This week’s tasty tidbits from the business and technology front, as well as other recommended links:

• How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood — Scientific American has some fascinating details that can help boost your productivity. I was expecting vague platitudes about feng shui, but was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the recommendations.
• James Cameron’s Sci-fi Film Is Turning the Heads of Fans — Cameron’s new 3D film, Avatar, sounds like it could revolutionize the movie industry… and be really fun to watch.
• 6 Networking Mistakes And How to Avoid Them — That’s networking in the social sense, not the hardware sense. Harvard Business offers solid tips for both introverts as well as seasoned pros.
• Top ten reasons managers become great — Project management and public speaking guru Scott Berkun offers some practical advice for managers.
• The best ergonomic keyboards on the market — Slate takes a look at a wind range of ergonomic keyboards and reviews the results.
• 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of — Most of these examples are like nails on a digital chalkboard. Designers, please, PLEASE avoid them!
• Maybe you shouldn’t buy that — After browsing this hilarious site it’s hard to deny that we’re living in a new Gilded Age.

May we please retire that technological dinosaur known as voicemail?

Human beings are primarily visual creatures, and our aural canals offer a problematically thin reed for trying to communicate with each other. The telephone, and especially voicemail, has been plagued by extremely limited bandwidth and all sorts of interface problems. The only worse use of our senses to communicate would be Smellmail (”exhale through your left nostril to delete, through your right nostril to save…”). Or maybe Tastemail.

The New York Times recently took up the topic of whether voicemail is obsolete:

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. [...]

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Many dread the process or… avoid it altogether, raising the question: is voice mail on its way to becoming obsolete?

The answer is yes. Voicemail may have been useful once upon a time, but there’s no reason to put up with it any longer.

Those of us afflicted with comically short attention spans tend to have especially strong feelings about this; such is my own loathing for voicemail that I haven’t even bothered to check my personal messages since sometime in 2006.¹ After all, technology marches ever on, and a bevy of superior options for time-shifted communication are now possible with email, text messages, and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, or your other favorite Web 2.0 app.

New tools from Google, Apple, and others are helping to ease the migration from voicemail by moving voice messages into our visual inbox. I’ll review my favorite of these tools, Google Voice, in the days ahead.

1. Friends and family know this; unsolicited callers don’t. It’s a good filtering system! [↩]

This week’s tasty tidbits from the business and technology front, as well as other recommended links:

• 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images — Extensive image libraries to spice up your presentation, website, or marketing collateral.
• Behind the scenes at Netflix — Fascinating photo slideshow of one the Netflix distribution centers, where the snazzy online service meets labor intensive bricks-and-mortar.
• Livescribe : Never Miss A Word — "The Pulse smartpen records and links audio to what you write, so you’ll never have to miss a word again." Cooool.
• The Crazy Genius of Brand Guru Peter Arnell — Genius, or fraud? I lean toward the latter after seeing the Pepsi branding memo–which I admit, I thought was a hoax at first. (It’s that ludicrous.)
• The Bad User Interface Gallery — Sometimes it’s easier to get ideas from bad examples, and learn what NOT to do.
• Rands In Repose: The Pond — Some honest and provocative thoughts on telecommuting, from management’s perspective.
• Dear Speakers — James Duncan Davidson has done still photography at many, many presentations, and has some invaluable advice for speakers.
• Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard — Do your Rock-Paper-Scissors challenges end in too many ties? This 5-symbol variant may be for you! (And no, "Dynamite" doesn’t beat everything.)