Last week I got hold of Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil. They’ve published all their examples on Flickr which is a handy reference.

On Tuesday I checked out some of the buzz from the SXSW interactive awards. Lost Zombies was terrific fun — a project to build a Zombie documentary / drama via a community (what’s with Zombies at the moment? People love them — check out Survive the Outbreak too). Anyway, this is a really interesting idea, although one I imagine which might end up looking a bit like the film in Son of Rambow when the entire school starts to get involved if the producers aren’t too careful.

We Tell Stories, another winner from SXSW is a digital fiction site produced by Penguin. I love the idea of things like this, although there is a tendency for any kind of hypertext fiction to go down the “Fighting Fantasy” books route. If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about or were too busy talking to girls in the mid-Eighties, these books were adventures in which you got to make a choice of what you wanted to do at key points in the story (if you decide the kill the evil witch of Swqkssx then go to page 100 etc.).

On Wednesday I learned why the Japanese don’t like the iPhone (too basic for very sophisticated mobile users apparently, well, amongst other reasons). Moving forward to Friday I got back into serious Web Development land and started enjoying the wonders of CSS border radius (Firefox and Webkit only, naturally). You might notice a couple of rounded borders on this site, although I tried not to go too mad, difficult though it was. Also, I checked out a couple more typography and grid layouts site. Because you can never have too much of that kind of thing can you?

Saturday’s link was a only child and came courtesy of Twitter in response to me pimping my post about useful usability sites I’ve been looking at recently: Johnny Holland: it’s all about usability. A site “exploring the interactions of experience design” no less. All articles are written in the voice of the eponymous Johnny, so there you go. One I will be dipping into I should imagine.

So that’s it for this week. As always, these links are brought to you via the Internet and my Delicious bookmarks.

So, basically somebody is sending me an email they don’t want me to read and which I would have had no intention of reading anyway. Fair enough, but maybe next time just don’t bother sending it at all and we’re all winners (and while you’re at it don’t bother with all the other shit either).

It hasn’t bothered me up till now but today when I was at a loose end, I casually looked at some of my friends’ profiles to check how many other friends they had. Frankly I was astonished — 80, 90, hundreds? Is it really possible to have that many friends? I’m not sure I’ve even ever met that number of different people. Or, as I head into my late 30s am I just getting plain grumpy and lazy when it comes to making and sustaining friendships? Err, yes, probably.

I started to feel quite ashamed of my paultry 40-odd friends, especially as some of them may not actually be, umm,  real people (one of them may be a friend’s cuddly toy which I initially had some qualms about adding but then did so in a flurry of desperate activity to bump up my numbers).

But why does it matter? Do I really want to compete in a game I know I’ll never be able to win? Is it even a game anyway, or, unbelievably, are my friends really just more popular than me? Hmm, I guess the answers to those questions are possibly, no, yes and yes. It only possibly matters when you’ve obviously got a secret agenda — for instance you’ve had a “friend” request from that really popular person at university, or even worse, an ex. I say “no” to not wanting to compete because it’s in my nature to lose interest in things I have no clear ability to do even reasonably well in (like being able to change a duvet cover in less than half an hour without getting angry for instance).

I also looked at Flickr today and realised most of my contacts (about the same number as Facebook friends) I have never met or am likely to meet. I just like their photos; and can do so without any sense of social inadequacy. Much better, although it has to be said you can’t play scrabble on it. Well, you probably could, but it might take some time. Actually, I bet there’s actually a Flickr group for doing just that…