November 7th, 2007 |
Published in
Featured Project, Personal Projects
Every once in a while, I get an idea. I’d been walking past Powell’s technical bookstore and they had a rack full of these punch-out wood puzzle kits that made different things: heavy machinery, navy ships, etc. I figured I could do something cool with them, being that they’re basically 3D puzzle kits.
I only had to fabricate two pieces (from puzzle pieces I wasn’t going to use), so it’s pretty much all snap-together. The two pieces formed the top and bottom of the cage surrounding the light bulb.
Unlike most other projects I’ve done, this one was mostly about staring at the pieces and thinking about how they could fit together. I actually let it sit, hanging above my workspace for about a week, coming back to it every day for a few minutes. Eventually, I stumbled upon a set of combinations that I liked, at which point I took a bunch of pictures for reference, then glued it together for stability.
I put up a few more pictures on Flickr.
November 21st, 2007 |
Published in
Uncategorized
- Bubbletime: Pepperidge Farm creates site that does nothing, calls it "Social Networking". NYTimes = hooked fish. http://tinyurl.com/34jbq6 #
November 29th, 2007 |
Published in
Out Loud
I’m going to take a stab at this Yahoo/Adobe announcement, since Yahoo didn’t apparently take the time to think this through. According to the Paidcontent article, which quotes WSJ and AP sources, publishers can now include contextual ads in their PDFs. Here’s why this is dumb:
- Selling ads isn’t hard if you’re doing it right. If your product is good, and your sales people are competent, you can make money. If it becomes hard, then perhaps the deals are too small, in which case, the prospect of splitting revenues with Adobe and Yahoo isn’t going to be any help.
- Laying ads out on the page isn’t hard, thanks to a recent revolution in desktop publishing (Oy! Heard of InDesign, Quark Xpress??). They sometimes look better than auto-generated text ads, too.
- Assuming #1and 2 are difficult, then you’re going to have to make up the difference in volume, which means you’d better go learn HTML fast, since PDFs aren’t going to get you the audience you need (It’s pretty incontrovertible that your Web audience is going to be larger than that reading PDFs).
- Finally, somehow Yahoo and Adobe are going to have to convince advertisers that having their ads disappear when the PDF is printed out is a good idea. I mean, isn’t emulating the print ad/edit relationship the whole point of PDF advertising?
Yahoo and Adobe need to sit down and think about how they can actually make publishers “new” money, not just insert themselves into an already functional business process. They may make it “easier” for some publishers, but it’s extremely doubtful that this program will deliver solid ROI for any of the parties involved. I don’t think the math is works out on this one.
Tags: yahoo, pdf, ads, adobe