The "long tail" and blogs

I found an interesting article about the impact of the long tail on the blogosphere.
The article says:

"The long tail of the blogosphere is huge and so any individual blog is not easily discovered. That is, the chance that a random Internet surfer will find a blog that is part of the long tail is nearly zero."

So unlike amazon or google which draw a huge amount of users to their site, blogs, like individual websites, have a small chance of beeing seen by long tail users.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blogosphere_long_tail.php

Grey boxes

Jason Santa Maria is an A-list web/graphic designer. One of his landmark blog posts is about how he begins a new site design — essentially his wireframing process! He starts with a sketchbook (“the way you should with any design work”) and ends with a Photoshop mockup. But the key thing is an additional step of grey boxes using Adobe Illustrator. This allows him to lay out design structure without getting distracted by technical limitations or the color and pixel-pushing details.

When I first read this article, I had no experience with Illustrator, so while I understood the design principles, I didn’t understand the flexibility that working with vector graphics provides. Last summer I took a graphic design course where we did get into learning Illustrator, and now I can definitely see how it’s easier to use Illustrator over Photoshop for this purpose. On the other hand, it’s the process, not the software, that really counts. Anyway, his description is much more interesting than my summary of his description. Be sure to check out the full-size versions of his sketchbook scans and screenshots, by clicking on the thumbnails.

Grey Box Methodology

Turn Off the Fan Tag Line

I humbly throw out the first suggestion for our blog tag line: Developing clear web voices despite the white noise

Perhaps a little wordy, but I tried to play off the blog title while communicating a purpose.

Vote yes in the comments or suggest an alternate. Maybe we can pick one in tomorrow's class.

Turning books into Kindling: Amazon's digital book adventure

At home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I plucked the latest Newsweek off of my mother's coffee table and sat down to reacquaint myself with the news of the world. Apparently, the book, in all of its page-turning, tree-killing glory, is about to go up in smoke. I found Steve Levy's cover story on Amazon's Kindle, The Future of Reading a thought-provoking read, that touches on much of what we've discussed in class. I still can't decide if I'd want to curl up on the couch with the new Kindle instead of that stack of Bill Bryson books I've been waiting months to savour in my precious time away from the computer screen, but it's a development with consequences I find easy to imagine. Will we someday find ourselves anticipating real-time edits from the author of the novel in our hands? Is the Kindle the new book? Or are we so tired of looking at screens all day long, we'll give up recreational reading all-together unless its on large-print, bound and artfully covered stack of pages? Will we someday dissect all of this in a class called "Writing and Editing for the Kindle?"

As I ponder all of this, and what it means for the future of my reading, writing and editing, Levy's interpretation of a rant by Microsoft's Bill Hill runs through my mind: "We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world...'do you really believe that we'll be doing that in 50 years?'"

I wonder. Any thoughts?

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Further explanation of Boing Boing

Hello classmates, I came across this review of Boing Boing TV on slate.com: What the heck is Boing Boing TV?

The reviewer reports the blog authors are still trying to find their voices in the video segments. Of possible interest to the class, the first few sentences of the article give a thorough explanation of all that Boing Boing has to offer...

Boing Boing, the world's "most favorited" blog, according to Technorati's vastly hideous phrase, is a hybrid of tech-culture newsletter and DIY lifestyle magazine. Its posts speak of copyright skirmishes and art-prankster attacks, of retro-kitsch bric-a-brac and futuristic gizmos, of comic books and academic journals. While an ideal Boing Boing post would concern an academic journal article about retro-futurist comic books, the site offers a little bit of everything for the cosmopolitan geek.

Dreams

I just wanted to share that I literally spent all of last night dreaming about wireframes. Unfortunately, I woke up with the exact same ideas as when I went to sleep....and the ideas are not original...

And did anyone else's Steve Krug book break into small pieces? My binding is literally broken and in small piles of papers throughout my room. Thank god it wasn't a book about print product usuability!

Sorry for the rant.

Have a good day!

Humor in Redesign

In case you do not obsessively read Dooce.com as I do, I will excerpt a few thoughts of Dooce's on the site's recent redesign.

On feedback from users

"...there was this one email that was very passionate in its hatred of this change, and she was all DIE! DIE! DIE! and then there at the bottom was her signature followed by a quote from Jesus."

On using a different content management system

"The amount and quality of work that they did was indispensable, cannot recommend them enough, and mostly I just want to thank them for all the support they gave Jon because without them he would have gone completely bald."

On the adrenaline of launching the redesign

"He briefly got up from this desk to kiss me goodbye when I noticed two giant sweat stains underneath his arms, and I was all, are you running on a treadmill while coding my website? Isn't that complicated? And he's all, yes I'm running on a treadmill, WITH MY BRAIN."

On opening up the floodgates of comments

"Soon we'll find out because I'm going to open up comments on this post to get your feedback, and I just totally winced writing that. Please be gentle for I am a delicate flower."

Reflections on a Messy Redesign

I've had this project hanging over my head for the last few (several?) months—the kind that gets so drawn out that everyone involved sort of tries to wish it away. I kind of got a pit in my stomach tonight during class, because it’s a website redesign and everything that Katherine talked about was so on par with why this project has become so convoluted (though, I have to believe, still salvageable).

I volunteered to write the copy for a small nonprofit’s website. The other three people involved are a web designer (who is my former boss), an IT person (who I’d never met), and the organization’s executive director. What happened, I think, is that we all defined our own roles without much consideration to the larger project, and we also assumed that one of us was taking on a project management role. But we never addressed that.

The designer and I had worked closely on our former organization’s website last year—a decent sized center at Harvard. We used a design consulting firm and went through brainstorming, wireframes, mockups, usability testing, and months of planning. It was a good site. So it’s not like we are totally naive about how to redesign a website. But, to be honest, we’re also not being paid for this current site redesign. So, she assumed that she would just design the layout and send the specs to the IT guy who would build out the pages and I would write copy that would be placed into these pages.

No one took it on themselves to decide what the content would be. The architecture and navigation was based off of a first draft of the web principles. I was given a list of topics, like “About Us” and “Volunteer Information” to write copy for. I kept asking for a site map, the designer kept asking for content, and we still don’t know who is actually populating the pages. We all looked to the organization’s executive director, who had wrangled us all in, to be the project manager. But she’s never been involved with any sort of new site or redesign. She knows what she wants the website to be from her executive perspective, but there is no one to manage the actual site development.

So now we’re at that point right that Katherine warned us of tonight. We had this emergency conference call last week (the first time we had all met—even over the phone) to figure out where all the copy was supposed to go, why some of the proposed content was/wasn’t relevant, and what we all expected of ourselves and one another. Oh, and we ended up changing the navigation—but that’s still not finalized. And the executive director wants to launch it the first week in December.

It’s been an invaluable learning experience for me from a project management perspective—it’s just too bad it had to become such a mess. Although I’ve been working in web publishing for a few years now, I feel like I’m still getting my feet wet. Has anyone else had an experience like this? Or have you come across the types of roadblocks that Katherine was talking about in class?

Web metric measurement

Another New York Times article, this time on the dispute between advertisers and site owners on the number of visitors and page views. Given how much money is involved in online advertising ($20 billion this year), there’s a lot at stake with these numbers. Unfortunately, there are lots of factors in the discrepancies from both sides, but no real solutions in sight.

How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting

Take My Word for It

You have to love the end-of-the-fiscal year for your company which coincides nicely with holiday madness. As if trying to score free shipping from all of your favorite online stores was not enough to occupy full-time job status. But then your workplace imposes upon you year-end reviews, objective setting sessions, an endless Microsoft Outlook calendar worth of meeting requests to accept...

and on top of all of that malarkey, your team decides that now is an auspicious time to OVERHAUL THE WEBSITE?!?

Despite my resistance to this ill-timed venture, I am doing my best to draft up my wish list for new site capabilities and aesthetics. But here's my beef: The rest of my team members want to focus on site functionality. We have an e-commerce component to our site and it's stuck in a bygone age - it practically wears pantaloons and carries a credit at the apothecary. It does need to be addressed. But what if the framework of our site is such that customers cannot even FIND their way to the e-commerce part. What then?!

Here is my question to you usability gurus - Have you ever had to wage a battle about the aesthetics versus functionality of site design, and believed that aesthetics should actually be addressed first? I guess this is the old fashion versus function question. Our site is functional, but because it is so ugly and poorly organized, it just cannot function. And somehow, I'm the only one who feels this way....

The NY Times on Search Engine Optimization

I've been thinking a lot about this column from the NY Times Public Editor last August - When Bad News Follows You - about how inaccurate news stories will keep turning up in google searches and damage reputations.

It's interesting that the Times' Editor highlights their SEO strategy as the biggest part of the problem, its not just that the inaccurate story never dies, the NY Times has also worked hard to make sure that is the first thing anyone sees if they google someone.

The article lists several potential solutions, discarding most of them as impractical or unlikely to work, ranging from programming the archives to "forget" stories that have later been corrected or questioned to rereporting all stories.

One of the most practical fixes turned up in a subsequent Letter to the Editor:

The Web is actually a blessing for those whose names are intentionally or
unintentionally besmirched. It offers an elegantly simple solution to the
problem of lingering bad news: ape the taglines of the offending items and, so
to speak, counter-blog.

While another letter points out:

There's a simple solution: The Times should stop using the technique.
Stripped of the rhetoric, The Times is basically saying that harming folks' reputations is a bit of collateral damage that inevitably occurs as the paper tries to make more money. I don't find that a very compelling argument, and I don't think you should, either.

So many links, so little time

I can has cheezburger? I no does geddit. But that doesn't matter. There are apparently millions
who do and millions more to be made from them. One person's frivolous waste of time is another's
creative engagement.

So bring 'em on: the devotees and
the furries;
the intelligent designers and
designing intelligence;
the "other" side and
this one(?);
the think or thwimmers" and
the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Voices that have long been silenced are shouting to be heard and all that's
necessary for connection is a computer and internet service. Oh, and there's the small issue of electricity,
taken for granted by all in the blogosphere but that's a link for a different post.

Still, though I'm delighted to be privy to the clamour, the snob in me sneers.
How did they find each other before the internet?
And, could I just get an expert, please.

The anti-credentialist in me
doesn't believe in experts but there are just times when I'd like to be informed by research culled by people who have made a
particular issue their life's work. Michael Pollan's one but even better regarding the Farm Bill is
the American Farmland Trust.

Who will you vote for 2008?

Hey guys,

This site was mentioned during one of the presentations and I JUST HAD TO find out who the internet people think I should vote for......Mike Gravel? I don't know him, and I probably never will because his website is Lame-ity Lame Lame!

Anyway, here is the quiz site:
http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html

Boston.com Makeover

I'm wondering what everyone thinks of the recent changes to boston.com. Do you think it looks more or less cluttered? What do you think of the header?

I'm a frequent reader of boston.com, and I was initially a little strangely upset by the changes, but I think they actually make the site more user-friendly, easier to navigate, and just simpler overall.

Thoughts?

-Erin

The Ethicurean

Okay, I admit it, I have an ulterior motive in mentioning this blog, which I just found today. (If you are at all interested in the politics of food you should read Michael Pollan's Op-Ed in the NYTimes.) But mainly I wanted to post about it because it's an example of a well laid-out and thought-through blog. Lots of ways to browse, etc. Also the title and tagline are both clever and extremely clear.

More on Campaign Sites

Here's the NPR piece on Chris Dodd's web team I mentioned last night. And after Anke and Erin's presentations, I was curious about which sites are getting the most traffic. Turns out Fred Thompson is the Republican frontrunner in terms of web traffic (he just overtook Ron Paul), and Barack Obama is leading the Democrats. This doesn't line up with the opinion polls, so I'd guess either the two of them are doing particularly well with a web-savvy audience, or they're doing a good job driving people to their sites.

Brijit cuts magazine pile down

Brijit is a new site where freelancers rate and write 100-word abstracts of articles from close to 100 magazines. The idea is that Brijit sorts through the chaff in your favorite publication for you. I read about it in an article in the Washington Post, which incidentally is one of Brijit’s “sources.”

The site is quite new and doesn’t have as extensive content as I’d need for it to be my one-stop shop for news and features. Also, I don’t need reviews of all the articles out there, just the ones I was going to read anyway. There’s a Brijit Recommends section, but I don't know who the editors are and if I agree with them. What if Brijit had a page where I can check the New York Times’ most emailed list and get the ratings just on those?

I use an RSS reader to aggregate the sites I’ll return to regularly, but it does have the disadvantage of not exposing me to other sites I could be interested in. Digg documents the popularity of the masses, but because of that, it’s unlikely any article more than 1,500 words will rise to the top. However, I don’t necessarily see Brijit filling that happy medium.

Brijit is not for me—I’ve given up even trying to keep up on a wide range of publications. If you wish you had the time to peruse all the good magazines out there but know you can’t feasibly do it, Brijit could help you get (just) what you’re looking for.

Second Life & Web 2.0

Hi all,

This article about Second Life is a year old, but I came across it and it's a very interesting and entertaining read. Laugh as we may, it's fulfilling an obvious human need for community and intimacy in the age of the net:

Leading a Double Life
10/25/06, Boston Globe

Parts that relate to our class:

• interactivity
• content "created almost entirely by users"
• spontaneity & "stepping-into-Wonderland quality" of the platform
• companies joining in to create buzz or sell their image/products
• Harvard and other universities using it to engage distance-ed students more (!)

I'll see if I can find more recent articles on this later.
Oh, and btw, this is Hana.

Layer Tennis Match

Remember our reading about the difference between a blog entry and a news story? One of the key differences being that a blog allows for more of an "in flux" telling of a story, with constant updates, modifications, and even flat-out apologies for erroneous information, whereas news articles need to be fairly airtight before going to print.

I was thinking about other ways that the internet allows for this in flux storyline, and here is an example of how art and entertainment intersect in an ongoing form.

Layer Tennis Match invites two graphic artists (or two small teams of artists) to post "volleys" of different iterations of a design onto this public website. The artists swap the file back and forth, parse and embellish the work for fifteen minutes, and then post their volley to the site. The volleying is broadcast live and each volley is commented on by a guest writer. The matches last for ten volleys then a winner is declared.

I enjoyed this latest edition of the tennis match, which features a clever take on the game of tennis itself.