This year Blue Mouse Monkey is sponsoring a table of ten. The party’s at the Ambridge this Saturday April 21st, starting at 7:00. Get your ticket here and support an amazing local foundation. See you there!

Some of the most interesting results include:

• There was a 19% increase in online revenue from 2010 to 2011, driven almost entirely by a 20% increase in the number of gifts (average gifts held steady).
• Advocacy response rates increased by a whopping 28% in the same time period.
• Although one-time gifts are still the mainstay of nonprofit fundraising, monthly giving grew faster than one-time giving.
• Facebook fan pages grew by 70% in 2011!

Blue Mouse Monkey rose to the challenge to make the YE website user-friendly to a wide range of audiences, including the White House, state governors, economists, industry analysts, economic development experts, and the media. An intensive audit of processes, and analysis of user-experience requirements led to a complete redesign of the information architecture, user experience, look-and-feel, and written content. And the bright orange and yellow color scheme is a conscious departure from the stereotypical “blue for business” palette.

But this winter has seen the great makeover, and now I’m proud to announce the launch of iteration #4 of my art portfolio website, built in HTML5, and all clean and nice looking.

“…the emotional pain (schmerz comes from a German word meaning “pain”) caused by difficult interactions with electronic gadgets or unhelpful websites. If you’ve ever felt your cellphone was out to get you, you’ve suffered from technoschmerz.”

This word is long overdue. (Thank you, Kate Greene, for the coinage.) I expect to use it often. If I take my personal experiences with digital technologies (and in running a web design company, I have plenty) and multiply these by the number of people in the world with dependent connections to contemporary digital gadgets, I can only imagine the amount of confusion, delay, errors, and the resulting stress from wrestling with technologies that keep changing, or don’t work intuitively or correctly must be global and massive. Has anyone analyzed the overall cost of this? I wonder what it would amount to when weighed against the overall benefits…

Bruce Sterling's chart of technological adaptation

Bruce Sterling In his book Shaping Things (one of my all-time favorite books, btw) examines the evolving interplay between objects and people. He divides the technosocial realm into several epochs, beginning with ARTIFACTS, which are hand-made, muscle-powered objects, such as spears. Then moving to MACHINES, which are artifacts with moving parts that rely on a non-human, non-animal power source, and require an infrastructure of engineering, distribution, and finance. Think steam engines. Next up is PRODUCTS, and they are mass-produced, non-artisinal, widely distributed, and operate over continental economies of scale. Think blenders. Since 1989 we have been in the age of GIZMOS, according to Sterling. Gizmos are

“…highly unstable,  user-alterable multi-featured objects, commonly programmable, with a brief lifespan. Gizmos offer functionality so plentiful that it is cheaper to import features into the object than it is to simplify it. Gizmos are commonly linked to network service providers; they are not stand-alone objects but interfaces.

Unlike artifacts, machines and products, gizmos have enough functionally to actively nag people. Their deployment demands extensive, sustained, interaction, upgrades, grooming, plug-ins, plug-outs, unsought messages, security threats,…

Sterling goes on to argue that we are moving into the epoch of SPIMES, which are already among us in primitive forms such as the RFID tag. But that’s a topic for another post. For now, GIZMOS are enough to deal with. And according to Sterling, we have long passed the Line of No Return on them. This is the moment when a revolutionary technology becomes the status quo, and a culture has become so reliant that it cannot voluntarily return to the previous technosocial condition, at least not without social collapse.

And dependent we are. Not just on the objects, but the networks that connect them. IMAP email that shows up at home, work, on my iPad, on my iPhone. Dropbox files that do the same. Writeroom for synched notes, BaseCamp for synched project management, FreshBooks for synched book-keeping. Compared with how I managed files and communications a mere two or three years ago, a revolution has taken place in my personal life, and I know it’s been mirrored in the lives of many.

Infographic by Randy Krum, coolinfographics.com

We are firmly in the age of the GIZMO. Thus I pledge allegiance to the new overlords, and I interact, upgrade, groom, and protect them from security threats whenever they demand it. Because if I fail to nurture these overlords, I become invisible and mute to anyone not standing directly in front of me!

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

Two Crows, by Gary Franceschini

On Wednesday January 4th at 7:00 pm I’m reading a piece of Flash Fiction — i.e. a short short story, less than a thousand words — at Blackbird Wine Shop (4323 NE Fremont).

The full lineup of readers is Joanna Rose, Sherri Hoffman, Jackie Shannon Hollis, Julia Stoops, Kitty Evers, Jean Hart, Scott Sparling, Steve Taylor, Sonya Zalubowski, Mary Milstead, David Pickar, Yuvi Zalkow, and Stevan Allred. Many of my favorite writing friends. My story is Morning Commute and it imagines a world in which the skies have become so crowded that birds have to wait their turn, by species, to fly.

Looking for an image to illustrate this post, I came across this one from Gary Franceschini’s sketching blog. It’s perfect for the story! This is exactly how I imagined my crows, full of personality.