JeffHester.net

Rolling Stone magazine made Kaki King the first women on the Guitar Gods list. Kaki has a unique, percussive style that can’t be fully appreciated without seeing it. Fortunately for us, her entire 15 minute performance at TED is now available. It’s worth watching.

Now you’ve seen it. Have a nice Sunday.

For years, designers have struggled with integrating interesting, expressive fonts into web pages. Until now, the general rule has been to stick to the commonly available font families — the default stuff installed on every Mac or Windows PC — and use images for anything out of the ordinary. This works ok, but (alt tags aside) search engines will not read your text-as-an-image. Not to mention the fact that it introduces yet another file to download, and increases the total weight of the page. 

A new project from Small Batch Inc. looks to change all that. Typekit promises to give you the ability to embed fonts on any web page with full fidelity and typographic control. 

Typekit is not yet available, but you can sign-up here to be notified as soon as it is.

There are two parts to your personal brand. First, you need to build your reputation. This takes time and energy, and there are no shortcuts. The second part is no less important, and that’s making sure the right people can find you. 

Google is making it easier for people to find you — if you are using Google Profiles. As reported on the official Google blog, once you setup your Google Profile, your profile may show up at the bottom of search results. I say “may” because if you have a fairly common name, you’re stuck with competition.

In my case, a search for Jeff Hester brings up the astronomer (not me), the business owner in Oklahoma (also not me), but also this blog (most definitely me, and #2 on page one). At the bottom of the search results page, you’ll see this:

Hint: I’m the guy on the left. You’ll note that Google also puts links to search for me on several popular social networks, including MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn. 

Simon Mackie at Web Worker Daily shared these step-by-step instructions for setting up your own Google Profile:

1. Go to the Google Profiles site.
2. Sign in with your Google account. 
3. Fill out the form. Add a photo and links to your sites. 

Remember that information you share will be available for others to see. You can share as much or as little as you like, but Google will rank a well-filled profile higher than a skimpy one. 

Have you setup your Google Profile? 

Joe Clark writes on the culture of antidesign predominate at Google:

Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob Nielsen) may occasionally succeed in the marketplace, but they do so in spite of their antidesign, not because of it. Of course we can’t prove that; we can’t run a controlled experiment, let alone 41 of them with distinct shades of blue. It is merely one of those things a visually literate person knows. The fact that you don’t know it, or you deny it’s important, or deny it even can be known goes to show you really are better suited to programming a computer all day than dealing with actual human beings.

A couple years ago I helped build this site for researchers at Yale studying the effectiveness of various “get out the vote” efforts. Scott Beauchamp (a colleague from my Winfire days) dropped me a note yesterday saying the site was linked in a couple of places from a great article on Slate discussing the contrasting responses from McCain’s well-known robo-calls and Obama’s extensive use of text messages. 

On the surface, robo-calls and text messages may seem like equal nuisances, but anectdotal evidence suggests that Obama’s text messages have been much more effective. 

With a little thought and it’s easy to understand why. A text message is permission based and less intrusive. I had to provide my mobile number willingly to sign-up for Obama’s text alerts. And I can read them when it’s convenient. In contrast, I have never received a recorded message that didn’t piss me off just a little. Who wants to be interupted by a recorded message? Not me. 

Hats off to Obama for his great use of this technology. And be sure to vote on November 4th.

A few days ago, the WordPress blog unveiled the visual design of the upcoming WordPress 2.7 expected to be released in a few weeks. While this won’t offer dramatic changes to readers of this or any other WordPress-powered blog, it offers some really nice improvements for those of us who publish a blog. 

Here’s a preview of the new dashboard:

The new dashboard is really a great improvement, with at-a-glance views of the stats effecting your blog. I also like the “quick post” feature and the ability to reply directly to comments. An already amazing product is getting even better. 

My schedule this week gives me this Friday to do whatever the hell I want. And today, what I want entails tackling some personal projects that have been hovering overhead for some time. And I’m using Things for the iPhone to help manage it all. 

Things is a nice little commercial iPhone app that dovetails with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for time and task management. I was using Todoist for a while, which is a nice, free web-based to-do list. I experimented with Jott, which is notable for its voice-driven interface. But so far, I like Things simple, no-nonsense interface. 

So what’s on my plate today? 

First, I’m doing a little rearranging right here. I’m updating the blog theme to make better use of screen real estate in general, and the right column in particular. I’m also going to be updating Wordpress and some 

plugins in preparation for next month’s release of Wordpress 2.7. And I’ll be adding the top content, making it easy for new readers to find the “greatest hits” (yes, there are a few). 

Next, I’ll be working on my two big forum sites, GetGamer and BigBlueBall. I use vBulletin on both, and they are both ready for upgrades to the latest versions. I’ll be adding a storefront to the GetGamer site in preparation for the holidays, and fleshing out the design mockups for BigBlueBall (which hasn’t been refreshed since 2005!). 

If you feel like checking in or throwing a little morale support my way, leave me a comment. I’ll also be online throughout the day, so feel free to drop me an IM.

Oh, and for you design geeks out there, check out Cultured Code’s “making of” Things for a pictorial that shows how they designed Things for the iPhone UI.

Earlier this month at the Office 2.0 conference, I ran out of business cards. Maybe it’s happened to you. You fumble around in your pocket and come up empty-handed. Somehow I was caught off guard. I put in a new order online (our company has at least automated all of that), but still hadn’t received the shipment before I left for the Knowledge Leadership Forum two weeks later. 

Dropcard aims to solve that problem, and could even eliminate the need for business cards altogether–a very green idea. I read about Dropcard on WebWorkerDaily and immediately saw how I could’ve used this.

How it works

The concept is simple. You register on Dropcard and can create two profiles: business and personal. You control how much or little information you want to share. When you want to send your “business card” to someone, you do so either via text message to 41411. When I meet Bill G., I can ask for his email, then send him my Dropcard by texting drop billg@windows.com to 41411. 

If you’re using an iPhone, you can thank your lucky starts and skip the text message, opting instead to use the clean, web interface you see to the right. Either way, it’s quick and easy. 

What happens next?

Once you send an instruction to send someone your contact info, they get a nicely formated email with all your details and a vCard attachment for quick import to Outlook. 

Dropcard allows you to enter multiple phones, addresses, chat networks, websites and personal profile addresses. 

There are no advertisements. Dropcard is supported by paid subscriptions. With a free account, you can send up to 15 Dropcards per month. $4.99 a month gives you as many as 20 profiles, and the ability to send up to 100 Dropcards per month. $9.99 a month gives you unlimited Dropcards. 

Oh yeah, my old skool carbon-based business cards did finally arrive this week. I’m not ready to ditch them, but Dropcard will be a handy backup in the future. 

Check out Dropcard.

Being the weekend, I’m sharing something a little more recreational in nature.

When I first bought my iPhone 3G (same day they came out), the lines were horrendous. But I did have plenty of time to learn about the new apps that were available. The Apple store employees were showing off their favorite apps, one of which was Midomi.

Midomi essentially let’s you find songs when you don’t know the name or even the artist. You can hold it to the radio and it will tell you the artist, the song title, the album and even provide links to YouTube videos and the ability to purchase the song on iTunes. But even more impressive, you can hum or sing a bit of the song and Midomi will find it for you… usually.

I didn’t really get the appeal of Midomi when the guy in the Apple store described it, so it wasn’t until a week ago that I downloaded it and gave it a try. The verdict? Midomi is FUN!

This week when I was driving to Dulles airport, I had the radio tuned to a classic rock station, and heard a song that I wanted to add to my personal library. I fired up Midomi,

Midomi records about 10-15 seconds of the song, sends it to their server and returns a list of matches. In my experience, grabbing songs from a radio was extremely accurate.

To purchase via iTunes, you must be connected via wifi. Since I was on the road, I just added a bookmark so I could return later and purchase the song.

Now for the real fun…

Midomi is useful, but the real fun begins when you try singing or humming a song. Lynn and I were cracking up as we tested the accuracy of Midomi (and our singing talent). Here’s how to play:

Get a few friends together. In round robin fashion, you challenge your friends to “match” a song from the band or artist of your choice. They choose the song, and sing or hum into Midomi. Who ever gets a match (or the highest match, if you’ve got a group) can decide the next challenge.

Let the laughter ensue.