Podserve is up for sale, not just sale but up for auction with no reserve. Check out the listing and see for yourself, might be one hell of an investment, considering a very similar application recently sold for a cool million dollars.
One of my last design projects with Big in Japan launched today. ServiceGuy is a quick connect referral network that facilitates instant access to service providers in your area. Find out more via Alex’s flickr page. It’s a brilliant idea, I’m very stoked it’s up and running and wish the BIJ the best with it, it could certainly catch-on as long as consumers are willing to make their lives easier, which isn’t always the obvious choice.
Well today is a day of transition, after nearly a year working with the crew at Big in Japan I’ll be stepping away. It’s been a great experience working with Alex and his various teams over the past 11 months. I’ve been working extra hard of late to get some final deliverables out the door. Later today we’ll be wrapped up. Moving forward there will be an entirely new identity and site here at crawlspce|media…actually that name may be going away as part of a new business arrangement and approach. In the meantime I am looking and reviewing freelance opportunities, it’s often serendipitous how one things leads to another and some things have already stumbled my way. If you or anyone you know can make use of my services hit me up at: info @ crawlspacemedia.com.
Looks like Scott’s app for dev camp made the top 10. Congrats. I -sorta- contributed :)
Taking a cue from Ryan Price, I created a new elfURL This! icon for the blogosphere (ugh I hate that word). Anyway feel free to use this to quickly generate micro, tiny, even midgie-sized links for twitter or other craziness. Enjoy.
There’s an article on the Big In Japan blog about the Obama campaign working with MySpace to commandeer a fan page. Not sure about this whole setup, comes down to understanding the terms of service and really knowing where the line is. I think it’s a shame that the campaign gets Joe’s friends and content, the page should have been wiped and the name alone transferred. Giving them the fruits of his work is shameful and the Obama camp was way out of line on this.
On a tagent, I’m seeing a trend in the Obama ranks, more and more politic-y behavior and a straying from their ‘new rules for politics’ approach. I’m wondering, is it possible to have a new-breed of candidate without having a new-breed of staff? Basically if Obama is not a business-as-usual candidate does it really matter if at the end of the day his staff is all dyed-in-the-wool democratic staffers pulling the same crap stunts they always have?
If you’re a fan of FX Network’s The Shield don’t forget to check out the FAN PODCASTS for the show. they allow fans to interview the show’s talent and then subscribe to the answers and interviews via iTunes (or any other podcatcher). FAN PODCASTS are a Big In Japan exclusive and FX has them for many of their original series.
I’m looking forward to these changes. Lots of nice, nuanced tweaks that improve overall read & scan-ability of the main pages.
That said I was bitten by a nasty little gap in the current basecamp ‘design’. Two word, SMART QUOTES. Yup they killed some work we were doing at BIJ because we had code pasted into basecamp with out being wrapped in PRE tags. The end result was some javascript dying silently because of curly quotes. Seems obvious in retrospect, but when you use the tool solely for web+application development it would be nice to have a switch to turn the darn things off so you don’t need extra tags for every message.
Earlier this week the Big in Japan team released Egorcast, a Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress and Jott mashup. Sounds all fancy, but it’s really a simple setup. Try it out!
We pushed an update to the Big in Japan site last night. This was a pretty rapid redesign and Wordpress cleanup and we’re still working as we go, sometimes it’s best to just get it up and tweak on the fly. If you happen to poke around and see any issues please contact me.
