times
• Schedule a follow-up sales call with Jim in 3 months
• Review all the people tagged “Leads 2006”

Highrise helps you keep track of people and related actions. Almost everything we do in business revolves around people. At the other end of every phone call or email or letter is a person. Highrise helps you keep track of these people, these conversations, these interactions, and what needs to be done next.

Stay tuned for the next preview of Highrise. If you want to be notified when we launch, please enter your email address on the Highrise mailing list signup form.

Jason Turgeon writes: “The textbook evaluator blog by Mark Montgomery has become a must read for me, not so much because it’s relevant to my work as because it’s so well-written.  Right now, the author is deconstructing, chapter-by-chapter, a book called Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices.  His reviews are vicious, funny, and fit right in with the spirit of 37signals.  He’s taking the authors to task for using unnecessarily big words simply for the sake of using big words. I’d love to see you write about this series of posts.”

Here’s an excerpt from the blog called Direct Vocabulary Instruction: An Idea Whose Time Has Come:

Anyway, all this discussion of convoluted defintions is starting to drive me crazy. The point that Marzano makes is this (drum roll, please): those kids who know more (who possess more “crystalized intelligence”, as he confusingly calls it) display higher academic achievement.

Let me state it again.

Students who know more are higher academic achievers.

Whoa. Blinding Flash of the Obvious.

So what does this have to do with direct vocabulary instruction? It means that we have to teach our kids new words. We have to provide direct instruction. We have to make them learn new words…

I “know” more words than a lot of people. Friends make fun of me when I use weird words like “limn” or “tintinabulation.”

And get this: I’m not smarter than my friends. I just know more words.

Why?

Because I studied them. I had teachers who instructed me–and taught me to love–the power of words.

Thus it irks me no end when people like Marzano have to invent new phrases and concepts. They end up obscuring the true power of words, even as they argue that our children should receive more vocabulary instruction. Even as I agreed with every word Marzano wrote, I became more and more irritated by his verbal obfuscation. Can’t academics use normal words–even if they are big ones? “Crystallized intelligence”? Please.

It’s all about knowledge. Plain. Simple. Easy to understand.

Got an interesting copywriting excerpt for Signal vs. Noise? Send the excerpt and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

“Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business” is restaurateur Danny Meyer’s new book. In a speech at NYU, Meyer explained his philosophy:

“The customer is not always right. While the customer is not always right, he/she must always feel heard.”

Meyer said his business strategy is built on both good service, defined as the technical delivery of a product, and “enlightened hospitality,” which is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. He argued that hospitality is the distinguishing factor for success in this new, service economy. In the information age, competitors know how to offer the same products and services, but the culture and experience companies create for their customers will help them stand out. “It’s all about how you make the customer feel. You must make customers feel that you’re on their side,” he said.

To create this hospitable culture, restaurants must hire the right people, said Meyer. He hires “51 percenters” – staff with a high “hospitality quotient (HQ)” whose skills are 49 percent technical and 51 percent emotional. The emotional skills that are required to create a high HQ are: (1) optimism and kindness, (2) curiosity about learning, (3) an exceptional work ethic, (4) a high degree of empathy, and (5) self-awareness and integrity.

Meyer reinforced that the first and most important application of hospitality is to the people who work for you, and then, in descending order of priority, to the guests, the community, the suppliers, and the investors. “By putting your employees first, you have happier employees, which then lead to a higher HQ. A higher HQ leads to happy customers, which benefits all the stakeholders. The cycle is virtuous, not linear, because the stakeholders all impact each other.”

In an interview with Amazon, Meyer discusses “hospitalitarians” and the restaurant version of defensive design:

[A hospitalitarian is] someone with a very high “HQ”—or hospitality quotient. It’s someone whose emotional makeup leads them to derive pleasure from the act of delivering pleasure…

Don’t judge a restaurant by the honest mistakes it makes; do judge a place by how effectively and thoughtfully it strives to overcome those mistakes!...

People will generally forgive an honest mistake when someone takes responsibility for it with genuine concern.

Mark Hurst has invited Meyer to speak at GEL and yesterday posted an excerpt from the book where Meyer describes the difference between “service” and “hospitality.”

The Ritz-Carlton hotels are deservedly famous for their focus on service; they don’t call it hospitality. But as a guest there, I have occasionally sensed a rote quality in the process, when every employee responds with exactly the same phrase, “My pleasure,” to anything guests ask or say. Hearing “My pleasure” over and over again can get rather creepy after a while. It’s like hearing a flight attendant chirp, “Bye now!” and “Bye-bye!” 200 times as passengers disembark from an airplane. Hospitality can not flow from a monologue.

Humument is Tom Phillips treated version of the Victorian novel ”A Human Document” by W.H. Mallock. Phillips transforms the text by drawing and painting over it and revealing just selected words. You can view the converted text online or in book form (Amazon).

In the mid-1960s, inspired by William Burroughs’s “cut-up” writing technique, Tom Phillips bought an obscure Victorian novel for three pence — W. H. Mallock’s 1892 novel, A Human Document. He began cutting and pasting the extant text, treating the pages with gouache and ink, isolating the words that interested him while scoring out unwanted words or painting over them. The result was A Humument, and the first version appeared in 1970.

The artist writes, “I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I’d stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.”

Daylife
Daylife’s Highlights: “Interesting stories from around the world, hand-picked by Daylife.”

Happy Cog
Happy Cog redesigns.

Adium
Eric Giovanola writes, “Here’s a screenshot I thought was great. I use Adium as my IM client, and their mascot/dock icon is a duck. This is the crash report screen.”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Nivi’s blog has some interesting quote-based posts…

From Mavericks at Work (Part 1):

“Even in the face of massive competition, don’t think about the competition. Literally don’t think about them. Every time you’re in a meeting and you’re tempted to talk about a competitor, replace that thought with one about user feedback or surveys. Just think about the customer.”
–Mike McCue, CEO Tellme Networks, Former VP of Technology Netscape

From The Essential Peter Drucker (Part 1):

“…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

From Part 2 on Drucker:

“Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.”

“Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.”

“[The relationship between knowledge workers and their superiors] is far more like that between the conductor of an orchestra and the instrumentalist than it is like the traditional superior/subordinate relationship. The superior in an organization employing knowledge workers cannot, as a rule, do the work of the supposed subordinate any more than the conductor of an orchestra can play the tuba. In turn, the knowledge work is dependent on the superior to give direction and, above all, to define what the “score” is for the entire organization, that is, what are its standards and values, performance and results. And just as an orchestra can sabotage even the ablest conductor — and certainly even the most autocratic one — a knowledge organization can easily sabotage even the ablest, let alone the most autocratic superior.”

He’s also got a Twitter blog with rapid-fire snippets.

Did Budweiser steal from a NYC sketch group for one of its Super Bowl ads?

The comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know claims that the Bud Light ad in which fist bumping is replaced by face slapping as a new kind of greeting looks more than a little similar to a sketch on the group’s Web site called “The New Thing.” The Whitest Kids are consulting with lawyers. Their rep said, “They are very upset. They are considering their options.”

Decide for yourself by watching both clips. [via The Apiary]

At The Whitest Kids site, one member wrote, “Hey! Budweiser just ran an ad during the SuperBowl that is a rip off of our ‘New Thing’ sketch. This has happened to us a couple times before but this one is pretty blatant. So suck it Budweiser. Drink Coors.” Later on, a member of the group says, “There’s more to the Budweiser story than just random coincidence, which we’ll probably post about in the next day or so.”

Some commenters aren’t buying it though: “Relax! my friends and I have been doing something called ‘slap club’ for years (way before your skit). I’m not saying they didn’t see your skit but seriously though, it’s not that original to begin with. I’m sick of people whining everytime something like this happens. Don’t do the, unfortunately, american thing and waste your time complaining or ‘seeing what kind of legal action to take’ but rather put your energy into the thing you love and think of new material.”

What do you think?

Update: Fwiw, the supposed “smoking gun”: “A while back, like in June or so, Budweiser contacted us through WMA [William Morris, their agent] and asked if we were interested in doing a regular show for them on what is I suppose called BudTV. We didn’t respond because we were already working with FUSE but DVDs were sent out anyways.”

Profile of Jonathan Ive

“We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was. That’s the appropriate thing…The way the parts [of the iPod shuffle] fit together is extraordinarily tight. I don’t think there’s ever been a product produced in such volume at that price, which has been given so much time and care. I’m really excited by that, and even if you can’t articulate its value, at some level I hope that integrity is obvious.”

Gore-Tex is "fostering ongoing, consistent, breakthrough creativity"

“Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams — keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most…[One employee says,] ‘Your team is your boss, because you don’t want to let them down. Everyone’s your boss, and no one’s your boss.’”

2008 candidates and blogs

“Barack Obama was the only one of these candidates that had a way for bloggers to grab the code needed to embed his video into a post or web site…Being on the internet means something different in this election. Having a site isn’t enough any more. These candidates will need to microchunk their messages, and make them available broadly. They need to be reaching audiences not just through The New York Times and CNN, but via blogs and iPods as well. More than anything, they need to reach out to people and talk to them directly without all of the spin.”

Bill Gates' Vista PR lap falling flat?

“When put in this context Microsoft just seems so big and slow and old, hidebound by 30 years of culture and organizational silos that seem impregnable. And it appears that Vista – the product, the PR, the marketing approach – is the result of such an organization. At times brilliant, very heavy, complicated and expensive. This is not a product for today. This is a product for an era when the desktop ruled. And that era is long gone.”

The most underappreciated appliance in your kitchen: the broiler

“If I’d told you I had an appliance that could brown like a grill, was as convenient as your oven, and cooked most food in less than 10 minutes, you’d buy it. But you don’t need to.”

DWR’s annual Champagne Chair Award finalists await your vote. This is my favorite design competition because it’s entirely about embracing constraints.

If you’re curious, here are the the finalists and winners from each round.