Jon Litwack » Stuff

Coming to a hotel near you, May 27th

Jon Litwack — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:04:29 +0000

I’ve been asked to speak at the upcoming “Conversations, Connections & Opportunities” event hosted by Visability.

If you’re interested in attending or hearing me speak you can find more details at: http://www.visability.ca/agenda.aspx#1a

Shameless Self Promotion

Jon Litwack — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:34:17 +0000

Ad Lounge featured me in a mash-up of their latest event. Check it out at http://adlounge.ca/mta

Playing with LiveStream

Jon Litwack — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:09:12 +0000

Beautiful Twitter Visualization

Jon Litwack — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:49:32 +0000

GoodMorning! Full Render #2 from blprnt on Vimeo.

Dave Gray on Game Usage in the Workplace

Jon Litwack — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:38:59 +0000

Dave Gray presented some core concepts surrounding a book he’ll be publishing soon. Check out the video I took of the presentation. Unfortunately it cuts out after 45 minutes or so at which point Dave gets into the concept of co-evolution in a knowledge working environment and then actual usage of gaming in facilitation/ideation environments.

The image to the left is courtesy of Aaron Williamson over at Shift and Share. His take on the session at – http://shiftandshare.com/?p=115

I’ve put this video up really quickly so that people who couldn’t attend could get a glimpse of what they missed so I’ve skimped on a lot of the context. If anybody wants me to delve into it, just ask for it in the comments section. My apologies for the amount of buffering you’ll have to do.

Dave Gray – Knowledge Games @ OCAD from Jonathan Litwack on Vimeo.

5 Reasons Why I Moved Back to Wordpress

Jon Litwack — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:32:59 +0000

Ok… I’ve gone the Custom build route, the Wordpress route, the Drupal route, and now back to the Wordpress route.

Why did I end up sticking with Wordpress?

MUCH better selection of themes – for those of you that remember what this site used to look like, I hope you agree
When you install it, even after moving from testing to production server, it just works. No need to set up cron jobs and the like, no need to set up workflows. It’s good to go out of the box
Unlike some of my PHP developer friends like Ashok Modi (@btmash) and Stephen Scholtz (@stephenscholtz) I am not in a position to leverage Drupal to its full potential and do all the fun things I intended to do with it
There’s far less work to do to get SEO friendly URLs
I don’t have as much time to post content and therefore rely on whatever support my iPhone offers and there’s just too many WordPress plugins that work seamlessly with the iPhone

Re-design-ated and it feels so gooooooood

Jon Litwack — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:56:23 +0000

Took a while but I finally upgraded Drupal to version 6. Took me a year but I did it.
I ALSO decided to revamp my design (by which I mean choosing another theme), and I’m quite happy with this one. Check the footer for the link back to the file if anybody wants to use it. I did have to hack the page.tpl file slightly to get the logo to work the way I wanted it to… But it all worked out in the end.

I’m off to bed, ciao!

Cbab and I attempt a Podcast

Jon Litwack — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:33:29 +0000

Pilot episode of [insertnamehere] from Jonathan Litwack on Vimeo.

Streeeeetch

Jon Litwack — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:55:50 +0000

Yep… It’s been a while again… And mostly because my domain’s been down.
Why was it down?
Fake reason: I attempted to bounce back all of the spam I’ve been getting lately.
Real reason: My credit card got upgraded and took forever to come to the bank where I needed it.

So that’s pretty much it for the past while.
I’ve made a lot of strides with Last.fm and my practice has been growing. So much so that they’ve asked me to step down from my UX duties and take on Social Media full time. Not sure I want to give up the thing I’ve been helping build for two years, particularly at a time when our past two years of UX have helped us build a TON of credibility in the industry, but oh well.

That’s pretty much the start of ‘09 in a nutshell.

Toodles for now,
Jon

The supposed “Gospel” of web 2.0

Jon Litwack — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:22:14 +0000

This entry is going to sound rather preachy, and how much more fitting could that possibly be considering the title, and the context that I’m about to deliver.

I’ve been perusing the supposed “blogosphere” as of late, particularly within the realm of “social media” and pardon me if what I’m about to say is out of line, but I feel like I’m being spoken to by a born again christian. The type of born again that wants to flaunt bible verses in your face, but doesn’t have the context to back any of what they say up with relevance.

Everything is personal branding this, executive blog that, enterprise 2.0 app the other thing… Why isn’t anybody standing up and saying “So What?”.

This stuff has been around for a long time. Blogging has been around since the advent of webpages, executive blogs are realistically a matter of corporate transparency, and enterprise 2.0 apps defy the true interconnectedness that the emerging trend of semantic web is supposed to offer. In other words, get a real job, stop trying to coach executives to do work that they shouldn’t be doing (unless they’re already doing it, in which case they don’t need your non-executive help), and stop building apps that restrict data to a Content Management System.

If you truly want to embrace the “Concept” of web 2.0, start looking into things like pareto’s long tail, think higher level strategy in the form of holistic campaigns, and stop trying to monetize from buzz words.

I make a living from providing my clients with real world solutions that may or may not leverage new technologies. I’ve been offering low jack solutions for the better part of a decade now and I don’t intend to change it. The more we attempt to market the crap out of web 2.0, the deeper we will fall into the next pit of unrealized equity. Stop selling solutions you don’t understand. It’s all data at the end of the day.

Rant complete.