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  • Paul Kim 2:56 pm on February 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Facebook, Games, Psychology,   

    Game Mechanics and the Real World 

    more about “DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box“, posted with vodpod

    This talk by game designer Jesse Schell is fascinating and well worth watching.

    Jesse generalizes some of the principles behind the success of Facebook games like Farmville, many of which are ultimately rooted in basic human psychology. He then extrapolates how these principles may play out in real world settings as Moore’s Law enables the embedding of sensors and cameras in things as mundane as toothbrushes – with the potential for effecting massive changes in human behavior.

    I was reminded while watching this of Matt’s description of Facebook itself as a giant social game, with your friends as players and their updates as the objects of the game world.

    The best games reward engagement and can induce flow states in their players. It’s interesting to think about how even a blogging platform like WordPress.com might come to integrate some of these proven game mechanics to encourage new users to learn and experienced users to return and keep creating.

     
  • Paul Kim 10:47 pm on February 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: jonathan harris, Photography, story   

    Storytelling 

    I recently discovered Jonathan Harris’ age 30 project.

    Jonathan is an accomplished artist, known for seminal web projects like We Feel Fine which panned the Internet for fragmentary ideas and words to sluice out meaning and emotion.

    The posts are simple rough gems of photography and epiphanies, often abetted by travel, that reveal the stories and people behind them.

    I enjoyed these two stories: Mesa Verde, CO, Jan. 20, 2010 and Los Angeles, Jan. 22, 2010.

    Amazing what you can still do with just words and pictures.

     
  • Paul Kim 11:38 pm on January 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: BBC, Blogging,   

    BBC Click Essential Guide to Blogging 

    Good overview of the basics of blogging by the BBC’s Click program, using WordPress.com for the demo. Hat tip: Mark R.

    This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

     
  • Paul Kim 1:31 pm on January 26, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Rebooting 

    I’ve been blogging for almost five years now.

    I started, mainly for work, when I joined Mozilla, and everything about it was kind of a revelation at the time.

    Not many places incorporated regular blogging then, and it was another sign I’d made a good choice in joining Mozilla, which was pioneering ways of creating open source software and building a global community.

    The main thing I came to love about blogging was interacting with people who cared about what I was writing, whether they agreed with it or not. Over time, I learned about a whole bunch of folks who were doing incredible things to help the Web, and connected with people whose work I’d admired. (None of this is news to you if you blog.)

    Joining Automattic has been a whole new experience of diving into the deep end of the pool.

    I haven’t blogged as much as I would have liked mainly because there’s been so much going on. Like 24/7 communication with my excellent co-workers — we all work from our homes or the road, no commute, and a lounge instead of an office — and with WordPress community members who are blogging zealots in the best possible way. Thank you for welcoming me to the community and feeding me tons of interesting ideas (I’m looking at you, Jeff Chandler). My life has been too exciting to blog about as a result, I swear. ;-)

    But I love and have missed writing and connecting with others through my blogging. So I’ll try to slow it down just a bit and share more here.  Also, I’m going to start pulling in pieces of my activity on other services to supplement the posts like this one. My most used web services these days are WordPress.com (here and for Automattic work), Twitter (which is already syndicated in one of the WordPress.com widgets at right), Flickr, Foursquare, and Delicious.

    I see a lot of resetting and rebooting of people’s blogs in 2010. WordPress.com continues to evolve and I’ll share here some of the things these changes enable, like better integration with social networks and improved alternatives for many different kinds of web publishing.

    I run this blog on WordPress.com with domain mapping, and I’ll try to make it clear when I’m using tools that are non-obvious — right now that includes custom CSS, the P2 theme (as interpreted by MT), Typekit fonts and several widgets.

    Four months in, I can report that I am now part of a stealthy force that is as ingenious and disruptive as my one year old daughter. Striving always to be generous, while uniting code, art, life and the Internet to distribute the collective wisdom of a global community (we’re ambitious! :-) ). I find it fascinating that we are this small — just 50 of us spread out all over the world — yet so mighty because we are part of a worldwide open source community.

    So, yes, please stay tuned to find out what other creative brews we have cooking. And as always, help spread the news about WordPress!

     
  • Paul Kim 11:05 am on September 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Why blog? 

    Two great answers, from Seth Godin and Tom Peters.

     
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