I recently published, along with a website realign project, a white paper on Usability. It’s titled Usability: a nine letter, four letter word. Here’s a quick snippet from the paper.

Usability is a subject you need to care about. Your reputation will be cemented or damaged by your understanding of it. You cannot survive without a deep commitment to developing a passionate philosophy of championing usability.

Hop on over to Ariamedia’s website and download a fresh, piping-hot copy yourself! And while you’re at it, stick around and check out the new layout, design, and sweat videos.

At first blush it looks to be a competitor to online project management tools like Basecamp and ActiveCollab, but targeted to the Mac-toting, Google Chrome testing crowd. But, after a bit of playing around, it seems to be much more, and in some cases, a lot less.

It’s certainly slick, pretty, and streamlined. I venture I would work more efficiently, and possibly even collaborate better using this tool than some of its competitors. However, the lack of domain options and customization leave a lot to be desired, as well as the lack of ability to segregate clients from collaborators. I’m not a huge fan of sending my client to a corporately labeled website, and asking them to sign up to collaborate.

I’m sure that problem will be resolved in the future, but for now it’s a blaring hole in the concept.

Some of the terminology they’ve adopted is cute, but might give them that differentiation they need to draw the creatives. Additionally, an Adobe Air application is available as a download so you can run this tool on your desktop. Very slick idea, and a great way to spread the news via the Adobe Air network.

In any case, after playing around with it for a bit, it’s got tons of potential to be a strong competitor to the current kings. I’m certainly keeping my eye on it, and hey, i’ll even use the free account for a few side projects, and see how it pans out to Basecamp, which we use at Ariamedia, and ActiveCollab, which one of our clients, Fish, uses.

LinkedIn: $75.7 Million in Series D with Follow-on

Posted by email from Jordan Wollman (Posterous)

So far so good. It seems to be working quite well.

Posted by email from Jordan Wollman (Posterous)

Macworld provided an in-depth review of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro’s. Good review, but the thing I found most interesting was something of high concern to me. No Firewire of any sort on the MacBook’s… Bad news for anyone who’s used to that work flow.

So, the new features:

• A unibody aluminum frame - that’s one solid piece of aluminum
• 13.3 and 15 inch LED backlit displays - gorgeous!
• Higher performance graphics - the 13″ is reported at 5x and the 15″ is 2.3x faster
• Choice of built-in Hard Drive or Solid State Storage
• Much sexier!

During the trip, I learned a lot of things. Some about travel, and some about other things that just happened to come up. Here’s my list of things I learned on my trip to Denver, CO… in no certain order:

1. Always bring a jacket - I left Dallas and it was about 80 degrees. I got to Denver and it was 41 degrees. That’s a 39 degree difference… which your body doesn’t quite understand at first.
2. Make sure the flight you are booking is non-stop. I didn’t even realize we had a layover in Austin. The flight to which is only 30ish minutes. We only reached a cruising altitude of 15k feet. On top of that, the layover was kind of a let down. We didn’t even disembark the plane!
3. If you’re going to document your trip on a social network like Pownce, make sure you have alternate ways to document than just your iPhone. I couldn’t get much service in a few places, and lost a lot of cool spur-of-the-moment photos or thoughts - which of course are lost when new ones jump through your mind.
4. If you have the opportunity to get a book you love signed by the author, do it. I got a new book (not sure if it’s released publicly or not yet) by Rick Green of WallBuilders signed, and now that copy (I have two) is more than just the information on the pages. It’s more personal now.
5. It’s expensive to eat when traveling. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be, but we wanted to experience the local cuisine, and I must say, downtown, it was expensive!
6. The trip means nothing if you’re not able to share it. Pictures are great, but being there with the ones you love makes it a lot more enjoyable.

I recently wrote, and am about to publish, a white paper on usability as a philosophy. I deal heavily with communicating the proper message to the proper demographic, which is what Seth points out.

It’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that because they don’t “get it”, that they’re stupid. In my opinion, it’s not the person receiving the message who’s responsible for understanding, it’s your responsibility to make sure they understand.

Posted by email from Jordan Wollman (Posterous)

So, you!, person reading this. Go get yourself Dropbox’d and enjoy sharing files across computers like you’ve always wished you could!

Posted by email from Jordan Wollman (Posterous)

Get your name prefix before it’s gone!

Posted by email from Jordan Wollman (Posterous)