We have decided to jump back into the 48 Hour Film Project again this year. Fortunately it is happening in Columbus, Ohio so we are more familiar with the town and won’t have the 4 hour drive just to get shooting. We have many of the same people returning this year and a few new additions. All the things we learned last year will be put to good use as we strap on the insanity and prep for sleeplessness.

I picked up a few ideas last week at the Spring <br /> Conference at Ohio University that I think are worth sharing.

Social bookmarking really is cool
I’ve known about social bookmarking for a while now, but I haven’t really been paying attention to it. Not only is it a great way to keep tabs on my bookmarks from anywhere, but its real power is the ability to share and find the best information on the Web—as evaluated by other users. This is where social bookmarking flies above traditional search by tallying the ‘votes’ of what real people find useful.

Object oriented programming is like baking cookies
Ans Bradford’s presentation on ActionScript 3 data structures rocked. He started by elegantly explaining object oriented programming using gingerbread cookies as a metaphor. The cookie cutter is the class file, each cookie is an object and properties are things like icing color. He left out some delicious methods like bake() and eat(), but maybe he was just trying to save the cookies for himself.

The difference between a laborer and a craftsman
Eric Meyer took a novel approach to his keynote presentation by not showing a single line of CSS code (okay, except for a CSS joke that looked like code). Eric is known as the guru of CSS, but today he took a look at what makes us—those who work skillfully in the digital arts—craftsmen. It was refreshing to think about how our trade is not unlike the trades practiced by our ancestors. We have new tools, but our product is still crafted through years of experience, careful attention and a skillful hand.

I’ve been at the HOW Design Conference in Boston for two-and-a-half days now, and I thought I’d share a few things I’ve picked up.

Describe what you do in 7 words or less
It’s becoming increasingly hard to stand out in the crowded marketplace. Distilling your message down to seven words allows you to clearly articulate what you do and why anyone should care. It also fits nicely into a first-time introduction.

Create opportunities for failure
If you always succeed, you’ll never get better at what you do. Failure allows you to examine what you’re doing and refine it. The BBC has a set-aside fund for ideas that their metrics say won’t work. This fund allows BBC staff to produce shows that otherwise would never get made. The Office, one of the BBC’s most successful shows of all time, was created as a result of this program. If you haven’t watched it; I highly recommend it.

Name your child after a prospect
It’s important to find personal connections with prospective clients. Building a relationship with a new contact takes time and sometimes a little creativity. Branding consultant Tim Pedersen claims to have named one of his children after a prospective client and used this as a conversation starter to establish a relationship with them over time. I’m hoping the shared name was really just a coincidence.

Two days ago we got the great news that our short film Spiral Bound was accepted in to the Appalachian Film Festival and will be screening next week in Huntington, WV. Though we have briefly written about this project before we are thinking about posting a longer “making of” in the next couple days.

Watch the film, 28MB Quicktime

Photography: Jared Vorkavich, Line Art: Beth Flick, Compositing: Tobias Roediger

The last two years have been challenging and a lot of fun. This past year has been awesome, we’ve greatly increased our capacity and had amazing projects to work on. The coming year will be even bigger and better.

We’re working with a team of five people from various locations on a big project, so getting together for an effective brainstorm or team meeting can be challenging. So we decided to give Campfire from 37 Signals a try.

My first impression was, “That’s all I have to do?” Yep. Click the chat tab in Basecamp (which our team was already using) and select the chat room (we only have one, so that was easy). Everyone was logged in on time for our 8:00 chat without a hitch, both Mac and PC users alike. Let me just say that it’s refreshing when technology just works and gets out of the way of actually doing work.

Our chat was incredibly productive and creative. We reviewed all of the work we had done the previous week, and generated a long list of new ideas for the project moving forward. There’s enormous energy in getting a group of creative people together, all focussed on the project at hand, and just letting the ideas rush out and be refined in real time. I hope we can all get together around a real campfire sometime—this group would be a lot of fun with some marshmallows and graham crackers—but for now our virtual fireside chats keep us moving forward.

Despite huge leaps forward in technology we appear unable to account for the mysteriously random day that shows up once every four years. Instead of plopping down an extra day where everyone has to bundle off to work everyone should be given 24 Leap Hours to use as they wish during the following four years. Like pieces of eight in days of yore, the Leap Hours could be broken down into Leap Minutes as needed (but not Leap Seconds because that would be ridiculous).

Lets say you are running “late” for a something, just show up whenever and announce that you are on time thanks to however many Leap Minutes.
Caught playing solitaire at work? No problem just rack that up as several Leap Hours.
Try it.

Here’s a still pulled from our little impromptu time-lapse test shots of the lunar eclipse tonight with our Panasonic HVX200. In addition to standing in three inches of snow and braving 10-degree weather, we had to knock the sticks loose from where they had frozen to the concrete.

I stopped for coffee recently at a little drive-thru place. The coffee was pretty good, the employee was polite, and the service was quick. But the experience of pulling up to the window left a lasting memory.

You could pull up to a window on either side of the small building, but the windows were strangely high for a drive-thru. Sitting in my Honda CR-V the top of my head was just below the bottom of the service window. I’m sure glad I don’t drive a Mini. The employee, towering above me, was able to take and fill my order with only a little stretching on my part, but it was clear that the builder of the drive-thru hadn’t considered the people who would actually be using it.

The window—not their product or service—made the biggest impression on me. Even if they served the best coffee on earth, I’ll remember and talk about the crazy-tall window. The messages we send are more than the words, images and products we produce. They are the lingering feelings and scattered memories of an experience—an experience you can have a hand in forming. With careful consideration of those who use your product, visit your business, interact with your website or read your advertising, you can create lasting and positive memories.

Über Connected
I’m a technogeek and am rarely out of the reach of a high-speed connection of one kind or another. This means that I’m always connected through email, phones, instant messenger, sms, rss, social networking websites… It is possible to be so connected that you don’t actually get any work done, you are too busy staying connected.

Planned Outages
Over the next couple weeks I’m going to be trying out a new technique of planned outages similar to what jv has been doing for sometime. A planned outage means that you shut off all the incoming attention grabbers for a couple hours, then spend 15 minutes checking and responding if need be. There is no rule that says that you have to respond to an email within 20 seconds, or even 20 minutes.

Brain Scatter
Having a tendency to think, “Ooh shiny!” at new things has its uses. However when working on a project, a constant flow of new information tends to be more disruptive than useful. Planning times where I can concentrate on making awesome, useful stuff should keep things more energized.