Though it’s nearly 8 months old, this early Spring release from Merrill Garbus’ project tUnE-yArDs, with its joyous beat and colorful, eccentric video is still one of our favorites from this year.

This week, we present Director of Strategy Brad Cohen’s cats Stir Fry Rosenstein and Froggy Littlepants.

The web has been all a buzz (ouch, sorry Google) with talk of Steve Yegge‘s accidentally public memo about Google’s failure to understand platforms. It has certainly been passed around here at JESS3.

Last week ScienceDaily posted an article warning about the decline in active participation in voluntary organizations, with the largest declines in participation occurring “for fraternal, recreational, and ‘other’ memberships, although declines are seen for all other categories of membership as well.”

It seems it was just yesterday we were lining up at the Austin Convention Center to hear some of our mentors, friends and colleagues speak at South by Southwest Interactive conference and yet, it’s already time to prepare for next’s year festivities.

September will mark my fifth anniversary at JESS3. In that time, I have seen more growth, success and failure than most see in a lifetime (mostly growth and success, but enough failure to keep me hungry and humble). And of all the things I’ve experienced as employee #2, the thing that gives me the most hope in an even brighter future is adding more talented team members.

In an ever expanding, ever evolving online world, living in an echo chamber is a route towards obsolescence (and so is designing with web 1.0 browsers and UIs in mind, but I digress). To truly compete in this dynamic environment means a regular influx of best known methods and ideas from leaders in their fields.

The Nonick 2011 Conference focusing on tech and mobile was held last weekend in Bilbao, Spain. It’s an emerging conference promoting the role of technology and new media in developing new areas of Spain’s economy. Nonick is hosted by EiTB, which is like the Basque version of NPR, providing multiple television and radio channels in the Basque and Spanish languages. Officially, as an international conference, Nonick is all in English, but with a very high percentage of attendees from Spain it’s also a good chance to practice your Spanish. I lived in Madrid about 9 years ago, and was excited to be able to carry messages of design for social media back across the Atlantic to share with a Spanish audience.