“This blog” == “the iPhone blog” (nee “Phone Different”). Thanks for the link!

The Internet is a veritable petri dish for zeitgeist. And, hey, if popular website is going to be “inspired”, better by me than someone else. You can copy a creation; you can’t copy creativity. Eventually you gotta come to the source. (Conciliatory traffic, however, is much appreciated.)

Blogs and the attribution dilemma » mathewingram.com/work |

In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).

Ironically, I have never in my life played the game of Risk. However, I was familiar enough to notice when Apple started playing…

ParisLemon: Another Classic Rip-Off Job By Ars Technica

Um. Wow. Hi everybody. Yep, weve been doing the iPhone Risk thing since February. In case somebody gets REALLY investigative-like, Ill mention that it started at phonedifferent.com — we merged with the iPhone Blog last week so now its over there. We noticed the Ars thing as well but figured theyd either come up with it on their own or would not take too kindly to us accusing them of doing otherwise.

Credit to Rene for coming up with the Meme on his own. I cant say for sure we were the first, but we were the first that I saw.

Via Fake Steve. Great advice that, in my unfortunate experience, is often repeated by designers and more often ignored by presenters.

Steve Jobs & Guy Kawasaki — Powerpoint Best Practices

His mantra is that Powerpoint should follow a 10/20/30 Rule.  There should be no more than 10 slides in the presentation — very few people take away much more than one concept from a presentation, so all that other stuff is extra.  The slide presentation should be designed to last 20 minutes, leaving room for ample questions/discussion between slides or after the presentation.  Guy points out that the point of the presentation is typically to initiate a discussion.  He says the font should be size should be no smaller than 30 Arial font.  Guy says that audiences read faster than you can talk, so that while you are up there talking, they are trying to read your slides and not listening to what you are saying.

Good redesign. Better insights.

Brand New: SanDisk through a Q&A with Brett Wickens

I can say without doubt that one of the tenets that I strongly believe in was reinforced by this project, even if it wasn’t new to me. That is, “good design is not about what you put in, it’s about what you leave out.”

Once again, bombing the internet back into the stone age…

Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA

Internet users are quite familiar with the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), a quick method that verifies whether or not the user trying to sign up is a person or a bot. A picture with swirled, mangled, or otherwise distorted characters is displayed and the user then types in the correct letters or numbers. Thus far, the system has worked well to slow down malicious bots, but recently the groups behind such software have made significant strides. A security firm is now reporting that the CAPTCHA used for Windows Live Mail can now be cracked in as little as 60 seconds.