OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview :
“… you only find out who’s been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”
Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.
We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.
Meant to this a while back from an email that went round at work.
Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.
Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.
Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital has a fabulous presentation to scare the bejesus out of their startups on what the current financial crisis means for their fledglings.
While I don’t agree with all of it, it’s got some excellent economic analysis in it of the real reasons there is a very real and serious problem at the moment and why it’s going to be hard for new companies to borrow and in general why we’ve all had perverse economic incentives to take on debt rather than save (I notice it missed deregulation in there, but hey, no one’s perfect).
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I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.
Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages .
And I especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think.
As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.
Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM, and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.
The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.
Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.
The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.
When I was a kid, before i got into power gaming and being a master geek, I used to read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories which were the forerunners of so many computer games and text adventures that were to follow. Ah yes, the path to being a high school social outcast…
And just in time for Halloween, someone has put together The Outbreak , a little video interactive adventure that is a hell of a nod of the head and petite homage to Romero’s ‘78 classic Dawn of the Dead .
Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjas here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo *(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now)*a, who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many .
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Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.
Back in the day, before graphics replaced playability (though let’s face it, the Wii has brought it back), some of the best games there were… in fact, the only ones, were text based interactive adventures.
Not to over-romaticize them but some of them were epic and such a critical part of hacker lore that they’ve entered the cultural lexicon.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.