Inspirations
Caterina’s “Make Things” post, which has been linked everywhere and is entirely worth reading, included a list of things she finds inspirational:
People ask me who inspires me. This often stumps me. Because I have been inspired in my work by stuff that people make. I fell in love with zines and independent radio when I was an isolated teenager living in the suburbs. Then BBSs, people’s personal web sites, Usenet, Entropy8, online zines (holy crap, the old Bitch magazine site is now a porn portal! And Maxi is squatted!), blogs, Excel, online communities, Amazon, Salon, eBay, O’Reilly books, Google, Friendster, Alamut, NQPAOFU, Metafilter, board games, Blogger, paper games, 1000 blank cards, The Mirror Project, 1000 journals, Moveable Type, 20 things, Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail, last.fm, iPhone, NaNoWriMo, McSweeney’s, Kingdom of Loathing, muxtape, vimeo, Etsy, iPad, Kickstarter, …the people who make these things are my leaders. Most of the time I don’t know their names. Sometimes I’m lucky and do.
Dennis made his own list:
Lemme make my own list: baseball cards, sticker books, Laser Tag, Legend of Zelda, BBSes, Prodigy, The Secret of Monkey Island, video game fanzines in early 90s, Street Fighter 2, disposable cameras, Yahoo, links.net, Puppet Motel, the Aladdin virtual reality ride @ EPCOT, Hypercard, CU-SeeMe, thespot.com, Orange Source (Syracuse webzine), QTVR, New York City, Moviefone, Craigslist, Citysearch, Vindigo, Modo, NYU/ITP, Bass-Station, PacManhattan, Mogi Mogi, Friendster, Pokemon, Flickr, Delicious, Nike+, Big Urban Game, ConQwest, CrossRoads, Sharkrunners, Twitter, FFFound, MuxTape, PMOG, Feltron Reports, Guitar Hero, Rider Spoke, Guitar Hero on a Bike, Epic Mix.
#1 source of inspiration? These two guys who co-founded the first real startup I worked at: Vindigo. …
Here’s mine:
Flying toasters, cereal box-top mail-ins, BSC trading cards, Pogs, Creepy Crawlers, glow-in-the-dark stars, Logical Journey of the Zombini’s (and most Brøderbund software), Hyper Studio, Glider, Oregon Trail, those claw games at movie theaters, Mac Quadra, Crusin’ the USA/World (remember how you could drive through cows in Germany, and they’d explode?), Batman ride at the Illinois Six Flags, AOL chat rooms, Webcrawler, Super Mario 64, cheat sites for Super Mario 64, dollz, NFL math computer game and the championship ring you got by mail, Ty.com message boards (my very first ..), Beaniemom, garage sales, eBay in a big way, Webrings, Mary Beth’s Beanie World, ESPN magazine (inspiration for so many high school magazine layouts), my bondi blue iMac, Livejournal, eGroups, Flourish, Alternity, Fanfiction.net, What’s in Name? / NineMuses, Photoshop, riddle.nu, eBay again, Nanowrimo, 100 books, Half Price Books, Lucky Mag circa 2003, Amazon, Ikea, AIM status messages, College Confidential (crazy .. ), Contemporary African Politics at Stanford, Nokia, delicious, Acumen Fund, oolong, Meebo (Seth/Sandy/Elaine + Jason/Ryan/Ben), Slate, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Grameen Bank, New internet economics (Hal Varian), early Facebook (2004-06), JPAL, IDEO, Craigslist, the Stanford d.school, Future Perfect, Marginal Revolution, The Independent (Uganda, not UK), Twitter, Frontline:SMS, TFLN, Dopplr, Etsy’s community, New Yorker, Tumblr, Foursquare, Turntable.fm, BERG London
I hope this becomes a meme.
