Jun 4th 2009My Name is Brad Frost Get It?
Brad Frost Logo Thingy
If there’s anything I shouldn’t be doing right now, its messing around in Photoshop. I’m so busy its insane.
filed under:design
Apr 22nd 2009Google Profiles: Reputation Management for the Price of Your Soul
Google Profile
Well this is news to me. Google apparently is now including Google Profiles in search results. On a semi-occasional search for my name, I found a message that said “Are you Brad Frost? Click here to create your profile”, to which I happily obliged. Now Google Profiles has been around for a while, at least since 2007, but it was mostly used behind the scenes to integrate all your profile info between Google products. Big whoop. Added convenience.
Now that the cat is out of the bag and the profiles are visible on the Search Engine Results Pages, Google Profiles seems less like a nice little feature and more like a crucial aspect to managing your online reputaion. You can dictate how much or little you want to share with your profile, including work info, interests, links to your other sites, and even photo galleries from Picasa and Flickr. Its a wonderful little place to aggregate all your pleasant little nooks on the internet.
This is all well and good, but this little phenomenon is going to open the floodgates for a whole host of issues. For starters, Google’s got your number baby, and now they can put it on display for the world to see. I can see this possibly triggering a gold rush to stake a claim in your name, to force you to get on board before the other scary, one-eyed pirate rapist Brad Frosts (yes there are more than one) outweigh your relevance. Now this gold rush puts that oh-so-important personal information in the hands of the gatekeeper, the Big G.
Now that its specifically targeting the individual, Google can promote, demote or do whatever with anyone brave enough to attempt to manage their online reputation. Will people who have the balls enough to post ALL their information on Google Profile outweigh those who try to maintain some deal of privacy in this online world? For example: “Hi I’m John Smith and I’m an accountant” will rank far below “Hi I’m John Smith and I’m a 42 year old puzzle maker living at 24 Wendy Way in Sandusky Ohio. I like long walks on the beach, Beethoven, and punching people in the face. I have 3 cats, a pig, and a shriveled turnip that I use to……” You get the point.
And out come the tin foil hats. Is Google preparing for the eventual harvest of humanity, riding around in their Street View cars now affixed with laser-beams to thin the herd? Is Google looking to undermine Facebook as the largest network of people? What can they do with a gigantic network of people and a near-monopoly on search? Will “Do No Evil” eventually become “Holy crap! We have everyone’s info, time to do some evil!”? Doubtful, but I think its important that while Google Profiles can help quickly and easily help you set up a home base for your internet presence, the gun-to-the-head pressure of hopping on the G train might raise some red flags.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in seeing what Google Profiles looks like, check me out.
Apr 16th 2009Magento Enterprise Edition: How to Stifle a Growing Community
Yesterday Varien announced Magento Enterprise Edition, which is a commercially-licensed e-commerce platform built on their free open source version. From Varien’s standpoint, I can understand their need to monetize their product, however I feel this is a big disappointment to the growing Magento development community. With over to 750,000 downloads in less than a year, Magento’s growth has been quick and has gained a ton of momentum from developers and critics. What better way to totally reverse that momentum by locking up the best features in a premium version and slapping a huge pricetag on it ($8,900 A YEAR?!).
From a developer’s standpoint, I was really looking forward to a lot of the features that were being hyped up by the team on the roadmap and/or forums (specifically the gift cards). Now that a lot of beneficial features will be locked up in an expensive premium version, I expect to see that excitement and momentum from the community fade. Read More »
Apr 10th 2009The Importance of Temporary Landing Pages
Website builds can be lengthy and involved processes. Designers can easily develop tunnel vision focusing on the final build that they forget about the importance of a strong landing page to keep users happy in the meantime. Gone are the days of the terrible-yet-oh-so-nostalgic ‘under construction’ animated GIFS. In their place are mostly functional, boiled-down websites capable of immediately satisfying users’ primary goals.
Why Bother with Landing Pages?
Its easy to understand why web designers overlook temporary landing pages: tight deadlines, the hassle of creating and maintaining a page that will only be discarded later, etc. But there are immediate benefits of exerting that extra effort to develop a great landing page:
You’re Building the Site Already
You’re busy slicing and dicing the static content of your gorgeous future website, so before it gets chucked into a CMS, throw the skeleton up (header, footer, container) as your landing page. Even though the full site is still being developed, site elements can be introduced and built upon later.
While developing the Complete Care Chiropractic website, I introduced what will later become functional elements of the site, but in the interim are simply placeholder divs to frame the temporary content.
Complete Care Chiropractic - the prettiest thing in the world? no. Beneficial? Absolutely.
Also keep in mind that the landing page will not be discarded, but rather dispersed when the full site gets developed. For example, I created a “Make an Appointment” form that will later live on its own page, but in the meantime is readily accessible to any user looking to quickly book an appointment. In fact, every element on the current page will be used elsewhere in the final build. Will it look the same? No. Will it be coded the same? Perhaps. Read More »
filed under:web
Apr 3rd 2009Sean Eisele’s Surrogate Trailer
My good friend Sean Eisele has recently written and directed a short film entitled Surrogate. Sean has broken convention from typical western gender stereotypes by focusing on a strong female lead character. I recently worked with Sean on Gospel of Wonderland, where I wrote score music featured in the film. Here’s what Sean says about his new film:
Surrogate is a script that my father and I developed that we are now expanding into a feature length script. Having been raised on Westerns, it came to our attention that in such a male dominated genre, female characters are often marginalized as flat, secondary characters. They are either damsels in distress or threats to the Cowboy lifestyle. Therefore, we set out to give life to a full blooded female character with this film, one that is integrated into the West rather than disconnected from it. Under the guidance of producers Mark Myers and Erin Hudson of Citizen Skull Productions, the project has taken flight.
The film also stars good friend and Sean’s long time collaborator Max Rappaport. That’s the extent of my knowledge about the film so far, but based on the quality of the trailer and Sean’s previous work, I know it will be absolutely amazing.
filed under:Friends
Mar 27th 2009Lunchtime Doodles
In an effort to try to keep creative amidst all my current activity, I’ve started doodling a bit in Photoshop at lunchtime. Hopefully this can be a semi-regular thing and I’ll post them as I make them.
All's Fair in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Lines
