./emilychang blog

A few weeks ago, I added a link to my APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language) on the side of my about page thanks to Chris Saad, Co-founder and CEO of Faraday Media, the creators of Particls and co-author of APML. I'm using their product, Engagd, to create my APML file. While I'm still importing RSS feeds from my web attention and activities into my data stream, the APML file gives users a format to view my attention data. Read more...

After spending the last two years as eHub, obsessively profiling and trying out almost every web application that's come out, I've decided to try something different from a new perspective. I just launched PicoCool, a site that's dedicated to bringing you tiny and obscure content from the world of peer media, social networks and subcultures. Read more...

Reactee has mashed-up it's services with Twitter to create a great hybrid of two services that I already like independently. Reactee has created an easy way to make your own t-shirts customized with your Twitter username. Read more...

Ever since I started using Twitter, Tumblr, and Stikkit, it seems I haven't been able to finish a blog post. Instead, I'm just Twittering, collecting, reading, posting: generally zipping through the electronic universe leaving a varied trail of my activities and thoughts. Read more...

As most of you know, I've been flying solo on eHub since it launched as the first Web 2.0 list back in Oct 2005. It's been a thrill and both personally and professionally gratifying to maintain a resource that's used widely. eHub has over 400,000 page views a month and reaches 14,000 daily RSS subscribers and growing weekly. Our audience is diverse and includes users of all types: startups, bloggers, developers, VC, designers, technologists, CEOs, librarians, parents, students, news media... the list goes on. Read more...

We're psyched to launch our first release of Twitterverse tonight after working on the idea for the last couple of weeks and then the last 48 hours straight. Twitterverse is a mashup and a visualization layer for Obvious' hot new product, Twitter, a "sophisticated, device-agnostic, social message routing system that nobody realizes they need until they try it," as Biz Stone so aptly described. Read more...

I'm happy to report that this site, EmilyChang.com, launched in September 2005, has now reached a combined RSS feed total of over 25,000 daily readers. To grab your own feeds, please visit the subscribe page. Read more...

It's hard to believe Flickr has only been around for a few years. It seems like I've been using it much, much longer than three years. That's testament to its lure, success, and the community that has sprung up around both the service and the lifestyle. Flickr is a seamless part of my digital life. It's both output of my picture taking and the visual view into the daily lives of my friends, colleagues and contacts. Read more...

As I was designing for a client web application today, I kept living through John Maeda's first law of simplicity: thoughtful reduction. The goal was to design a new comments system for parts of the site so members were more likely to leave little notes for each other. In order to make it fun and easy, we wanted to reduce the person's input to as few clicks as possible, but with enough expression that she would want to click it. Read more...

I'm still thinking about simplicity/minimalism vs. experiential and emotional experiences. If memory is strongly attributed to adrenaline, then shouldn't we design for optimal emotional attachment? Or, do we design so it's "so simple" that you don't have to think about it? Read more...

After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway). Read more...