Scaffolding in ubiquitous in New York, which is always under construction. On 57th and Madison, the facade of the Nokia Flagstore gets a face lift. It, along with neighboring stores, Yves Saint Laurent and Burberry, have scaffolding that matches the store colors. At first, I thought, is this too much? I don’t think so, it serves the function of helping to maintain the store’s presence during the construction. What I like is that it shows a little more thought and intention, where there is usually none.

I was walking in Chelsea last Sunday, and approached one of Verizon’s buildings. I wondered if there where any remnants of Saul Bass‘ classic Ma Bell logo. His design was the last in the evolution of the Bell System’s logo, before the 1984 break up of the company. I was surprised, if not pleased, to see that there was, clinging to the side of the brick, leaving a fading trace of the past. I was not exactly pleased, because the logo’s successor fails to reach the original’s greatness.

The Ma Bell logo was strong, clear, and confident. (Look at the red check of the other logo, off balance, ready to tip over.) Bass designed a bell, for a company named after Alexander Graham Bell. He is credited for inventing the telephone, which rang. The logo was created back into the days of monopolies over start-ups, land lines over wireless, circuits over IP, a few indestructible phones styles over a multiple of unusable bricks, expensive long distance over universal access, clear voices over shouting through static on sidewalks, and 99.99% reliability over dropped signals. What governs the features we value, which are often mutually exclusive, in the evolution of something so pervasive as the phone?

I did a quick search for a little more history on the logo. Michael Bierut over at Design Observer, wrote a nice piece in 2005 about AT&T redesigning its logo, which they still use today. He gives the story behind Bass’ original design and his globe inspired logo for AT&T, after the 1984 break of the Bell System. By coincidence, he ended of the piece to commemorate the destruction of Pennsylvania Station forty-five years ago whose anniversary coincided with his Bass-AT&T posting. He said “graphic design, unlike architecture, leaves no footprint.” Perhaps he was wrong.

The shifts of the city, both graphic and architectural are natural. The images on a building’s facade are not quite removed as a snake’s shedding its skin, but decay and erode. An evaporating logo has a half-life, akin to a sweaty glass’ ring left on a coffee table, waited to the properly cleaned or covered with a stack of magazines.

On a rainy Friday, here are some follow up tidbits to some previous posts that have been collecting in my mental Inbox. I think it’s a good practice to follow up on posts. In both blogging, even more importantly traditional journalism, the story after the story is too often neglected.

1. A few kind readers have asked me about the other youtube famed video, D.A.N.C.E., by French techno duo Justice. While it is a great track and video, I still like DVNO better. Superimposing motion graphics on a shirts is a brilliant idea, however the visual effects prowess of the creators overtakes the visual imagery. The viewers spends a lot of time thinking, how did they do that? and what a cool effect. DVNO required a similar level of design skill (with albeit less rotoscoping.) As stated before, in the case of DVNO, the technology is invisible and the viewer can focus on the imagery.

2. The game designer who created Passages, which I alluded to as work of interactive fiction, has created a new work called, Gravitation.

3. From March 1 to March 31, Google blog search reveals: 16,526 results for awesomenessand 706,055 results for awesome, which is lower than the results from my original post:February-2008: Awesomeness: 17,182 ; Awesome: 736,783 ; Are: 61,531,049
January-2008: Awesomeness: 9,627 ; Awesome: 429,769; Are: 57,214,958

Is the use of “awesomeness” leveling of?
I’m not sure. The results that Google is now giving me is different results for previous months when I first collected data, which is a little troubling.

However, if I really want to understand how search engines work, I may have to try to read this suggestion from Wojciech, Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Standford profressors, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze.

Image source: Talent imitates, genius steals

Faris at Talent imitates, genius steals wrote up a great post on the Fed Ex logo, which has been one of my all time favorites for years. I’m sure we’ll familiar with it, but if you have really looked at it, please read his post. You’ll never all at it the same way again.

I am loving the DVNO video from Justice, the French techno duo. Although the retro designs invoke my humorous Gen X sensibilities, what I really love is the look and feel. The color saturation of the logos against the black background hits a sweet spot that feel very fresh today. Even with the fairly high compression of flash video on youtube, DVNO is just beautiful to watch. Part of the reason of its success is that the technology behind the effects are invisible, the video is about the logos rather that digital visual effects (even if they are employed.) So much of digital imagery is still about showing off rendering capabilities. Although the cost of video is decreasing and becoming more democratic, you still can’t discount the power of good eye and the willingness to push back against the grain of the status quo.

I have IM accounts on AIM, iChat, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail and Skype. (Years ago, I once used ICQ and IRC.) I always find it interesting, how certain services are popular in specific countries. AIM is most popular in the US, where as, MSN more widely used in Asia, South American, Canada. IM, like all networks, benefit from network effects. If a service gains traction early in a country, when it can maintain growth, even if it is surpassed by other services who may be globally larger.

The shrunken image above from Valleywag shows which social networks are most dominant by market share, which was tipped off to me by hellowojo. The color coding is a bit confusing, because they decided to make match the countries by the color of the social network’s logo. Because most of social networks logos are blue, a network’s reach is difficult to differentiate. Fortunately, Valleywag also includes another graphic with a list of all the countries by social network.

Going forward these data will change. I wonder if there will be a consolidation of these networks, start into interconnect, or with they stay fractured, in the same way that email addresses were once closed. Here are a couple of possible of future scenarios.

Just as standards for email have been created, Open Social or some other social networking set of standards can allow for competing sites to share information with each other. Wordpress or Moveable Type could become the open platform, where people host their own blog which would act like their profile, or use a service provider to maintain their profile/blog. Gigaom has postulated Wordpress’ move into social networking. Third party widgets could be created to offer function, such as status updates, photo albums, walls, and gifting applications to mimic many of the features of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others SNS. This sounds like a lot more work for the end user, which would be fine for the people who want to have control and heavy lifting which that entails. For the Blogger and LiveJournals users of the world, adoption is only going to take place if setup is as easy as creating a Blogspot or Facebook account.

Where the first example envisions some combination of blogs and SNS, another example is email fully integrating with social networking profiles. Google has been able to effectively enter the IM space by introducing a closely integrated chat client into its Gmail service. By sidestep the application download step, millions of their email users instantly became IM users. Similarly, the Xobni Insight plugin for Outlook, connects information profiles on email contacts, giving Outlook an SNS feel. I haven’t used Outlook in a couple of years, but if I did, I would certainly be trying to get a copy of Insight, which is still in an invite-only beta.

The final possibility to consider is the consolidation of social networking sites into one main site, which may have an open API like Facebook, but is also closed and propritary in the sense that people cannot easily export their profile data out of Facebook, MySpace, or Orkut. While people can leave at any time, if all your friends and contacts use a network then there is incentive to stay in that network. In this way, a company like Google, Yahoo, and MSN could use its adjacent email or blogging services to leverage its entrance into social networking and possible become the de facto platform. Although, as of yet, none of these sites have been about to make a major impact across continents.

So, I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens.

Brian hooked me up to this great Flickr group, Songchart, which combines pop culture references with graphs and charts. So, I gave it a go. Try to guess the song. Enjoy.

Update: Link to the reference.

On February 10th, just a few blocks from my hotel, an arsonist burned Namdaemun or “South Gate,” in central Seoul. It was one of the oldest original structures dating back 600 years, and had survived the Korea War as well as the various occupations of foreign countries. The Cultural Heritage Administration is stated that it will spend over US$20 million to rebuild the gate over the next three years.

In Seoul, people don’t navigate via street addresses.  Instead, people use landmarks to describe locations. For example, people often give taxi directions in terms of going down a main road and turning at the movie theater.  Namdaemun, then, was an important fixture for more than historic reasons. It also held a function, being used to explain the location of surrounding destinations such as the street markets, malls and office buildings that surround it.

Central Seoul has many palaces, walls and gates which are have reconstructed over many years, and now Namdaemun will join them. The historic sites have been built and rebuilt. Just north of Namdaemun, is Gwanghwamun, another gate dating back to the same period. The structure had gone through several reconstructions. It is also currently being disassembled and moved 15 meters and also rotated to realign it with the Gyeongbok Palace, its original position.

The idea of building and rebuilding cultural historic monuments is fascinating. We think of these structures to be permanent, however like all architecture and cities, they get built, altered, torn down, and rebuilt.