Shameless Promotion Department:

We've just released our PIXCETERA app in the Apple iPhone store. The experience was designed and created by the Key Experiences team within MediaGlow. We kept the experience very simple, very focused, and basically ported the value proposition of the site onto the hand-held device. Users can explore hundreds of original world-class photo galleries created by the photo-editors of the site as well as galleries published from across our content network. Check it out and let us know what you think. The app is significant for us in that it solves both a technical and UI convention for delivering photo browsing experiences within our upcoming iPhone apps. Very soon look for releases for "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" (www.TUAW.com), as well as Asylum.com. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures on PIXCETERA!

The hullabaloo of fashion week has dissipated leaving a lovely collection of delights.

Stylelist.com hired V. Nina Westervelt to shoot backstage and front row during the Spring 2009 presentations, and she came back with quite an impressive portfolio of portraits. Nina's shots, caught on a medium format camera using a spotlight flash, leave the celebrities unpolished. It's as you found snapshots of your best friend's high-school party...with some familiar faces standing next to the keg... There is a disassociation from the perceived reality of Fashion Week, and a candidness usually not attributed to the likes of Kanye West, Nicole Richie, or pretty models...

Click here to see the works.

Well, it's been a few years since the book "Skip Intro" by Duncan McAlester and Michelangelo Capraro. I'm guessing that its lessons weren't quite absorbed by the web strategists for each of the presidential campaigns.

A thorough analysis of each site would be a worthwhile effort for several articles, but for now let's just take a look at how each site employs the splash screen.

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

PIXCETERA is a fully fleshed-out celebration of the craft of photography and has, as its central innovation, the ability to dynamically "read" galleries being published across the AOL network and consolidate them into one website (some innovations are not so obvious). Our users clicked billions of photos last year so we're hopeful that bringing all of this amazing programming work into one website fulfills an unmet need for them.

It is important to note that the site is not trying to compete with flickr as a UGC play (I myself am a faithful user of the site). Though we do have plans for user upload and gallery publishing and favorites, the main concept here is to bring the best programmed photography experiences in our network into one simple interface and provide the user the ability to "skip" across topics effortlessly.

One of my favorite little features is the ability to reskin the interface to white, gray or black so you can view photos in your own neutral tone of choice.

We've only just begun so expect some interesting innovations out of the pixcetera team over the coming months. And please let us know what you think.

Last week we launched a new PC gaming download experience called BIG Download. GameDaily and Joystiq are partnering on the editorial coverage.

Take a moment to check out the personalized "game tracker" If you add [+] games to your tracker, we'll automatically place the downloads in your queue, whenever there's an update!

I really like where we landed with the branding... we wanted to have fun with the logo. It's a downloading site for PC gaming enthusiasts and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Look out in the future to see more of the big guy doing different things across the site.

I'm thrilled to report that we have seen tremendous growth across our AOL Living sites over the past year with AOL Body increasing page views 760%, Food 319% and Home 475%. Overall, AOL Living is the third-highest-ranked women's network of sites on the web.

How did we do this? Our editorial team's strategy has been to offer practical, solution-oriented and highly relevant content to increase consumer engagement.

Our creative team has augmented this strategy by keeping a close eye on user behaviors/needs on our sites and competitively. We do in-depth user profiles and varied mood boards at the beginning of our projects to ensure every design decision we make is tied back to core user needs and the message we plan to share.

Our design team continues to dream up rich design experiences that reflect a welcoming, inclusive tone to resonate with and deeply engage our audience. And the results are stunning.

Looking for a good movie to see this summer? If so, check out the latest Summer Movies feature on moviefone.
I'm hoping this summer's Incredible Hulk may be a little better than the first one.

Sitting at a desk near Libe Goad, EIC of Gamedaily, is hell these days. She's not only played GTA4, she's played it several times. I get to hear the boasts, the snideness and, yes, even the cat calls as I wait until 4/29. Like the common man I am.

I've been a big fan of the GTA series ever since I got to demo #3 in front of a couple dozen IBM executives. They wanted to know what kids were playing these days. Let's just say they weren't pleased. But I left the meeting convinced that GTA3 was not only a game, but a statement. The repulsive violence turned off a lot of people in the room (I think I might have gone a little too far with the baseball bat). But Taxi Driver disgusted a generation, and it's now considered one of the most influential films ever made.

Just like Taxi Driver, the GTA series is not all about the excessive gore, or the sex. That's a component of the game (the one they use to sell copies). The series also allows you to make decisions in a wide open world, with an engaging story all around you. You can do good things if you want to, and they have benefits. You can do bad things if you want to, and they have benefits. While you're limited by the story's linearity you still have an illusion of anything-goes. That's one of the toughest tasks for game developers to pull off.

Love it or hate it, in the final analysis GTA will be seen as a cornerstone of modern gaming, and (with boffo sales) a window into who we are.

AOL Television has an informative microsite dedicated to the show America cannot get enough of: Idol. But whether or not you are totally sick of Simon Cowell (um, like me), or hanging on every potentially off note you'll dig this nice poll interface. Though we have been using this format for some time, somehow the team keeps making it more and more interesting visually. Great build and drama in the movements. Check it out.

Here goes another one... we launched a new blog today called Urlesque. Following up on the success of Asylum, we developed a new site that will focus on "what are people blogging about today."

Let us know what you think about the design.

It was a heartbreaking loss for Memphis but for the first time in 20 years the Jayhawks are the NCAA BB Champions. The final game tonight capped off a tumultuous final on March Madness and was the end of a record year for AOL Sports. The March Madness package was the best to date, surpassing our goals and setting page view records, that included editorial coverage of each region, live bracket scores via an interactive flash scoreboard and individual gamepages with news, team and player stats.

The heart of the package was built on original coverage, realtime game data, player stats and differentiated further by a strong edgier look and feel that made the package stand out on its own. Top it off with a first class sponsor in Audi.

We rounded off the experience with a host of games for tournament fans. Starting off with the best looking printable bracket to the interactive bracket games built in collaboration with our partner Stats, inc. -- Bracket Challenge, Bracket Manager and Second Chance Challenge.

Our AOL Food team launched several new features last week, including a series of Get Cooking videos, enhanced search functionality and category sorting. These incremental improvements lay the groundwork for many great features that we have in our pipeline to launch in the coming months. It demonstrates the team's ability to break down large ideas into iterative launches to get great features in the hands of our audience quickly.