If you haven’t heard, our fellow Chicagoans at Feedburner are now part of Google. The official announcement was made today.

Congrats to the Feedburner crew and Google. Everyone I know at Feedburner is quality. Feedburner’s man in charge, Dick Costolo, is one the sharpest (and funniest) people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in the past few years.

Great companies are made of great people and Google definitely gets greater with this acquisition.

Well done on both sides.

A nice profile of the new Cork'd commander-in-chief, Gary Vaynerchunk, over at ABC News. #

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation." Incredible stuff from the TED conference. Via Dunstan. #

Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.

FeedBurner has been acquired by Google. The local weather forecast calls for general euphoria with intermittent periods of off-the-rails delight.

This is one of those posts in which there's so much to say that it's difficult to know where to begin. We want to start off by highlighting the whys, wherefores, and whatnots for our publishers. FeedBurner has always been a publisher-centric company. We built the company around a central theme and hypothesis that distributed media present publishers with immense opportunities as well as spiraling complexity.

The vision is straightforward: publishers who successfully promote distribution and measure consumption will be in a position to derive more value (aka make more money, gain more influence, etc.) from media distribution. Feeds present a simple and ubiquitous opportunity for publishers to embrace distributed media, but content distribution standards without metrics, publicity tools, and monetization engines are ultimately of little value to individuals and organizations whose businesses depend on an ability to maximize and measure reach.

There is so much alignment between how we think about publisher services and how Google has executed around publisher services, that we'll try to pick just a few specific areas that we believe are the most compelling reasons for working together:

1. Google's competencies and focus around publisher analytics, distribution, and monetization map perfectly to our suite of services.
2. Publishers want a single dashboard and single source for the metrics that give them feedback about the value of their content and its impact on their business. By combining our market leading feed metrics with Google's market leading site and marketing analytics, publishers now get a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience. This 'total perspective' has long been a goal of ours, and we think our combined analytics offering is going to provide publishers with previously undiscovered insights and opportunities.
3. The measurement of awareness advertising is evolving from unique impressions to audience engagement. By providing our hundreds of thousands of publishers with Google's world-class advertising marketplace and metrics, we can provide far more value to publishers and begin to deliver this next step in ROI measurement to advertisers.
4. Speed of innovation. We have always prided ourselves in our ability to deliver extensive functionality to the market rapidly. As we have grown to hundreds of thousands of publishers with global demands, we are delighted to be combining forces with an organization that has a deep understanding of the most efficient ways in which to deploy significant functionality to the widest possible audience. It is one thing to roll out a capability to 3 percent of your customers and it's something else entirely to roll out a broad set of new services simultaneously to customers around the globe.

Back when we released the now oh-so-popular FeedCount chicklet in 2005, FeedBurner co-founder Matt Shobe said in a blog post here that "This is how it all starts. First, a little counter with digits whizzing past…next thing you know it's all bubble cars and floating cities as far as the eye can see." We still smile at that line, mostly because it's funny, but also because it's so easy to get ahead of ourselves and extrapolate from the abstract "these synergies make sense" to "enormous benefits will accrue to all interested parties." The fact is that there is an immense amount of work to do in order to a) continue to provide our customers with the best feed analytics, b) begin to provide a more comprehensive 360-degree view of audience and reach, and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content.

We like our chances. We are confident that we are going to be a part of the company that can best deliver the most comprehensive suite of services to publishers. We are confident that we're going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you'll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself "Well, *that* was a good idea!"

We suspect several of you may have questions, we can see your hands waving out there, and fortunately, some of these questions are answered in this FAQ. Also, you can and should contact us with any additional questions. All of your favorite FeedBurning services will remain totally accessible during the integration.

Back to it.

Using built-in filters and a single background color, this simple little tutorial worked like a charm. #

IDEO designer Jane Fulton Suri figures out unmet consumer needs by watching ordinary people doing ordinary things.

As the leader of the “human factors” group at IDEO, the international design consultancy, she and her colleagues will watch kids brushing their teeth, parents pushing strollers, or patients checking in at the emergency room, trying to find opportunities for design to improve the experience. Yet often that means looking for something less obvious: the ways in which the experience can improve the design.

Their observations have brought rubber grips to Oral-B’s toothbrushes, raised the height of Even-Flo’s strollers, and streamlined DePaul Health Center’s check-in processes. For Fulton Suri it’s as if the world is one big beta test, in which every feature is begging for improvement.

“Thoughtless Acts” is her book that shows random acts of design witnessed in everyday life. Some shots from the book below.

Creative Generalist has an interview with Suri:

In your experience, what type of personality typically makes the best observer? I find that curiosity, open-mindedness, and imagination are important. It helps to be non-judgmental, able to move easily from noticing detail to thinking about patterns and the big picture, perceptive about (their own and other) people’s behavior, motivations, and personally genuinely interested in other people’s points of reference.

Today we received a joint statement from Hoya and Pentax confirming a 'management integration' agreement. The statement spells out the purpose of the merger as well as the terms; Hoya will pay 105 billion Yen (approx. $860 million) for all outsanding Pentax shares. The deal could go ahead as soon as next Monday (June 4th). We fully expec this deal to strengthen Pentax's position iespecially considering the growing importance of the lens market.

Have you got what it takes to be a part of the dpreview.com team? Are you passionate about the techniques and technology surrounding digital photography? Do you want the dubious pleasure of working alongside Phil, Simon, Jo and Gordon on the most exciting photography website in the world? We're looking for three new staff members; two technical writers and one web development engineer. We need driven, technically curious people who can solve and innovate. For the writing positions we expect you to have a solid photographic knowledge as well as experience using our chosen authoring tools (see inside). All three positions will be at our office in London (UK).

In the Pentax Square in Shinjuku, Japan Pentax has revealed a special 50th Anniversary edition 'Design Study Model' digital SLR with the tentative name of 'Asahi Pentax'. This prototype camera is based on the K10D (as is obvious on closer inspection) but has a very different viewfinder, which is of the same design as that found on the very first Asahi Pentax from 1957, the first Japanese SLR with a fixed pentaprism viewfinder. Note that there are no plans to put this camera into production, rather it is a celebration of Pentax's 50th anniversary and their long contribution to SLR photography.