February 2006 Archives

The title of this entry is also the title of a panel I’m moderating at the Interactive portion of the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, at 3:30 on March 14.

The panelists include Phillip Torrone and Natalie Zee from O’Reilly’s Make magazine, Cameron Shaw from AOL, and Limor Fried from EYEBEAM (and late of MIT’s Media Lab). The panelists will be talking about how consumers of media are becoming producers of media (and media objects).

I’ll talk a bit about how blogs and wikis and other online social media are putting people at the center of their own information ecosystems instead of relegating them to the fringes of a mass-media dominated discourse, but mostly I’ll be introducing the other speakers and keeping time.

I’m not sure how well the SXSW banner fits the design of this site, so I’m going to let it gradually scroll off the page along with this entry instead of stowing it in the sidebar.

danah boyd has posted her “crib notes” for a talk she gave at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace.

Worth reading for everyone curious (or fretting) about MySpace’s popularity with the young.

Google Analytics has posted a few white-paper type articles to its Conversion University section, grouped under Drive Traffic and Convert Visitors)

(Link via Terry.)

AIGA, a designers’ professional association is relaunching its web journal, GAIN:

The Gain journal is dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business. Through rigorous case studies and thoughtful interviews, the journal demonstrates how the process of design can be used to solve business problems, foster innovation, build meaningful customer relationships and differentiate products from competitors.

Gain has a new team: managing editor, Karen McGrane, and mailing list moderator, Jeff Lash….

[R]eaders are invited to join a discussion through a new mailing list, AIGA-Gain —an informal, open discussion on topics at the intersection of design and business. The mailing list will focus on one topic per week.

Stu Nicholls has created a little web-native video game powered by CSS. It’s maddening, though. I can’t seem to win.

The good folks at Participatory Culture have unveiled a key component of their “Democracy Internet TV” platform, the desktop Democracy Player software (for Windows only, so far):

This Windows version, while still in beta, means that we now have a complete set of tools for democratizing online video — and marks the beginning of our campaign to establish a free, open-source video platform.

We’re re-naming the desktop software Democracy player (formerly DTV)…. We hope you agree that open tools for publishing, watching, and sharing video are important for the future of online media.

Last night I had one of those long elaborate dreams with several movements in it. Near the end, though, just before I woke up, I was in a big bed after a long night and Oprah Winfrey showed up in my hotel room I think it was. She was going to get in bed with me and I remember thinking to myself, “This probably won’t hurt my career.”

First of all, Web 2.0 is definitely hype. It’s a marketing concept whose meaning varies depending on who you are talking to. For some it means web-as-application-platform, for others it means social web (or living web), and for others still it means a new round of VC investment and rags-to-riches tales.

So let’s get that part straight: Web 2.0 is hype. But Is Web 2.0 Just Hype? Is web 2.0 just hype? That is the question:

It’s interesting to me that while the Web has been around for 10 years, we’ve only gotten to version 2.0 in the last year or so. I mean, with the advent of the Internet, it seemed like most software was getting a new version every couple months, not once a decade. And yet, Web 2.0 is on a lot of lips these days. But what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is “what some people see as a second phase of development of the World Wide Web, including its architecture and its applications.” It is often defined by the technology that is used to create the applications that are considered Web 2.0 - such as AJAX and SOAP. In fact, the word application is often what defines a site as a Web 2.0 site. It is not just a static repository of information, but rather an application that customers use to get more information, make more information, or interact with existing information in new ways.

Yahoo! has really taken it to the next level in terms of reaching out to the developer community. As I mentioned earlier, there’s the new User Interface Blog and I coincidentally stumbled on the Graded Browser Support article around the same time.

Digging deeper I found the Design Pattern Library which Yahoo! defines as “an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context”. The pattern library describes a problem and the best approach to undestanding and solving it.

Current examples include: auto-complete, breadcrumbs, drag and drop modules, module tabs, navigation tabs, object pagination, search pagination, object ratings, and writing a review.

The examples are sectioned into: when to use, the solution, the rationale, and accessibility. A sidebar includes links to related patterns, where Yahoo! has applied it to their own sites, a related blog article, and code examples.

Coupling the Pattern Libraries are the UI Libraries with in-depth examples and BSD-licensed code available for download.

These libraries are shaping up to be an essential resource for developers and designers alike!

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library Yahoo! UI Library

Nate Koechley, Senior Web Developer for Yahoo! has written an interesting (if a bit high-level) article on what he’s calling “graded browser support”. Instead of using the more commong “graceful degradation” approach, Nate looks at browser support using a graded system.

The system puts browsers into 3 seperate categories based on their distribution.

See the article for more information. The graded chart will make a lot more sense after reading it.

Yahoo! Developer Network: Graded Browser Support Yahoo! Developer Network: Browser Grade Chart

Since leading sites such as Yahoo and Google set expectations for users across the web, I’m glad to see that Yahoo is sharing their user-experience philosophy in the form of their new User Interface Blog.

Todd sent around this post from the IE team’s blog regarding the changes they made to CSS in IE7 Beta Preview, and this MSDN article that describes the changes in more depth, adding:

I think the important thing to remember is that this isnÕt final, this isnÕt even a full beta version. It will change, but I think the progress theyÕve shown is good for all.

I’ve been reading Dan Klyn’s blog, Wildly Appropriate (found it via his signature on an IA mailing list) recently and he’s a great source of valuable links and trenchant insights about user experience, findability, SEO, and related subjects. If I have one complaint about his blog, it’s that his Flash-font-replacement blog entry titles break my tabbed-browsing experience.

His On-Site Search: Still eRetail’s Killer App explains how important local search is for e-commerce sites, and his recent post on consumer generated media startup BazaarVoice relates, indirectly, to the panel I’m moderating at South by Southwest next month (“D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer”).

Lots of great stuff. I’ll keep reading.

(posted from the Denver airport via wifi)

Some interface designers may feel threatened by the idea of Greasemonkey scripts altering the intended look-and-feel of their web pages (at least in Firefox and Mozilla), but I like the idea of users getting more control over their experience (even if the scripts are brittle and sometimes hack-y), and in the best scenario I would imagine you could improve a site’s design by selectively adoping popular interface improvements.

Mark Pilgrim, the guru of Atom and Accessibility who wrote the Greasemonkey script Butler (which removes ads from Google results pages among other things) and the online tutorial Dive into Greasemonkey, has now written a book for O’Reilly called Greasemonkey Hacks:

More than just an essential collection of made-to-order Greasemonkey solutions, “Greasemonkey Hacks” (O’Reilly) provides complete, fully developed user scripts you can use to modify web pages, the tools to customize these scripts, and the guidance to develop your own scripts from scratch. You’ll learn how to:

• Install, configure, and debug your first Greasemonkey script
• Insert links into web pages, fix broken pop-up links, and follow links without clicking them
• Beautify the Web by enhancing fonts, images, tooltips, lists, and tables
• Intercept and modify web forms, generate developer reports, and debug Ajax web applications
• Make search engines auto-complete your search terms, prefetch your results, and remember where you’ve been—without invading your privacy!
• Add accessibility features that make sites easier to read and navigate
• Download embedded movies, automate site registrations, and route around brain-dead browser sniffers

David Seah’s Printable CEO Series incorporates some interesting paper-based tools for tracking and prioritizing your tasks during the day. His system assigns points to different types of tasks. Life-sustaining work, such as billing or signing new deals, earns 10 points. Work that provides concrete results that demonstrates your skills earns 5 points. Networking-related tasks are worth 2 points, and the efforts involved in maintaining current relationships are worth 1 point each.

Seah is a new media designer so his concepts are encapsulated in beautifully designed forms that he apparently fills out to track his progress each day.

This should save some effort for JSP developers building out Ajax interfaces.

This has been your daily Ajax link (via Dan).

The telegram is dead:

Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.

Following up on the link to Derek Powazek’s article in a List Apart, here’s Keith Robinson has a similar take on the role of a home page in a site’s information architecture:

Part of this problem stems from the idea that items on a Web site can’t live in more than one place within a taxonomy. This, my friends, is unrealistic, unpractical and well… silly. At least in many cases. It might seems obvious, but it can be a real challenge to get stakeholders to see that it’s ok to put things in more than one grouping, even if it’s just via related item linking. Or, maybe a larger and more common issue, to get them to understand that it’s ok to place something into a grouping where it might not fit 100%. And then there is the Homepage. They want to know what “lives” on the homepage, and often have large internal struggles to get that sorted out. Struggles that can be an ongoing maintenance drain, let alone the effect of an ever-changing home- or hub- page has on users. They don’t realize that their stuff might get more visibility on internal content pages. And it’s not just internal stakeholders that have a problem with these ideas. For example, it always amazes me that people will pay more for one homepage ad than they will for a load of internal page ads. It’s doesn’t always make sense when you think about it, especially when there is an opportunity to relate the ad to the content on the page ala Google’s AdSense. In addition, I can safely say that quite often these struggles are next to meaningless when it comes to helping a user find what they’re looking for. The fact that everything is conveniently grouped within a hierarchy and mapped down from a home page doesn’t help everyone (or even most people) coming to the site looking for information. It can be very helpful to those who begin at the homepage and browse through your site. However, as search engines become more accurate, and as Web services and syndication spread content around the Web and, in some cases, away from the Web browser, this type of behavior will become less and less common.