Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the Social Media Revolution:

new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns. Some 19% of internet users have posted material online about political or social issues or used a social networking site for some form of civic or political engagement. And this group of activists is disproportionately young.

Design thinking — distinct from analytical thinking — has emerged as the premier organizational path not only to breakthrough innovation but, surprisingly, to high-performance collaboration, as well. “It’s not about the pretty,” says one design-thinking practitioner, “it’s about the productive.” In this special section of articles, interviews, illustrated cases and research findings, the Review explores how to put design thinking to work.

Good designers copy. Great designers steal. Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era.

What does pervasive computing have to do with animism? Essentially, it can become a tool in manifesting what I call designed animism. The goal is fundamentally experiential, but the conequences are profound: designed animism forms the basis of a poetics for a new world.

Companies and agencies spend months and millions of dollars on how they'll deliver content online, yet allocate very few resources toward creating and governing the content itself. Why? Distributed ownership, internal politics, scope creep, higher-than-anticipated costs… content is messy.

Bill Scott shares six design patterns that are critical for creating effective web interfaces, focusing specifically on interaction design on the web

sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service.