Last week we, bought an 8gb iPod Touch ($229 from Fry’s) for my Irish father-in-law’s upcoming 80th birthday. We loaded it with a bunch of his favorite old music, family photos and videos from the trips we’ve been on together. And we’re bringing it to our son’s wedding next month to add wedding photos, and a special video of everyone singing happy birthday and giving him birthday wishes.

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Download this free font from Bittbox, which I contributed the lower-case “a” to! It was a collaborative font project where designers from around the world were encouraged to hand-draw a letter, which Bittbox then assembled into a quirky, mish-mash font. Check out the list of contributors.

I’m not sure if or how I’d ever used this font in an actual job, but it does make for a pretty cool little hand-drawn alphabet to print out and put on a wall.

If you’re interested in submitting a letter for the next Conglomerfont project, check out www.bittbox.com.

Now this is a really interesting idea. A company called txteagle has developed a business that pays users in third world countries small amounts of money to do quick, small tasks via their cell phone—things like translating a phrase from their native language into English, recording words in their own language for the purposes of speech recognition software, or completing a short survey (1 or 2 questions) about their living habits for the purposes of heathcare research. For marketing research, companies can text users to respond about how they feel about the wording of a product or brand, in order to gauge public sentiment.

On the txteagle home page, they sum up their business model this way:

There are over 1.5 billion illiterate, mobile phone subscribers in developing In the developing world, many living on less than $3 a day. Corporations pay people to accomplish millions of simple text-based tasks. Txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe.

I’m baffled by a couple of things, though:

• If they’re illiterate, how do they read the text message?
• How do these poor folks, most of whom live on less than $5 a day and can hardly afford to buy food, afford a phone and phone service?

Txteagle seems to have good intentions, though. They have found a way for users to turn their idle minutes into profit. They also offer a way for users to transfer money earned to bank accounts, encouraging them to save. Or, they can take their earnings in the form of more minutes on their mobile phones.

Amazon has launched a program called Mechanical Turk that allows computer users in third world countries to do the same thing, but there are far fewer people with computers. Txteagle’s model of using text messages, making use of the larger infrastructure already there, sounds like a better idea.

What do you think? Is this a business model that will fly?

Remember the 90s when the everyone worried about how truthful the Internet is? From lonely hearts on chat rooms posing as the hotties they wished the were, to one-person shops referring to themselves as “we” on their About Us page, people took advantage of the early Web Invisibility Cloak to reinvent themselves. New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner nailed it in his 1993 cartoon: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

But now, 15 years on, an unexpected shift has happened. Thanks to photo sharing sites, forums, social media sites, and Google indexing every step you make on the web, it’s getting harder to fake it. Your online self is now a more permanent and visible version of your physical self. Your every online utterance, drunken party picture, and speeding ticket is now up there for all to see. You now have 2 reputations to manage: your physical self and your online self.

My friend Ed Kless recently referred me to this excellent article in the New York Times about this phenomenon. An excerpt:

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you.”

I’ve been mulling this thought over for the past week, thinking about how little privacy we really have now. It’s interesting that the web has morphed from a D&D fantasy-scape to a gigantic reality show. In a way it’s good, because it forces you to be accountable for all your actions, which (hopefully) makes you act more responsibly, so as not to live with permanent cyber-embarrassment. On the other hand, it makes you wonder where (and if) there will ever be uncharted territory again. It’s human nature to want to escape, to clean your slate, to reinvent yourself. Is it even possible anymore?

Read the NY times article and tell me what you think. Is the web a better place than it was in the beginning?

I just found out about moo.com from Twitter, and boy, I am excited! Check this out: you can get your own custom set of 2-sided business cards, mini-cards (smaller than business cards), or a set of greeting cards, stickers, postcards or notecards… each one with a different piece of your own custom full-color art, for CHEAP!

The process for ordering is very slick. You can print your photos straight from your online photos at Flickr, Facebook, or several other places, or else you can upload them from your desktop. Your photos go on one side, with six lines of customizable text and a logo on the other. All you have to do is log on to Moo, enter your Flickr or Facebook information, and pick the photos you want to be printed. Nice.

They also offer a 100% recycled paper option.

I can think of a million ways to use these products. Like you see in this photo, real estate agents can print all their properties for sale. Companies can print cards with different featured products or services. Artists, photographers or agencies can use it to highlight different samples of their work. Check out moo.com and see what you think! I’ll post samples of the next project I do with Moo (I’ve already got something in mind…).

… he designs some cool funky bike racks for New York!

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Someone on my Twitter feed this morning posted this link to a Business Week debate about Twitter. On the anti-Twitter side, Ilise Benun argues:

Twitter is the ultimate in self-centeredness. To imagine that anyone would want a running commentary of every moment of your life puts you—as a businessperson—at the center of your world when in fact that’s where your customer should be. It feeds the isolated narcissist who wants “followers,” rather than live contact with actual customers.

She goes on to say that if you’re tweeting, you’re not communicating in person or doing something in the "real world," which isolates you from people.

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Want to build some more brain synapses between your hemispheres, possibly reducing the damaging effects of Alzheimer’s and strokes? Try using your opposite hand!

You can actually teach yourself to write just as well with the opposite hand, believe it or not. It’s all a matter of forging new pathways in the brain, which is possible to do in a healthy brain of any age. (It could take months to perfect it, but it can be done.) I’m heavily right-handed, but have decided that for today– or as long as I can stand it– I’m moving my wacom pad over to the left side of my computer. It’s a very strange feeling trying to move the cursor. It makes me feel like i’m five years old, just learning to "draw" my alphabet. I can’t make a good circle, and can’t manage a straight line, because my left hand has no muscle memory for those kinds of fine movements.

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A couple of days ago, Google released a new open-source browser called Google Chrome. (The name "chrome" comes from the developer’s term for the graphics that go around the window of a browser). Their goal was to totally rethink the way people interact with the web, stripping the browser down to its barest essence with a minimum of tools and options. I am particularly fond of the "omnibar" as they call it: rather than having a separate address bar and search tool, it’s all combined into one. This will make my mother happy, who often types URLs in a search box and then wonders why it doesn’t take her to the website. (This will hopefully keep me from reverting to my annoyed adolescent voice: "Because you have to use the ADDRESS BAR, Mom! Duh!")

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I recently ran across a hilarious list of instructions from a 1950s telephone directory from Drumright, Oklahoma. It explains how to get the most out of your telephone service, with tips like "Answer calls promptly. It’s courteous to do so and often keeps the caller from hanging up– thinking you’re not at home." They also recommend in the book to "Use a natural, pleasant voice. Don’t whisper. Don’t shout." (See the whole list.)

This made me recall my friend Madeleine’s classic story of a person who, in the early 90s, once phoned in frustration to her association’s headquarters after being unable to fax a conference form. Turns out she wasn’t actually using a fax machine: she was holding the page up to the computer monitor and slowly "scanning" it my moving it upwards.

It cracks us up to think that people once found routine technology so confounding. And yet, all technology is bewildering to start off with. That’s precisely the way I felt a few weeks ago when I started using Twitter and Facebook. I really had no idea what it was for, how to use it, or why I, never mind any of my clients, needed it. I only started blogging a few months ago, after years of summarily dismissing the whole medium as a self-indulgent exercise in time wastage.

Oh, how quickly things change. Now I’ve set up several clients with blogs, I’ve started Facebooking and Twittering, and I’m becoming a convert of all this new social media stuff. I’m realizing that it was starting to make me look like an old foagie to keep shouting "Get a horse!" 

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