She’s way smart and way talented. I may be biased though. So check it out for yourself.

Thanks to Anthony Mattox for his useful post on fractals in Processing.

The front end experience was fully built with AS3, interfacing with a MySQL database via a PHP script. We also incorporated hooks into Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn APIs, so that once a user votes, she can be found by others on via her chosen channel.

Take a spin and let your voice be heard here.

In the non-linearly timed film, above, Leth places his human in a ‘boundless room, radiant with light.’ I interpreted the title not as “the depiction of the perfect human” but rather as “the perfect depiction of the human” – that is, a precise telling. This brings to mind the nature of the World Wide Web – boundless, driven by packets of light, arranged in a non-linear fashion, and accessible at any precise point – especially via today’s powerful search engines.

So to tell the 2010 version of The Perfect Human, I built a tool that brings a user into a precise – albeit random – point along the vast continuum of the Web. Using the voice over and dialogue from the film as body copy, one can highlight any range of text and be presented with a relevant (as deemed by Yahoo!’s search engine) destination on the Web in the results section below it.

If you have a second and can give it a spin, please do. It’s certainly still in beta, with some interface elements to clean up and complete. But check it out. Scroll along the text box, watch as the film at the top (which takes a bit to load – it’s 9MB) follows suit. Alternatively, click play or scrub along the QuickTime video and watch the text move. When you’ve found a piece of text you’d like to search the Web for, highlight it. It can be any portion of text – not necessarily single or even whole words. You can also scroll along to see what past users have searched for and the coinciding results.

If you give it a spin, please leave some feedback in the comments section here.

Click here to access the tool.

I had a few things I wanted to accomplish:

Setting Flash Aside Momentarily

I’ve built plenty of sites, apps, and other widgets in Flash/ActionScript. And while there are certainly a multitude of ways I could present my online self in Flash, I decided it was time for a new challenge. Combine that with the fact that I wanted an iPhone/iPad friendly site and I decided to jump in to jQuery as my main development framework for the presentation layer. I’ll be keeping my portfolio (once that gets a facelift) in Flash, however, so that my AS3 skills are properly represented here.

Unifying Feeds

Partially inspired by Mr. Daly‘s Flavors.me built site, I realized it was time to start unifying all of my disparate feeds. I use Twitter and this blog for my ramblings, Flickr, Tweetphoto, and TwitPic for my image sharing, LinkedIn for my resumé, and a slew of location based services for my geotracking. Isn’t it about time these all lived in one place. Besides, the site IS called Barely Concealed Narcissism. Maybe there should be more about ME.

Updated Design

I’m not really a designer. I like to think I have some basic design chops, but nothing compared to the art directors I’ve worked with over the years. In a few weeks I begin working towards an MFA in Communication Design, but the focus there will be more theoretical than practical. That said, I wanted to keep the look and feel simple and clean, inspired by my latest obsession (to which Mr. Norton can attest), 60′s style screen prints.

I admit that it took a few weeks of thinking to figure out what this new site would be. It actually came to me in the shower one morning. How’s that for a too-much-information-cliché? I sat down that weekend (the wife was out of town) and cranked this out in 48 hours or so. It took a few hours of tweaks afterwards to clean it up (more on that soon), but here we are.

I’d love to hear your reactions. Naturally, since this is a site about me, I plan on sharing my thoughts. In the interest of attention spans, I’ll take care of that in Part 2.

In truth, the term sells itself short. When referring to app store, we’re not just talking about a commercial market for applications (although that’s certainly a primary focus). Instead, this is a place for a software company to show how extensible all of its engineers’ hard work really is. And, of course, it’s also a showcase for the platform extensions themselves – letting the independent developers shine.

From a marketing perspective, launching an app store can be smart. But you really need to be a first mover in an industry. Otherwise, you become more noise than signal.

All of this is why I’m proud to have been part of LocaModa’s recent DOOH App Store launch – the first of its kind for digital out of home.

Loca’s move (with design help from StudioNumberNine & Daly Creative) continues what the company has already worked very hard to do to standardize a rather splintered industry. The company’s platform extends across multiple media to bring client content together with user interaction. And now it has a great showcase to explain what that actually means.

The site was a 2010 MITX Interactive Awards finalist in the Travel, Tourism, & Leisure category.

Test drive here, but good luck not picking up the phone and buying a villa in the Virgin Islands.

I’ve participated in the 48 Hour Film Project two years in a row now. While 2008′s entry marked my debut not only as a participant, but a writer and actor, the experience was surely hectic. The 2009 experience, however, proved to be much smoother sailing. We had a smaller, more focused team. I was also fortunate enough to avoid being cast as any character and instead got to try directing out for a bit. And would you believe, I enjoyed it.

We weren’t recognized with any awards, but I wouldn’t have changed much if we had to do this again. Hats off to my production team, Barry Frechette and Bob Holt, for seriously knowing what they were doing.

Cold Feet from Gabi Schaffzin on Vimeo.

It’s hard to survive in this cross-platform, cross-media, cross-channel, cross-everything-but-dressing world without, well, mixing up your executions a bit. So building VH1′s The Great Debates campaign was both entertaining and relevant.

VH1′s The Great Debates ran for a week after July 4th, providing its viewers with the answer to such debates as “Star Wars vs. Star Trek” or “Beatles vs. Stones.” LocaModa was tasked with bringing this debate to the general public. Using digital out of home and web executions, we gave users the ability to text or click their votes and then we showed live updates in Times Square, in bars across the country, on VH1.com, and on Facebook. We also used some “social polling” to check in with how popular each topic was on Twitter. And VH1 carried the baton even further, displaying live text-in results during the show. How’s that for a little buzz-word bingo action?

The campaign garnered a large number of interactions, especially considering its short seven day flight. And it’s already been named a finalist for a 2009 MITX award. We’re hoping the accolades continue through 2010.

ATT’s digital out of home presence at pop star Demi Lovato’s summer tour was really my first major launch at my newest gig. We gave concert goers (and online participants) the opportunity to text or email messages and pictures to screens at the show, then provided them with a “playback” viewing of all the messages at that show. Users could go online after a concert and see a virtual replay of the DOOH screen. They could then capture the screen as an image and post it to Facebook.

Turns out 12-18 year old girls love to text. Who knew?

This campaign, one of Loca’s most successful in terms of user numbers, is a great example of engaging an otherwise bored [albeit captive] audience. AT&T had hundreds of eye balls staring at their brand; and by the end of the campaign their brand was on thousands of handsets (in the form of mobile text-backs).

CEO Stephen Randall was at the Boston show to capture the excitement users get by sending a message and seeing themselves up on a huge screen. The “Vanity Play” if you will: