More recently, we’ve been talking about ways to get you stuff. Good stuff, from local businesses and groups that do things we all actually care about. This might mean bartering with a bar to get you and your pals half price mojitos. It might mean empowering a concert venue to connect with their community. Or to give you free tickets to a gig that isn’t sold out tonight. It might mean organizing a ride home for you after camping over the long weekend.

It’s a delicate line, but we’re excited about finding a way to create positive experiences and positive cash flow. We want to be very careful while we’re exploring what respectful advertising looks like. Most of all, we want to listen to people who are using Rill, the people who are excited about their neighborhoods and the people who create the experiences that make us smile real big.

As part of that, the Rilli team has applied to give our first public panel discussion at South by South West this year in Austin, Texas. SXSW selects panels partly based on a voting process, so if you’re interested we’d be jazzed to have your vote and any comments over on the SXSW panel picker. Or drop any of us a line; we’d love to hear from you!

Right, so, not like Oprah, I swear. The first differentiator might be that the idea came to me over a nice glass of Aberlour Whiskey in Montreal with good friends. I’ve been trying to discipline my reading lately and my friends are generally consuming the most interesting books on the planet as far as I’m concerned. So the idea is to combine forces, and like Oprah, conduct things remotely (okay, so one point against). But! Since the initial group is a crack team of designers, programmers and cultural enthusiasts, I figure it will be a great opportunity to play with the concept of what a book club is.

We’ll be tossing around different ideas of what to do with that gleaned knowledge once we’ve pealed through those pages. We’re talking about creating and publishing information models for a book or building a web app that employs a core concept of a book or making a major change in our own workflows or lives based on a concept from a book.

The bookshelf above is from Shelfari, the tool we’re using to organize our group, which so happens to be bloody amazing. It really gives a certain respect to the books you love that other media organizing sites like last.fm seem to miss. And its a joy to use and share the books you’ve read with your friends.

I’m mostly writing this here as public colateral to ensure I stick to this idea since I like it so damned much. If anyone’s interested in checking out the club please, do take a look and hop in if you like.

“Design” is Dead, Stark Retires
“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact… Everything I designed was unnecessary… design is a dreadful form of expression.” - design is dead, long live design.

Sidewalk Psychiatry graffiti - Boing Boing
What about interface easter eggs like this?

Fever Named After Blackwater in Iraq
Unprecedented?

America’s new subprime shanty-towns - Boing Boing
“I wonder why I found out about this from the BBC and not US media”

my del.icio.us…

Visual design and flash development for PersonafID.

Science Fiction, Futurism and the Failure of the Will to Imagine - WorldChanging
Re: a predictability singularity. Is Adam Curtis’ downfall of futurism stuff a corroboration or an explanation?

Better Than Free - Kevin Kelly
“When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.”

XOXO, Exopolis Mixtape
From a while back - but so lovely, I don’t want to lose it again.

Tantek Celic on open information
His 2 way definition of open information - user and publisher level. Similar to Douglas Rushkov’s conception of system level openness.

my del.icio.us… ]]> http://andrewsimpsondesign.com/notebook/2008/02/some-of-my-delicious-bookmarks-from-this-month/feed/ http://andrewsimpsondesign.com/brand/2008/02/rilli/ http://andrewsimpsondesign.com/brand/2008/02/rilli/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:26:37 +0000 Andrew Simpson http://andrewsimpsondesign.com/brand/2008/02/rilli/

We just relaunched Rilli’s public site. The three of us are crafting this thing in the day when we should be working on something more respectable and at night when we should most definitely be sleeping. The race is on to SXSW in March and our public betaing. Branding, visual design, splashing and splattering in collaboration with the Irrepressible Force, Adam Bognar. Development with the formidable Master Colin Brumelle.

Visual design and web development for a pop country artist via Transmitter Studios. She stole the show at this year’s CCMA and caused me to walk around singing Breakin on the Love Thing with a rock grimace for consecutive weeks. Impressive flash development by Bernard Kowalski.

Alternate version shown.

Interestingly, since Oprah mentioned the service on her show they have a massive shortage of businesses in need in their system. It’s a good problem to have, though it’s a shame that they can’t fully take advantage of the surge in publicity.

I was checking out Zopa today - a peer to peer lending network more geared towards developed world lenders and loaners. The idea is to cut out the banks, allow people in need to get reasonable rates on loans without draconian repayment terms, and for lenders to make decent interest on their surplus cash while doing it in a positive, human way. Distributed citizen banking on a mass scale. Amazing.

To the streets!