BOOK: The Smashing Book

smashingbook The folks at Smashing – an amazing resource site / community for web design and developers have just released a comprehensive resource in book form.

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

BOOK: We Feel Fine

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“We Feel Fine” an expansive project that has mined the web since 2005 for the phrase “I Feel” has expanded to include a beautiful book that captures the project.

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I’ve been following the “We Feel Fine” project and a number of collaborations between Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that harness data in interesting and artistic ways.

Here’s how Sep Kamvar describes the project on his site.

“Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.”

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BOOK: Futuretainment

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From the book’s site
Futuretainment is about the world transformed by consumer connectedness. Futuretainment is about the world transformed by consumer connectedness. It is an indispensable handbook for anyone wanting to understand the future of media and marketing, and explains what it will take for companies and brands to thrive in this challenging new environment. With a unique focus on the dynamic markets of Japan, China and Korea – Futuretainment tells the story of disruptive consumer innovation at the cutting edge of social media.

(hat tip Christy Dena)