in which I write about stuff
A portal that creates a custom home page based on the links most visited, without the user needing to actively pick anything. (I have this vague recollection of BBC News doing something like this some years back with news topics.)
Nothing more than that; I just wanted to write down the thought so I wouldn’t forget it.
I’m trying to write a summary of Web 2.0 for someone, and I’d like to bounce this draft off of my peers out here. My goal is to get the basics across, including terms that might come up in a discussion of Web 2.0, without being totally overwhelming. My tone can be fairly casual/conversational.
In particular: is there anything I can cut or need to add? Is anything way too confusing? I’m planning on also sending a link to those Commoncraft videos.
————–
The “Web 2.0” name was invented in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Books, one of the top publishers of technical books. (About half the books on my shelf are from O’Reilly.) The name itself is often used tongue-in-cheek by web folk, and argued over as much as the word “blog,” but like blog, it’s stuck.
In this case, to describe an amorphous universe of technologies, visual identities, and social expressions. I started this as an email with 3 or 4 bullet points and then realized I was only getting the tiny tip of the iceberg. This is tricky for me to capture because I’ve been pretty well immersed in it from the beginning.
The elements of Web 2.0 emerged from two basic trends. First, in the period 2001-2004 there were a lot of unemployed web people with nothing but ideas and time. Second, bandwidth has steadily been going up, which makes it possible to do more with programming, graphics, audio and video.
1)Â Â Â Â Â The web as an application. (Not just reading, but doing.)
2)Â Â Â Â Â Interaction among site visitors. (Rating, commenting, reviewing, etc.)
3)Â Â Â Â Â Standards for creating and using data across sites.
4)Â Â Â Â Â Radical transparency.*
Top 10 terms to know:
1)Â Â Â Â Â Blogs: a website with small-ish pieces of content organized in reverse chronological order.
2)Â Â Â Â Â Wikis: a website that can be edited inplace by the visitors and that is organized on-the-fly.
3)Â Â Â Â Â Forums: a website that creates visitor-to-visitor direct conversation.
4)Â Â Â Â Â Podcast: an audio blog. iTunes can subscribe to podcast feeds (see #4) and sychronizes with iPods, thus the catchy name.
5)Â Â Â Â Â
6)     RSS: a standard for publishing notifications of site updates. Also known as Atom, feeds, or syndication. RSS files are used by software/web applications, not by humans.
7)Â Â Â Â Â API: a concept of publishing data standards and methods so that your site/application’s data can be used by other sites and applications.
8)     Tagging: a user-generated way of organizing content, created over time. Often seen as “clouds” of keywords.
9)     Social networking: a website to connect with existing friends, online acquaintances, and new people. Everybody has a profile and there are various ways of connecting between profiles.
10)Â The Long Tail: there’s an audience for almost anything. Imagine a graph rating the popularity of all movies: a huge spike of the few most popular, rapidly declining to a “long tail.”
The look & feel:
———————
So, fire away….
from Dimitri Glazkov, on the UWebD list, June 2006:
In my experience, lack of realization that you are in effect running a small software development company inside of your IT or Marketing department is the biggest reason Web projects overrun deadlines and budgets, wither or fail long-term.
I got permission to use it a year ago, and just found it again whilst cleaning out email. It still seems a point worth noting.
On my last “clear the decks day” at work, I took a stack of post-it notes & scraps of paper, all bits of web/marketing wisdom I’ve collected over the last few years (seriously: some of those scraps came with me from Pierce) and combined the best parts into a single Word document.
It’s now printed out and marked with a highlighter, posted on my magnetic whiteboard where I see it pretty much continuously.
Since I know a number of you are webbish marketing people, I thought I’d share.
Unfortunately, I don’t know the origin of all the bits and pieces. I’m guessing the UIE guys, Gerry McGovern, maybe the GrokDotCom folk, plus definitely the book Made to Stick, but I can’t say with any degree of certainty. (Two of the questions under “Inquiry” are from an email I got from a former VP of Administration at Pierce…he left at least 2 years ago.)
Why “Big Character Poster”? It’s an in-joke with C from the class he took on Chinese culture at UWT.
Holler if you want a Word version.
Matt Dean over at Open Source CU asks:
How have you used technology recently to get recommendations or advice from your friends and peers?
The flippant answer is: when have I not used technology? Three recent-ish examples:
(Tracking these down is annoying.)
Can’t find slides for the User Experience or Personas sessions. :(Â Here’s the rest:
That is all.
Alas, the first half of my notes are completely gone, so the 2nd half starts with a lot of profanity. The overarching theme was getting a deep understanding of the people who use your site/service/etc. And that this understanding shouldn’t be limited to people with “usability” in their title, or just designers, or just anything. Getting empathy helps propel action, and makes research durable. Then you have to work to make sure that understanding makes its way into the design. A big thumbs-up on personas, as long as they’re revisited frequently.
5 key points that lead to creating personas:
Three methods of creating personas, each more data-oriented: from interviewing 20 or so people and then segmenting, then adding a follow-on process of confirming with quantitative data, to integrating the two by pausing after the interviews to just get to some hypothesis, rather than all the way to personas. There were lots of good tips and such in the slides. One idea I found fascinating: creating a matrix, persona goals on one site, business goals on the other, and then ideas for accomplishing both in the middle.
This had much more personal relevance than professional relevance, which I think it probably as it should be. All very way out freaky stuff, and it put two ideas into my head that I want to address at some later date:
It was fairly obvious that this session was aimed at freelancers (which I am once in a long while) and small agencies. However, there was still plenty to glean. The basics of project management: controlling time, cost, and scope. Basically, organize and document. His recommendations for dealing with disaster reminded me of some basics of cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly around making sure your self-talk is good before you act. I’m looking forward to going over the documentation examples from the presentation. It was also a good reminder that I want to reread The Art of Project Management, now that I have my own copy.
The presentation didn’t give me the practical material that I wanted directly, but it gave me an opportunity to triangulate with and think about what I already know of this area. The critical data point to remember is that most people are most likely to choose a product, service, whatever, based on information from people they know and trust. Social media in a corporate context, then, means empowering employees and customers to become known and trusted outside of a hyper-controlled environment.
Two good starting points for an organization entirely new to social media: monitor what’s already out there (because it is already out there) and create internal blogs. A customer-to-customer forum is also a good way to build trust and learn about customer (read as member for me) needs and concerns. This links together with the Thursday afternoon sessions, as another way to get towards user research.
This, on the other hand, was relentlessly practical. Lots of examples of pages with poor prioritization or organization, compared with good examples. Also some with progression from one state to the other. The most hopeful message is that quite a lot can be accomplished with relatively small changes. Every page should inform the reader of its meaning and connect to the most important action; the content chunk is more important than the navigational frame.
The web content roundtable was so pointless that I’m not even publishing those notes that I do have. And I skipped the keynote in favor of shop talk with Dylan. Which is probably how I caught this cold.
I also have a list of work-specific points, but those don’t go here. 🙂
back in the row of people vampiring off of a power strip. not that I’m all the way down, but I don’t want to get there.
food comas all ’round! but the smartasses come out after lunch, too.
functioning form guy. I had to unsub him a while ago, too overwhelming.
gotta love a typo in foot-tall letters. intro stuff. “form design best practices” hm. he’s written some good pieces on forms
ack. bullet points!
looking around feverishly for something that might be right. vid of eyetracking. scanning headline & graphics. I’ve seen that in practice. it’s fascinating.
what an odd diagram. of organization -> interaction -> presentation.
presentation != icing on the cake.
quickly communicate: usefulness, usability, desireability.
sms2quit, visual example.
another of a page with almost no hierarchy. nothing draws the eye. (especially at this distance) and then essentially the same stuff with more distinction.
“if you can’t make it big, make it bold, and if you can’t make it bold, make it red!”
what if you can only do incremental improvements. smallish color changes, move search box, text size and spacing. totally. that’s what I’ve been doing. and then even smaller changes.
oh, cute baby. meaning based on differences. and this is the same stuff as in the little design book, and things that Ken taught in his class. visual weight. “buy that thing!” while you understand and use, you also get a brand message.
this is a problem I think with lots of offline places that let customers (clients, students, members, etc) do stuff online is that those functions are done by IT in toto, which makes sense structurally, but is a problem with the actual experience and the impression given to those customers. hm.
how do you know the priority?
list of “stuff” — scanning at a high/mid level. you are here indication. I’d like to do that a lot better. plus nice error messages. easier way to see the health of a network. (kinda reminds me of the meraki interface.)
[digressive research: no, there isn’t anything we can do about the basic look/action of online banking. dang.]
sites vs content objects. the important thing is little high-quality bits of content.
chicago tribune: 76% site hierarchy stuff, 24% content. which is why I want to go 2-column. and contrasted with NYT.
(oh, hey, I forgot I had a measuremap account.)
clearer, single strong message. maybe there’s some ways I can realign in that direction.
side rant re: signups. (but in our case, signup really is the first thing you do. hell, you gotta get checked against the gov’ts terrorist list.)
nice display of reprioritizing actions in an email.
giant honking button. gets a good laugh. and so on and so forth.
hey, look, it’s of U of Florida! (I totally borrowed their design for the pierce site a couple of years ago.)
work out units of related stuff.
scanning tables. I think I’ve improved the rate tables, but it could sure be even better. that last one in his example is damn nice.
and the loan lady is a problem. I understand the GOAL, but I don’t know if it’s particularly successful. (which reminds me that I need to check Google Analytics.)
imply the fun slide? huh?
more quirky examples. enterprise software is notoriously ugly, which is totally depressing. so many people spend so much of their life working with such painful systems. ::sigh::
prioritization connecting with personas, working out what’s important to the audience, and then using the data to create priorities for design. nice. I want to go back to my idea of reviewing the goal of every single page.
prepackaged questions. hm.
Q: what about multiple audiences? make sure what the core is, and show it. “uber-prioritization”?!
he’s doing some crazy livestreaming & off-site interaction. chat room? donde esta?
lots of asking questions & hand-raising. he’s gonna go practical.
web person “all his life” — I kinda know that feeling.
slide with silly amounts of bullet points. different methods of corporate use of the web. oh, and he’s going to read through all the points, describing each one. ::sigh::
we are still getting into the basics, I think. I’m thinking that the project mgmt stuff needs to inform this, things we might want to do. advertising is the one I’m looking at.
what is social media? def w/out describing specific tools. yep, conversations. and communities. nothing here is entirely new, just moved to the web. (user groups, etc.) and easy to use.
here’s the thing. cluetrain, et al is old hat to me, eye rolling and all that. but it hasn’t even touched the rest of the org.
blogs as trusted sources
oh, the meta. “somebody is liveblogging this now.” hi.
TRUST. I’ve seen a version of that graph. People trust people they know.
there’s a fancy-pants graphic. ladder of participation. a finer breakdown of the 90-10-1 ratio.
online & offline blurring. everything happens online, eventually. embraces vs. freakout.
bloggers as the new media. yes, well…with caveats a plenty, as far as I’m concerned. treating the bloggers all sweet at some event.
web marketing has spread all over the internet. our interesting experience with financial forums & blogs re: accelerator checking. decision not made on the corporate site, but just going at the end to get specs, buy, or whatever. look at what other people say. (I do that all the time)
“Edgeworks” by Brian Oberkirch
traditional messaging through marketing, controlled, being overtaken by conversations at the edges. not THAT much different from the marketing effect of customer service.
(pause to look at crazy MSFT/Yahoo story)
asynchronous going closer to real time. okay, now he’s going all buzzwordy.
letting go (of the message) to gain more. the challenge of control issues. the “not while I’m here” person. what is the way for me to put this in a way that makes sense in our environment. remembering that I’m out here on this weird webbish edge.
connection point: I want us to go out and talk to members in order to understand what of of this would actually make sense to our membership…or potential members.
@hitachi, created “data storage” industry wiki, linking to competitors even. to become the first source that customers go to…and building trust, which rebounds to the actual business.
scoble & microsoft stuff. letting people say that the company sucks, things are broken, etc.
what are people already doing: forums seem to be a biggish thing. internal meetings of what to do! yeah. internal blogs. (which leads me back around to the intranet.)
not getting into understanding the tools, because there’s lots of other sources.
listen & monitor. maybe this is where I need to be right now.
internal experimentation. typically first thing is a corporate blog. “gently” align with the corp.
organic spaces already emerging. (as we discovered)
Q: re ROI. (this came up on open source cu blog recently) flippant: what’s the ROI of a billboard? of a conversation at a coffee shop? two people just talking? when you can measure that, then you can measure social media roi. more seriously: actually it can be measured. opportunity costs. what would it cost to get the same media attention in advertising vs. attention to blogging. costs of blogging relatively low: mostly time. yep.
evangelist, educator & cheerleading. “yay, good for you!” but make sure somebody’s following. (I should go talk to MZ.)
community mgr. everybody is, but somebody gets paid for it.
organic blogger. hi. but then again, I don’t talk about work. how do you connect the organic & the corporate. the balance of credibility.
the Vice President. (aka my boss.)
corporate controller. the message owner. not changeable? go after the agnostics, not the atheists. do we have atheists? (I think we’re all godless pagans.)
what about legal? compliance is a big freaking deal.
use of social media outside of marketing. part of the entire product process.
but impacts to marketing. media, press, analysists (do we have those?). now add social media. less hyperbole, more pull strategies, meaning USEFUL. that’s what I’m trying to do with our email newsletter! (hmmmm, that makes me think about something. come back to that later.) customers as marketers, because they like you.
ceo of sun says “intranets are gonna die [are an anachronism].” talking outside of the firewall to build better products. how does that interact with compliance?! (also, I should probably also send my summary to the strategic planning people.)
nobody here’s heard of Dell’s ideastorm, voting on wanted features. now they are putting out laptops with linux, because of that kind of feedback.
forums as the main customer to customer tool.
data outside the firewall.
IT depts way behind the curve on this stuff, typically. “let’s ask IT if we can do that” IT says no and then Marketing runs off to Typepad, Blogger, et al. which has its own problems.
100 year old japanese company, and now they’re open, which means (theoretically) that anybody can do it. lots of stuff deployed. tied strategically to other company activities. understand the customer lifecycle. (and what about personas?)
what he learned, in many many bullet points. just absorbing.
“your employees are going to blog, no matter what.” (i know of at least one person on myspace.)
ethics policies cover online, why should it be any different from anywhere else? but of course. (I tried to use this over & over with pierce web guidelines: how do we handle the analogous situation IRL?)
Q: air traffic controller? internal blog observing everything happening in social media in our industry. oh, nice. (I have a creditunion tag on delicious.)
blah blah blah buzzwordyness. nothing super-new.
Q: DNA is not to share? how does it change the org? answer not helping. talking about orgs getting “run over”. have to change to still be relevant. BS. ah, yes, banks using blogs. comment from the audience about regulated industries, and when customers start to say things that the company can’t say. wells fargo building other sorts of blogs, related to other community issues NOT in regulated spaces. (I have hate for wells fargo from long ago, but it does sound like they’re the only one out there in the banks. the greater diversity of credit unions, IMHO, means that there are actually a handful out there. Verity is the one I keep an eye on.)
Q: social media in edu? yeah yeah yeah. nothing new here.
I’m too hungry & tired to really track, esp since I’m not getting anything new.
what a dick. so much blather. I’ve never fucking heard of ustream. oh, hell’s bells, describing the journalist as a “middleman”.
he said at the beginning he was going to be practical, and he really wasn’t, at least not as far as I’m concerned. all either stuff I knew, or WTF? stuff. more than anything else, an opportunity to rattle this around in my own head. which I guess is good for something.
was starting to make morning notes when Dylan showed up, and then Russ from Red Canoe found me. and now I’m sneaking into the project mgmt session right as it starts.
scope, time, cost.
gotta like a presenter who swears like a sailor.
human make things more complicated, and it just comes down to those three things.
why project management? to not waste time & money. this is geared towards freelancers & small studios, so I’ll need to be internally translating. (and thinking about my freelancing, too.) the problem of worrying about when you’re going to be done, and people breathing down your neck. (oh, crud I need to work on the weird stuff that Nathan found in his project. would be nice to finish before he goes to Aus.)
confirms work ethics. (?) we value working with you, not making this shit up as we go along. (I will say that having a promo schedule seems to make M & P happier.) makes for repeat customers.
failure! (“I must have been half-drunk when I did this slide.” ?!) problems with end dates, and it just keeps going on and on and on.
defining team roles. ah, but then again, there is the one-man-band. otoh, I know that our DEPARTMENT has gone from one-man-band to an actual team, and I’m not sure if as a team we’ve worked out the roles. other than the obvious.
scope creep. everybody’s favorite. “can we do one more….” and then not knowing the objectives of the project. goal: get more guys to buy deoderant: and does a new website meet that goal.
unstable funding. (this is where it’s kinda nice to be an open-source nut…and naturally a cheap bastard.)
4 D’s (hey, that’s the name of the computer store down the hill!)
Discovery: what is this thing? who’s working on it?
Design: starting to make the thing. reviewing.
Develop: making. (not sure of the difference.)
Deploy: launching the thing.
Discovery can include: kick-off meeting, a set date to start. hm. I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those. which sort of comes from my predeliction for the stealth project. but maybe I should have my own personal kick-off meetings.
(I have intranet thoughts rattling around in my head, and how to get a project started to improve it.)
project scope worksheet. fairly involved, series of questions. this reminds me of something…a file I used occasionally with college subsites. oooh, though: asking if the mission and the objectives match. kewl. I like this sheet a lot, it articulates things I often ask. (I’m really big right now on over-articulating.)
stakeholders. (on my last project, that was M, C, and P. and then after it launched, I actually found out about a stakeholder I hadn’t even known about! that was weird.)
he’s really going into agency stuff. interesting to think about this from the D-B point of view, though.
(oh, hey, it’s supposed to be really nice Sunday on. can’t wait to get back on my bike. sorta kinda wishing I had my bike here.)
the quality triangle! heh. cheap, fast, good: pick 2. fast + cheap = low quality. good + fast = expensive. cheap + good = long time. (the “spare” project. sounds like Paula, much as I love doing stuff for her.) he actually draws the triangle.
scheduling worksheet…can’t be found on this server. line-by-line tasks, etc. vs. big charts & graph. (gantt-a-licious!) as a way to determine who’s doing what and what else people can take on.
Q: how can you give an estimate before you actually know time requirements? he’s going on, but it sounds like guesstimating. previous projects and all that. plus the old classic of take the first guess and double or triple it.
Design: oh, he’s talking about “design” as the conceptual work. and project mgmt apps. MS Project makes sense in working with clients who also use Project. vs Basecamp as slimmed down & simple; easy for the client to see everything that’s going on. (I did enjoy it a lot with this last ENA newsletter.) clients & profits is designed for ad agencies & similar, and comes as either application or web version. studiometry, new, for running an entire studio. he loves OmniPlan, which is only Mac. ::sigh:: (is that from the omni outliner people? I really like that program.)
(my experience with things he doesn’t mention: I really enjoyed using Tasks Pro. I miss it a lot. I’ve also used…oh, I can’t remember the name of the top of my head…like Basecamp…oh, hey, it just came up: ActiveCollab. which is pretty nice; he uses it for personal stuff. somebody mentioned Copper and DotProject. I use numara footprints for work, which…yeah.)
Develop: he brings in testing here, which sort of contradicts yesterday’s sessions. this is the place where the schedule often goes off the rails. yeah, that’s been my experience too.
ah, technical difficulties. project timesheet. sooper-basic. like the way I’ve used slimtimer. (sorta kinda.) the power of paper. I’m fascinated by the development of a culture of paper amidst the computer people.
Deploy: like the resolution phase of a novel: critical, but kinda short. (my analogy, not his.)
keep a playbook. I like this idea. it fits with my own impulse towards journaling. something to come back to later to figure out what to do better. got the idea for a comic, who kept a book of his jokes and how long people laughed at each one. nice. (cognitive behavioral psychology: it shows up everywhere!)
re: question: he doesn’t do usability testing in his project. his commentary on this topic is craptacular. IMHO: throughout. another comment is that it should happen with use cases & wireframes. okay, here’s the deal: he’s an ad agency guy; I need to filter everything he says through that.
checkins, assign tasks. hoverers make people nervous. on a physical level, I’m really happy to be moving to a cubicle where I can see the entrance head-on.
let people screw up. the worst thing to say: “you shouldn’t code it that way”
preach time management. show by example. GTD. I like GTD, although I’m not terribly thorough about it.
weekly status meetings, the whole team. I have an instinctive loathing, but that comes from the freakishly dysfunctional staff meetings I have been at elsewhere. but it’s probably a good idea.
managing a meeting worksheet. hey, I was hoping he’d spend some time on that! (for the peanut gallery: Death by Meeting was corny, but useful.)
the client: assign THEM tasks. consistent communication. (this is where my dysfunctional thinking often gets in the way. hiding out because of fear of criticism. hm, maybe something for the log. because this has been very problematic with personal projects.)
one channel of communication. hm. dunno. I like being able to get materials directly from the DB designer. but otoh, is that the most effective thing?
Q: mismatch of communication preferences. you like email, they like phone. what to do? find the happy medium. for him it works well. and also double-cover in many instances: a phone conference, then with minutes by email.
Q: when decision-makers aren’t the single channel of communication. conference call. put that onto the client, to make sure the decision maker is in the right conversations. “this is what we need to do to give you a good product.” I’ve used that one with getting content from people, in combo with the not-psychic thing.
be honest.
and the classic: under-promise & over-deliver. I could get better at that!
staying organized. papers & files. this is where the GTD filing thing seems to help me a lot. I love the department labeler, too. interesting looking project folders, with a spiffy tab with all the info you need. a little bit overkill.
standardize file structure. stuff in the same spot for every project, naming conventions, etc. I’ve noticed that all of us have our own version of that. a worksheet for that, too.
tasks, this is where project mgmt apps come in. getting a hierarchy. another worksheet! list about GTD, DIY planners, Franklin Covey, etc.
retaining ideas. when do ideas arrive? car, bathroom, cooking…not at the computer. find some way to keep them! worksheet: his faves are index cards, sticky notes, moleskine, voice recorder. I like having a pad of paper handy, sticky notes, the MDA (I use Mobile Word way more than I would’ve expected).
“when shit goes wrong” (nice.)
stay “focued” lovely. that would be focused. talking about the cognitive issues, good self-talk. like leaving a burning building?!
don’t act too quickly. (as Hank used to say, count backward from 10 and focus on yr breathing.)
rely on staff, get them involved in fixing things, and keep them all informed.
don’t play blame game. creating a confrontational situation, which doesn’t help anybody. (tips in the anger chapter of book I’m reading.)
realize that something will have to be sacrificed, because something was miscalculated. no deus ex machina here!
then making a calculated decision, which flows out of all the rest of that.
“change order” which I think is an exceptionally dorky name.
make it official, get it in writing. only in serious situations effecting the big three: cost, time, scope. include details of change, cost, time needed on yr end & theirs, and then sigs all ’round, plus a date. (today’s date? yep.)
“projects can be as easy as you want to make them!” hrm.
wv07.graphicdefine.org
Q: controlling scope creep from the art director to the production people? that’s where the buffer comes in.
he relies on the programs to keep track of whether stuff is overlapping. I could really stand for a project *calendar*. email folder per project. I do a bit of that.
Q: thinks traditional project mgmt hasn’t caught up to the interactive studio. digression about PMI…things they were teaching were way over what he needed to be doing. construction of a building, gov’t grants lasting months or years, when his projects can be as short as a week. focus on the basics!
I want to triangulate these notes with re-reading Art of PM.
more of a back & forth between speaker and this particular IA.