“Secrets of the Job Hunt” blog lists some creative ways that job seekers get their message to potential employers.

Other (not recommended) ideas from the survey included:

* One applicant sent six postcards, each a puzzle piece, which formed his resume.
* A candidate sent an egg carton with faux eggs and a message saying she delivered fresh ideas daily.
* A job hunter used an office building across the street to post his qualifications on a large sign.
* Another sent a baseball mitt and said he wanted to be part of the team.
* A woman printed her name on golf balls and sent them to executives that were hiring.

Creative? Maybe. Sound a little desperate? Absolutely.

The consensus of the advertising and marketing executives (you would think they’d be a pretty creative group) was that gimmicks like these are not very impressive.

Advertising and marketing executives… gimmicks… not impressive…

I love irony.

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Ok, I admit it, I got sucked into finding my “Diet Coke Personality” (and yes, I consume quantities of Diet Coke every day).

The “personality profile” was a 10 question survey with 4-5 “personality” questions and 5-6 survey questions.

The survey worked because it was framed around the idea of Coke doing something for the consumer (personality quiz) rather than the consumer doing something for Coke (survey).

The enticement of getting iCoke reward points is pretty standard - most surveys will give something away for free and an incentive for doing the survey - but you also got an avatar (picture) showing your “personality” that you could use on Facebook, etc. It’s a cute picture (holding a DC can of course), and avatars are pretty popular for social media sites. Again, very you-centered for a survey.

Your “personality type” at the end of the survey has all the accuracy of a horoscope, but is still quite fun (and reflective of me based on four questions). Even though I know I took a survey, I feel like I got something for me.

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“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things”
Robert A. Heinlein

I hate washing dishes. I could always not do the dishes (now that would be lazy),  but a) I’m married and b) I need clean dishes. I don’t really have an option, but because I have to do it, I want to get it done as fast as possible. And that means I look at every step of the process and look for inefficiencies and find ways to make the job easier.

I’m innovating.

So many of the major innovations throughout history - the wheel, the printing press, the assembly line - are all about efficiency and productivity. And none of these innovations are created by people saying “I like doing the same repetitive task over and over”. I want to do other things with my time, and I will find (almost) any means possible to cut the time it takes to do unpleasant work (and still do a good job).

There are certain people I watch doing a job and I think “if you organized it like this, did it in this order, and used this tool, you’d cut your time in half”. But since many people are resistant to trying new ways, old processes remain. Which is why many innovators seems lazy in their minds.

I love this definition of “lazy” from the American Heritage Dictionary: “Resistant to work or exertion; disposed to idleness”. All I can say is “hell, yes”, and find a fast, easy and efficient way to get through the work so I can dispose myself to idleness. And I create better processes as a result.

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Registration forms are the gatekeepers of your web site - they can allow or deny users access to your most interesting content. Good registration forms can allow the highest volume of most qualified users, but poor ones can either allow in riff-raff or deny good prospects (or both).

Linda Bustos at Get Elastic wrote an excellent post: Registration Usability - 87 Registration Forms Tested. I can’t beat the quality of her analysis, but I do want to discuss one aspect of registration form design: Garbage in, garbage out.

There are two basic problems you must address when designing a form: problems of type and problems of quality.

Problems of type

These problems occur when data is entered into the wrong field; for example, an address is entered into a business name field. These problems can be easily addressed through affordances, constraints and visual grouping.

Visual grouping
Problems of type can be reduced through visual grouping; putting similar fields together and making visual breaks between these fields.

Affordances and Constraints
When a piece of information like a phone number or a credit card number has a specific format, constrain the entry fields to the format of the data. The “size” attribute in HTML can also limit the number of characters entered in a field, like 3 digits for a phone number area code.

If a user can enter data in any format, they will. A country can be “U.S.A.”, “USA”, “US”, “America” and so on. If the data must be consistent, offer a selection of choices, but don’t allow users to format the selection. Drop-down menus and combination boxes are good for this.

Update: SEOmoz.org points out a form with last name first, followed by first name. WTF? Keep the fields in common order. Country then state then city then address? Um, no.

Problems of Quality

Inaccurate data entry, typos and spelling mistakes can have severe consequences on the quality of the data, including having email addresses that don’t work due to a typo. The majority of quality problems come from slips - accidental and unconscious mistakes in data entry.

There are several ways to catch slips and other problems. Allowing a user to preview their entry before submission and showing a confirmation afterwards are two ways; validation (JavaScript, etc.) is another way - this is a good way to catch problems of type.

The data you collect is only as good as the data a user enters.

Update: SEOmoz.org highlights a form with absolutely abysmal data collection here. Sigh.

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Hasbro and Mattel, the owners of the Scrabble game, are trying to shut down Scrabulous, one of the most popular games on Facebook and a direct rip-off of Scrabble. Much has been said about whether this is a good move of not by a company trying to protect its trademark and whether this will be a public relations disaster in the name of patent protection.

3 things to note

• Scrabble is one of the most popular board games of the last few generations with no sanctioned online version
• Scrabulous is bringing in new fans to Scrabble
• These fans are buying the physical game

Naturally, a Facebook Group has been created to try to save Scrabulous (called Save Scrabulous - go figure). As of 3:20 this afternoon, the group has 8850 members. The group is growing too fast and too big for Hasbro/Mattel to ignore. We saw last month how the Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada contributed to delaying a piece of legislation in the Canadian legislature; can the groundswell of Facebook users influence a multinational corporation?

Hasbro outlines its position:

SCRABBLE has been entertaining millions of people around the world for 60 years so we are not surprised that fans have thoroughly enjoyed playing Scrabulous on Facebook.com. What consumers may not realize, however, is that Scrabulous is an illegally copied online version of the world’s most popular word game, the copyrights and trademarks for which are owned by Hasbro in the U.S. and Canada and Mattel in the rest of the world. We encourage fans to continue to lay down online tiles at sites that have legally licensed the interactive rights to host SCRABBLE fun. (bold is mine)

Remember - there is no online arena for Scrabble. Plus, Hasbo misses the point by a mile: players don’t care about licensing. They care about the game. Matthew Ingram says: “…how people interact with your brand is pretty much up to them, not you. If you’re smart, you will be glad they are interacting with it at all, and you will find a way to capitalize on it.”

Will Hasbro clue in and join the new millennium by embracing Scrabulous or will they demonstrate a RIAA-like inability to adapt to new market conditions? Can the mobilization of the Facebook army Save Scrabulous?

(3:45 and the group has 9200 members: 350 members in 25 minutes? Pay attention, Hasbro)

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For the typographers, here are some samples from Lettering by Thomas Wood Stevens. Lettering is a hand-lettering textbook published in 1916.

In the days of digital design, it’s great to see these hand-drawn samples of typefaces. The craftsmanship and precision is wonderful to see, and the book is a wonderful read for those learning about type and designing and drawing typefaces. Used copies can be found on Amazon, etc.

Calson Oldstyle from American Type Foundries (from the original matricies).

Cloister Oldstyle with a nice c-t ligature and alternative Q.

Variations on letter shapes (note the square slab serifs in the last example). I love this - taking the same basic typeface and doing all kinds of variations on it.

Cover of The International Studio magazine. Wow.

Speechless.

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The New Year’s Day slaying of Stefanie Rengel and the subsequent (and inevitable) Facebook tribute page once again shows that the law cannot keep up with the social developments and implications of the Internet and especially Facebook. Facebook, and social networking in general, is redefining how society interacts on the Internet, and how the law cannot keep up with these new social definitions.

The Toronto Star’s article “Gag orders in the Facebook age” quotes:

The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) prohibits the publication of information “… if it would identify the child or young person as having been a victim of, or as having appeared as a witness in connection with, an offence committed or alleged to have been committed by a young person.”

The key here is “the publication of information”.  The article goes on to state:

[…] while media outlets are prohibited from naming the victim and the youths charged, their names and faces are all over Facebook.

“It’s a very good question if the people who post things on Facebook are actually breaking the YCJA,” Peel Const. Wayne Patterson said. “I guess it all boils down to whether Facebook is eventually determined by somebody that it is a publication.”

Alain Charette, media relations spokesperson for the Department of Justice, said the restriction “does apply to the Web, including Facebook … generally publication covers a very wide spectrum.”

Facebook is not a newpaper article, or a publication in the traditional sense. Facebook represents social processes digitally, in this case, mourning. It’s our virtual meeting grounds, not a series of published articles or blog posts. It’s as if a group of Stefanie’s friends got together on the sidewalk on which she was slain but could not mention her name as they were talking about her life.

So, is Facebook a publication? Just because something is on the Internet, is it published? Technically yes, but is that the intention? This blog posting is published, and is intended to be a publication, but the group I create on Facebook is not intended to be a publication.

Our society is being redefined in this digital age. The law, as usual, lags behind.

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Check out your friend list on Facebook! You are finally able to make lists of friends and organize them the way you want.

It makes sense.

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And the third installment of “Top 20 Interests According to Facebook”.

Top 20 Interests According to Facebook: UK Edition

Hockey may be Canada’s national sport, but we’re not as passionate about hockey as Americans are about football or the Brits are about soccer.

Consider this:
Hockey in Canada Males: 133,580, Females: 40,220 (approx 3.25:1 ratio)
Football (soccer) in the UK Males:  229,960, Females: 23,780 (approx 10:1 ratio)
Football in the US Males: 472,200, Females: 101,680 (almost a 5:1 ratio)

As a % of  Facebook population:
Football/soccer in the UK: 0.036%
Football in the US: 0.032%
Hockey in Canada: 0.026

In the new year, Australia. I wonder how hockey ranks there…

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This caught my attention today.

This, from Slate Magazine’s Human Nature column:

Australian doctors proposed a carbon tax on couples for procreating. Current policy: To promote population growth, Australia pays each couple about $3,500 per baby. Counterproposal: “Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a ‘Baby Levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.” Details: You get two kids free; thereafter, you pay a $4,400 tax at birth, plus $350 to $700 per year “for the life of the child.” Rationales: 1) This is a conservative estimate of the cost of planting enough trees to offset your kid’s carbon effects. 2) “Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment.” 3) “We deserve no more population concessions than those in India and China.” The good news: You’d get a carbon tax credit for using birth control.

And from David Attenborough in a letter to a colleague:

I agree very much with your central concept that many of the world’s most grievous afflictions can be attributed to population growth: the unprecedented increase in numbers of one species – humans – whose environmental impact threatens the habitats and the very existence of nearly all others, in both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This process certainly cannot continue indefinitely without bringing about global catastrophe. When the facts are incontrovertible and the conclusions inescapable; when success could bring a vast improvement in the welfare and happiness of millions; and when the penalty of failure is global disaster: surely humanity will want to collaborate and make sure that sanity prevails.

As I said at the end of my last TV series “The Life of Mammals”: maybe it is time that instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, we should control the population to ensure the survival of the environment.

We live in a world where growth is good - in fact, much of the time, it’s the only yardstick for success. How long can growth keep up? Is growth good? We’ve proved that we can’t manage it, and that we can override the natural mechanisms for controlling growth. Are government incentives - baby bonuses, etc. - the first thing to cut for a strong environmental policy? Another argument against state social welfare?

Discuss.

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