Occasional Links: May 22nd, 2007

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“Adobe says YouTube generation their next customers”:http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9721659-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 – Vindicating my “previous suggestion”:http://jayneely.com/2007/03/28/a-profitable-partnership-how-youtube-can-re-revolutionize-personal-publishing that Google-owned YouTube form a partnership with Adobe, the CEO of Adobe Systems himself identified YouTube users as potential customers.

“Google Trends is a new measure of search popularity”:http://www.google.com/trends – In what’s certain to become an essential tool for people looking for problems to solve, markets to serve, and the effect of press on their popularity, this new tool by Google is a super-charged version of their old “Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. You enter a search term, and Trends shows you the rise and fall of that search term’s usage and also cross-references it to news stories indexed by Google News. You “can also see”:http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends up to 100 of the most popular daily search terms, and even browse through past days(likely sanitized, and only back to May 15th).

“Comics helping users learn”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/comics-not-just-for – The excellent design blog Boxes and Arrows writes that the graphical, sequential nature of comics makes them ideally suited for informing users and shaping the user experience.

“Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across. Comic artist and Yahoo! staffer “Kevin Cheng”:http://nevdull.com put it best, calling comics “the universal language.””

Social Strategist,