The fantastic Canadian Design Resource has an article today about the historical flag of Canada's Metis people. I've made several posts in the past about flags and the Metis flag fits well with the other standouts I've mentioned previously. According the description, the Metis flag "represents the coming together of two distinct and vibrant cultures, European and indigenous, to produce a distinctly new culture, the Metis... the infinity symbol suggests that the Metis people will exist forever."

I've been spending many of my recent weekend days working from cafes near my apartment in San Francisco. There's a new one called On the Corner on Divisidero about two blocks from where I live and it gives me a nice break from my small apartment to go down there to write email and work on Pownce stuff — plus their coffee is very drinkable.

However, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels guilty throwing down a couple of bucks for a coffee and then mooching wifi, power, and a comfy chair for a few hours. I try to get up every once in a while and grab a snack or a coffee refill. I hardly need the extra caffeine and I especially could handle eating fewer pastries, but I feel obliged to support the cafe.

In many ways, cafes serve a very similar purpose as co-working space. Many people come much more often than I do and stay longer, essentially using the cafe as temporary office. For co-working space, like the Queen Street Commons, people pay a decent sum for the convenience.

I'm curious if anyone out there has seen cafes experimenting with alternative payment schemes? I could imagine either a subscription scheme or something as simple as special tip jar clearly indicated as a 'thanks-for-the-wifi-comfy-chair-music-bathroom' donation. I know I'd be willing to pay — and my body would thank me for the reduced consumption of guilty pastries and extra cups of coffee.

I'm currently in Toronto at the Mesh conference taking place at the MaRS centre on College Street. Today was the MeshU day of workshops, including great presentations by John Lax, Leah Culver, Ryan Carson, John Resig, and a bunch of others. I presented in the morning and promised that I'd stick my slides online, so here they are. If audio is available later, I'll try to add it on, but I promised to get them up there at least in a basic way. Thanks to anyone/everyone who came out!

As I've talked about at a few conferences recently, one of the exciting/difficult things about working in-house, on a project with the scope of something like Digg, is the luxury/challenge to adapt your own work. The comments system on Digg is a perfect example. Just this past week, we rolled out the latest iteration of the comments system, which is the fourth major adaption of the system since the site launched over four years ago. It's a project that's been a long time coming and has been under development for a fairly long period. What a relief to finally see it out in the wild.

In his blog post about the release, Micah described several of the important changes that we made from both a design and performance standpoint. From the design side, we've made the comments visually lighter, reduced the metadata around each comment, improved the visual flow down the comment threads, added subtler functionality, and significantly improved the interaction design. When I say we improved the interaction design, I mean that as you interact with the comments (e.g. digg a comment, write a comment, edit your comments, etc) all of the pieces fit together more naturally.

The next step will be to iterate on the comments system once we've seen how people use, abuse, and break the one we just built. We certainly plan on doing more small adaptations over the next months as opposed to waiting to perform a large revision. As always with Digg projects, it's pretty exciting to watch a few million people use a feature that, up until launch, had only been seen or used by a few people... it'll be interesting to see what they do.

Here's an annoyingly unhelpful teaser of a new Pownce-related thing I've been working on with a few friends lately. It's the first piece of really original design I've done in a while, which has been refreshing. After working on iterating and refining the same two projects (Digg + Pownce) for the last few years, it's nice to sink my teeth into a fresh, untouched problem! I can't wait to see this project breathe in the next couple of weeks (hopefully!).

Joshua Porter, aka Bokardo, has just announced the publication of his book Designing for the Social Web. I finally met Josh in person at SXSW when we were speaking on a panel together about this very subject. He's obviously got fantastic insight into the subject of design for social sites and it was very interesting to bat around ideas with him and, in particular, to hear his critiques of design choices on sites I've been working on like Digg and Pownce. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of the book... turning on tracking for my Amazon shipment!

Also check out Mark Trammell's latest collaborative effort entitled Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites . It looks like Trammell (who works with me at Digg) and I will likely be doing a workshop at dConstruct this coming September in Brighton, England. He'll be discussing many of the topics from the book.

Why not come back from a months-long writing hiatus with a somewhat off-the-cuff rant that's been building for just about as long as I've been away from posting on my weblog?

I've been going through dozens of applications for design positions over the past few months as we hire at Digg. I've also been through plenty of resumés and portfolios at silverorange and I'm sure I'll be sifting through more with Pownce at some point in the not-too-distant future. An application and portfolio are generally fairly easy to do well (though they're seldom incredible) but there are a few common and easy-to-fix issues that I've seen again and again. A few things that cause me to pause on anyone's application:

Include your portfolio

Nothing matters more than your portfolio. Sure, your education and prior experience are useful knowledge, but I want to see your actual work immediately. I'm continually surprised how many applications are a straight up resumé with no link to a portfolio. A web-based portfolio is always preferable, but if you can't include current work online at least include well-described screenshots.

Lightboxes in portfolios can die a speedy death

This issue precipitated this blog post over any other. Ever since the Lightbox effect was created, there's been a surge of designers implementing it in their portfolios. Click on a thumbnail of a project in a portfolio and there's about a fifty percent chance you'll end up seeing a downsampled image of the relevant site. The Lightbox thing is easy to implement and has been used effectively in lots of places. Your web design portfolio is not one of those places (unless you're featuring your photos). Seriously. At best, I want to see your work in full functioning order. Bar that, a static html/css page would great. That won't work either? Well at least provide a full-size screenshot.

Link to actual live sites

If you can, link to an actual live website that you've designed. Sure, you might've handed off the work to your client six months ago and now they've gone and changed some stuff, but that's all part of the design process. Showing something that lives and breathes in the real-world even when you've let go of the reigns is a great sign of confidence. Even better, describe what's changed since you handed off the project and how that's been positive or negative. If you're unable to show live work because of NDA concerns, find some way to describe the project in general terms or share particular parts of the UI that don't give the game away.

Describe your role in a project

If you worked as part of a team, especially a big team, describe which parts of the project most reflect your input. Just linking to your work is good, but it's all the better if you're able to describe the politics of decisions, the process to achieving the final goal, and how you were able to produce something to proud of.

And now I shall return to my current stack of applications, with a deep sigh that I got that off my chest...

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to present at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, England. I was talking about interpreting user feedback on websites like Digg and Pownce. Thanks a lot to Ryan, Mel, and the rest of the Carson team for having me!

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If you haven't tried Slideshare before, you should totally check it out. The service is amazingly useful for sharing your presentations and slides. And, Rashmi (one of the founders) was a great presenter at FOWA and she's awfully nice to boot!

British podcaster Paul Boag had me on his show for a nice little interview the other day. We discussed the user interface of Digg, enabling people to participate in a community site, developing for the iPhone, and lots of other interesting bits of interface design. He's very good at putting his subjects at ease, so it was a fun interview to participate in.

Thankfully, Paul includes full transcripts of his shows on his site. Aside from the obvious advantages for accessibility and searchability, it has the added benefit that I could read the entire thing this morning in a cafe without headphones. Very nice. I wish more podcasters had the patience to do so. Even with typing errors and some hilarious misinterpretations (Ben Goodger came out as Van Gudgers!!) it's extremely useful. I'd be curious to know if he uses an automated system.

The one problem with the transcripts is that you can count the times I say "you know". Erg, what a terrible oral crutch. I'll have to work on that.