Directories

I realized yesterday that my design skills need an update. I have to spend some time away from text working on making beautiful things. I have been living in a text only world the last couple of months and it shows in my attempts at graphics recently.

Hello Nasty Lyric of the day: "His name plate medallion Says never trust a hal 9000"(from The Grasshopper Unit)

There is a Wired article today about the similarities in the design of all of the Internet directories. I couldn't agree more. What happened? People used to use the Web to innovate and try new things, and now its just like everything else. It's obvious that these folks are working and designing by committee. I like simplicity as much as anyone, but I also like beautiful things. It's one of the reasons I still use a Macintosh 60% of the time at work and for all of my home computing needs. I think that beautifully designed things inspire me. There isn't a substitute for that. I'm getting off topic though.

I think all of these folks who have all their money invested in Yahoo should take a long look at some of the emerging technologies(Like Everything and NewHoo) that represent the spirit of the Internet as a community. These are the future in my mind, not a small group of people working to try and catalog the entire growing and morphing Internet.

I would much rather know that someone like me with an interest in finding valuable information was cataloging pages I might look for. It makes a lot more sense to trust someone like that rather than someone who has a vested financial interest in seeing me go to certain sites regardless of their information value. I want to do what I can to support these efforts going forward.

The next meeting of the Atlanta Frontier Users group is tonight at the Red Light Cafe at 7pm. I really enjoyed the last meeting a lot. Hopefully some of the strong Frontier skills of the others will trickle down to me:-)

The Grand Royal Web site redesign is really good. I really like the work I've seen by the Big Gun Project.