A Wealth of Information

Things that scare me: The LA Weekly, cable offerings in the 500+ channel range, Leatherman Knives, Russian stacking dolls, and scores by Philip Glass.

In other words anything that contains a myriad of other things within it. So many things, in fact, that you may never make it back to whatever you were looking for in the first place. (I know I that I'm describing the Internet and the blogosphere, but these two I can handle under heavy sedation.)

You know what I'm talking about, you walk into Costco to buy a loaf of bread and some lunch "fixings" and before you know it, you're trying to shove a 50" plasma TV and a La-Z-Boy recliner into your Mini Cooper.

A couple days ago on our other Aquent blog, the talent blog, Matt was exploring the Adobe Labs site and came across a mind-blowing application related to Amazon, called Amaznode. (You need Flash 9 to access.)

You just type in a word and it'll pull up tons of tiny pictures of products related to that search, all connected in a web of lines (it looks a lot like the Thinkmap's popular Visual Thesaurus, if you're familiar with that). Click on any of the products and it'll bring up a short description and two buttons, one to add the item to your Amazon cart, the other to go to the Amazon site itself.

I think Matt likes it because of its beauty and great functionality, which I agree with, but it's a little frightening, right? Like Six Degrees of Separation for books, CDs, and toaster ovens. ("I was looking for a good book St. Thomas Aquinas, but I ended up buying 4 on existentialism and becoming an athiest in the process.")

Regardless, it is a great application and an amazing use of Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

Speaking of overwhelmed (and Flash 9), we have a lot of Flash and Flash ActionScripting jobs open right now. If you have great hands-on skills in both/either, let me know by emailing me your resume and URLs. I'll make sure they get in the right hands!