- Is the Title “Freelancer” a Turn-Off? via Freelance Folder
- How Web Designers Can Adopt a Global Mindset via Six Revisions
- 25 Beautiful Travel and Tourism Websites via Vandelay Design
- Best Tools for Testing Cross Browser Compatibility via DJDesignerLab
- 5 Web Files That Will Improve Your Website via Six Revisions
Interesting links of the day: Freelance Web Designer Edition
On how the Internet is changing our brains
“For a long time, even when I was going to school, we were taught that the structure of the human brain was basically fixed by the time we got to our early 20s. But it’s become clear in the last few decades that in fact, even the adult human brain is quite malleable. And our neural circuitry is kind of always in the process of adapting to circumstances and to environment and to the tools we use, particularly those for finding information and making sense of information.”–Nicholas Carr
Interesting links of the day
- Heading to Africa or the tropics anytime soon? Consider Chris Blattman’s list of essentials. And don’t forget to read the original list too. Good stuff from @cblatts as usual.
- Reasons to buy a pink car via RovingBandit
- It’s now legal to jailbreak your iPhone. But proceed with caution.
- Flying cars? God save us all.
- Why OLPC is “..dead in the water”… still. via the excellent TMSRuge
Defining goals and seeing things through to fruition
There are lots of people out there who feel as though they have failed at something they anticipated to have high success with. And some of us truly have failed, not only once but multiple times (myself included). But, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m finding the case is more often that we simply haven’t gone far enough to experience failure and learn from it the right way.
While it may be common sense to have to try something before you can experience failure at it, many people feel the reverse effect: the onset of failure before there is even a chance to achieve any measurable results. Instead, we should first be asking ourselves what our goals are and further define what failure looks like so we can identify it before it is too late.
When looking at some of the things you might have abandoned or walked away from for one reason or another, take a minute to look at those things through the lens of my statement above. Suddenly, things take on a different shape and you might even start to feel differently about having regrets.
Some projects I’ve walked away from left me with feelings of deep regret at best to incredible angst and bitterness at worst. I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum.
But the “take-home” message here is that you should re-examine why you walked away from something and whether or not you gave it enough time to come to fruition. If you’re like me, you think analytically and have to have a reason for everything under the sun. That can be a downfall, but it doesn’t have to be. You can use that to your advantage.
Consider whether or not you took things far enough to see any measurable results and, even more importantly, whether or not you gave yourself any goals to begin with. A project without clearly-defined goals is a project destined for disappointment and possible failure. If you didn’t define any goals and you ended up walking away from a project prematurely, don’t fret. Do what I did. Learn from it and move on. Your next project will come together more clearly.
Interesting links of the day
- A Complete Guide To Tumblr via Smashing Magazine
- Energy retrofits could save $41 billion a year via CNET
- Asia and Africa, Fastest Growing Facebook Regions via Appfrica
- Report : Why and how Africa should invest in African languages and multilingual education via SocioLingo Africa
- Why Don’t The French Get As Fat As Americans? via Barking up the wrong tree
Maslow would have been intrigued by today’s social media
“What is really happening when you post a photo to Facebook? What about a tweet on Twitter? What about when you broadcast your location via Foursquare? You’re looking for attention and you’re looking for some kind of recognition/acknowledgement from your social graph. Many people will read this and think that’s a negative thing. It isn’t. Take a quick re-look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and you’ll quickly be reminded how important love, belonging, esteem and self-actualization is to our personal development. Social Media has an amazing way to solve the “look at me!” internal dialogue that we all have.”–Mitch Joel (I’m a Creep blog post)
5 years since Africa and counting…
Hard to believe that this month it has been 5 years since I visited Africa for the first time. I volunteered for a span of two months setting up solar-powered satellite Internet stations in South Sudan. These stations were to be used by local NGO’s, government, schools, etc for communication and educational purposes.
Over the span of two months, I blogged nearly every day what I was experiencing as I traveled from Ethiopia to Uganda to Kenya and up to Sudan. The trip was life-changing to say the least. My eyes were opened wider than I thought was possible to the world around me. Images I will surely never forget.
I kept all of my writings in a notebook and haven’t read them since I returned because the range of emotion I experienced was so dramatic, especially upon returning to the States. That notebook has been gathering dust for 5 years. I am considering reposting those writings here on my blog in a special section, perhaps with some notes on what I think looking back. Is that something you would be interested in reading?
The future is coming and it’s taking no prisoners
Working as a Web professional, whether you are a designer, programmer, or social media specialist, one thing is certain. Only the strong evolving survive. I work in all three of those capacities both for my full-time job and as a freelancer and have seen advancements happening so fast that it is practically impossible to keep up, no matter how fast you work at it.
The future is coming at a faster pace than we can imagine. Ten years ago we thought technology was advancing fast. Now, technology is moving faster than we thought it ever would. And it shows no signs of slowing down. I chalk it up to the singularity. What is the singularity? Think of the singularity as compounding interest, except that in addition to the principal balance always increasing, so is the interest rate! And the further you go along the path into the future, the faster both are increasing. Eventually, you get to a point where the speed of both are increasing so fast you can no longer predict where they will be and the lines begin to blur. You’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil, the brilliant man behind the singularity theory, predicts we will reach this “zenith” around 2020. Machines will become as smart as humans and progress will be moving so fast we will not be able to keep up with it. Believe in the coming singularity or not, technology isn’t waiting for anyone.
Back to being a Web professional…
Continue reading →
Interesting links of the day
- It’s official, Facebook hits 500 million members (but how long will the growth last?)
- Ushahidi in the classroom (a simple simulation as to how Ushahidi works)
- The Dichotomies in Personal Learning Environments and Institutions
- Open Source Design: Can Non-Devs Contribute to Open Source Software Projects? (my personal favorite link of the day)
- HOW TO: Crowdsource Funds for Causes, Creativity and Startups
