Alan Brandon

Frank Chimero has a great post up entitled On Content, in which he explores serving bad soup in a fancy bowl. Content strategy anyone?

…and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say…. Would people want the soup if it came without a spoon? It could be called “undesigned” or “naked” soup.

In many of the organization I have worked with, design (or redesign) has been tried as a way to fix bad content. Even though design is hard, it’s still seems easier than fixing content (content is hard work). But it’s not effective. If you want good soup you need a good chef and good ingredients. Slurp.

The apple meets the shield-and-bars in the DashLink iPhone cradle for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In this piece for Gizmag I cover a slick accessory from Hell’s Foundry.

With my fat fingers, I’d hate to try using an iPhone or iPod Touch while riding. But safely stopped, this would be a good way to keep the tunes rolling (or use a GPS app).

My hands-on review of the Recon-Zeal GPS goggles is posted on Gadget Review. This was a fun one to do because the goggles have that living-in-the-future feel to them.

I’m trying to line up some more gear for more hands-on reviews. I’ll link to them here when I do.

I have a new article on Gizmag.com about near-futuristic motorcycle concept called the Ostoure. The brainchild of Iranian designer Mohammad Reza Shojaie, the Ostoure aims to combine traditional Persian design elements with state-of-the-art technology.

The Ostoure super-naked motorcycle concept by M. R. Shokaie

This is old news (in more ways than one), but the AP Stylebook now officially endorses “website” as the one-word term for, you know, websites. The Wired Epicenter blog has a nice write-up:

Of course, the cool kids have been tossing around “website” for at least a decade. But that’s the way it is with usage: Even when it does happen, it takes a while for language disruption to become a middle class value.

The added emphasis is mine.