March 26, 2006
Comments are not Group Wisdom
Jeremy "Two First Names Make One Cool Name" Keith shares his thoughts on communities and I can understand his point about groups being their own worse enemies, but I don't think individual comments represent group wisdom. The Group Wisdom in Newsvine, Digg and other such sites is the fact that they can show which stories should be the most popular. The ensuing discussions that occur in the comments are simply individual thoughts and therefore should not be representative of group think.
This doesn't hide the fact that comments shouldn't be opened up for everything and this is clearly reflected on Jason Kottke's site where he is very selective with which entry has comments open.
Posted by Scrivs at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
It's the community stupid
Newsweek has an interesting article on the new wisdom of the web where they showcase the Web 2.0 darlings and what makes them successful. Obviously it centers around community and that seems to be the only way to make something when you are going for the general consumer facing website.
The alternative of course is the 37signals old school methodology of creating a product that people are willing to pay for.
Make sure to read the article if you are at least interested in seeing how the mainstream media views the web that we have been entrenched in from the beginning.
Posted by Scrivs at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
Google and the tyranny of good design
It seems that every successful web company has a quirk about their website and surprisingly many of those quirks trace back to ugly design. Adrian Shaughnessy explores the issue of good design and Google's logo and provides many choice quotes to go along with his analysis.
...Google’s financial gigantism places it alongside some of the biggest corporations in the world. Odd then, that it should have a folksy logo that looks more like a school project than the mark of a global corporation.
Hopefully I can will myself to explore this issue more indepth because I had a million thoughts while reading the entry. Now I just need to put them into words on the screen.
Posted by Scrivs at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2005
Design and Getting Links
Where I give a case study on how design can help in increasing both the traffic and links to your site.
Posted by Scrivs at 02:01 PM
November 08, 2005
9rules Round 3
It's that time again, Round 3 for English sites opens up next week. Checkout the details.
Posted by Scrivs at 01:50 PM
Web 2.0 Quiz
Really wondering what Web 2.0 is? Take this quiz to find out if you really know what's going on.
Posted by Scrivs at 01:48 PM
October 03, 2005
Web-Based Collaboration Round-Up
Drew has put together a great summary comparison of the latest three entries into the web-based collaboration arena: Writeboard, JotSpot Live and Writely.
His last sentence is what makes the whole article worth reading:
So all in all, the best of the bad bunch (apply your pinches of salt here) is Writeboard, which in itself destroys your document too easily. Ah well.
Posted by Scrivs at 10:23 AM
September 22, 2005
Manzari On Successful Companies
Johnnie Manzari has a great read on Successful Companies in today's world. My favorite part of the article is the talk about execution.
I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution. It's really - it's just one of these things where can you strike the fear of God into your competitors by releasing every two weeks the features that it takes them three months to write. And by the time they're done copying the features that you built last week, you've got three more months on them. And this is really all about execution.
Brilliant and oh so true.
Posted by Scrivs at 10:44 PM
September 14, 2005
Embrace your bottoms
Derek Powazek talks about the importance of footers and it's something that I have told people about before. Footers get so overlooked in our designs, but it's one of the few places you can put a lot of information without clogging up the design. The footer for this site is still in the works, but it's goal is to help all readers to continue reading the site.
Listen to Derek. He is rich.
Posted by Scrivs at 09:43 AM
September 13, 2005
Oliphant Dissects Mail's Menu
Matthew Oliphant (9rules partner) dissects the intricacies of Apple's Mail Menu and discusses the topic of finding opportunities to improve. It seems Apple has been getting quite a bit of grief from professionals for not sticking to their own set of HCI guidelines.
I guess I get caught up in the pretty things.
Posted by Scrivs at 09:55 AM
September 08, 2005
Searching for Standards
Molly does a comparison of modern search engines and how they fair on the standards front. You would think that many of them would start to move towards CSS and gzip compression (or whatever) to cutback on bandwidth.
Here is my own CSS Google I did 2 years ago.
Posted by Scrivs at 08:41 AM