A dark genre of rock music where bands use minor keys and “Muuaaahhhs!”. More times than not videos involve medieval architecture and bands in ankle deep water. Videos containing dungeons, dragons, and moats are also strong indicators.

See:
The Tea Party
Creed (some of their work)
Early Marilyn Manson

Related/Overlapping Styles:
Gothic Rock
Big Jaw Rock

Yesterday while driving around downtown at 5:30PM I noticed a few people walking home from work. I saw a man in a suit, a lady who works at a cafe I frequent, and a few other normal folks with business type bags in hand. It was then that I noticed that people walking all look the same. There is nothing substantial that one can do to appear better off, more wealthy, or more important than others while walking along the sidewalk. Sure, you can wear an expensive suit or a Gore-Tex jacket but those are subtle differences. Normal folks can’t differentiate between an Armani and Moore’s special at first glance. They can no better tell a Gore-Tex from a K-way.

If we look at people driving vehicles though it’s very easy to distinguish the perceived status of each (that they wish to present to us). The level of status each driver would like is quite distinguishable between a BMW and a beat up 88 Buick Skylark.

Related: As I was driving around looking at real estate in the city (there’s a statement to start some wild rumours) I noticed that very nice homes in the city are less distinguishable from their not so nice neighbors. In the city homes are closer together and size plays less of a roll when it comes to “nice”. Often the nicest homes are well done homes of moderate size. Sure, there are some beautiful large homes, but when they are surrounded by other nice homes and large trees their size plays less of a roll than their “niceness”.

If we head out to the suburbs we see that size is king. The larger the yard, the more car doors on your garage, the more square feet you have the larger your status genitals become. In the suburbs you also have rich with rich, poor with poor. The downtown however has a much healthier blend of folks.

So is our need to be seen as better than someone else (C.S. Lewis’ definition of pride) driving us out of the downtown? Do we move out of the city so we can be seen driving into it in a Mercedes? It might very well be. I think our pride and quest for status might very well be a subconscious cattle prod to urban sprawl.

Over the past few months there have been a few things in the life of silverorange that, when they happened, I was going to blog. When I sat down to write about these events, lessons, and going ons, it turned out that I could not abstract the ideas and thoughts enough so that I felt comfortable posting them in a public forum. While I feel the lessons and ideas that have we have come across lately are extremely important for others to read about, that feeling does not outweigh the feeling that I need to protect the people involved, their feelings, and their integrity.

Today the Nielsen Norman Group released the winners and accompanying report for their latest intranet design competition. We’re glad to say that the report, the Ten Best Government and Public Sector Intranet Designs, features a silverorange designed and built intranet.

The winning intranet belongs to IRAP (National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program). IRAP came to us after having read of our first intranet recognition in 2001. Since then we’ve worked with them to develop and fine tune a custom intranet based on the silverorange intranet platform (v3.0). We’re very pleased to see that project get such high recognition. Congratulations to the development team here at silverorange and to the absolutely fine folks we work with at IRAP.

As many of you know, this is the third time the silverorange intranet has been honoured by the Neilsen Norman Group. In 2001 we were award the best intranet. In 2003 we were given an honourable mention for a redesign of a previously winning intranet. And now this:

“The silverorange intranet has proven to be an excellent-looking and very simple-to-use system. Designs from this company have made the top ten in not one, but two of our Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annuals.” - Jakob Nielsen

We built the first version of the tool in 2000 to talk amongst ourselves. We would never have thought that four years later hundreds, if not thousands, of people would use it on a daily basis. Amazing. Congratulations once again to all involved and a sincere thank you to the Nielsen Norman Group.