We Love Maps & We Love Information

Thank you Google for making maps cool again! (Were they ever not cool?) Well, thank you for putting them in front of the world in such a big way!

We have built a mashup of Google Earth and Flash and we're always looking for interesting ways to use maps to tell stories. We built a series of interactive maps for the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai in 2006 (using Flash.) AND we're working on a video right now for the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Foundation that uses extruded maps to tell data stories.

Here is a great Google Maps mashup:

Wikimapia

Puts EVERYTHING into perspective

perspective

Visual Thesaurus meets Pandora

This is a very good idea, with some decently executed Flash but overall I'm a bit disappointed with the user experience. It falls a bit flat and I'm left feeling the visuals are just eye candy, not really serving a purpose. But I want them to serve a purpose like in the Visual Thesaurus. I WANT the lines to join things in a meaningful way, and the related music to be related in an understandable way. Being able to pick "positive" v. "dark" or "energetic" v. "calm" is also interesting. It's a nice place to listen to music but doesn't wow me with the UI.

Musicovery.com

Micro Finance Meets Personal Lending

If you like Prosper and you like the idea of micro finance.....

Kiva

Seems like a great idea - the kind of thing that can really change the world.

Solid State Drives We Can Live With!

Finally - another vast leap in hard drives is coming!! This article says we'll have affordable, giant solid state drives SOON! (Like in a couple/few years.) This will make a lot of things we do better and easier - carry an entire small business' worth of data on a thumb drive! Carry massive amounts of video everywhere you go. Can you say 1,000,000 songs in your pocket?

Solid State Drives of the Future

Simple Software

Many of you have probably read about or used simple software. There is a long-standing debate - would you prefer a simple solution that includes fewer features or bloatware that has 10X what you need? The answer is that everyone wants simple features but the problem is that not everyone agrees on what those features should be, which the software companies then react to, developing bloatware to appeal to everyone. 37Signals has done a great job balancing this need to satisfy the need while delivering simplicity. I use their mini-CRM, Highrise, and their project management tool, Basecamp. Like most users, I have some grips - where is my Entourage Sync?!?!?....and why can't I forward email and assign it to someone OTHER than the original sender's contact info?!?!? But overall, the user experience and feature sets are excellent. And they offer an API, so theoretically, someone could fix the Highrise Entourage sync deficiency. Hell, maybe Beehive Media will look into creating a solution to make Highrise sync with Entourage!

Design and the Elastic Mind at MOMA

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/

This is a very interesting website with lots of cool links. To me, though, it is impossible to navigate.

Problems:
How do I actually read what's in each blurb?
How can I get the little bubble to disappear?
Is there any rhyme or reason to the navigation within each section?

This is cool for cool's sake, I think.