Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK has just posted about a map of start ups around the world. Nice idea. Who’d have thought that being in York would provide such an advantage - you can see our logos! (At least until Tom gets in with burning a hole).
As community sites become the me too of 2007, with businesses all feeling that they need a slice of that user generated content goodness, there are going to be some rocky times ahead. It's worth remembering that even in the best run communities a reasonable proportion of the users will misbehave (at least according to the rest of the group). When your site is brand-dedicated-me-too with a veneer of user focus on top rather than truly user centric it's likely that the problems will get worse more quickly as your initial well meaning user base is forced out by hijackers simply looking for a place to hang out.
Moderation will be key (third party services like eModeration can help, for example), but it's worth remembering to plan for the worst kinds of behavior from your users from the start.
This is one of the web 2.0 projects that is really making a splash - they’ve put loads of effort into their interface, and from watching the demo it looks gorgeous. You really should go check it out.
We had an interesting visualisation and representation problem last week for Sleevenotez. Our next Iteration involves adding a lot of richness to the interface, which includes the presentation of quite a lot of complex data. However, we don’t want to make the interface very complex - we’d like to keep the simple stripped-down look and feel we have now.
We got properly stuck with the discography, and I turned to my books by Tufte for some inspiration. The problem is, as Jon Udell notes here: Scaling the Tufte effect, that Tufte’s brain doesn’t scale very well. He only has one, and it’s his.
Inspiration was unfortunately scarce, and we ended up spending many more hours thrashing about the problem. Jon Udell’s call there for a Tuftian visualisation library for the web is a very relevant and timely request, hwoever it is not without some significant hurdles.
Unlike a traditional charting library, I think part of the core of Tufte’s technique is his advocacy of thinking of the users of the data, and concentrating on usability. A lot of the terminology he uses is reminiscent of the patterns movement in fact, and I wonder if there is a potential angle of attack there, using some of the techniques that have emerged from the patterns movement to analyse how and when to use certain techniques.
Of course even better would be factoring this into a library. As others have noted (for example this excellent post at lesscode or even some of the notes in the Wikipedia page, it should be possible to factor a pattern properly into code - it’s just hard.
If we really could factor Tufte in this way, maybe he really would scale!
ajaxload.info - makes those lovely 'loading' animated gifs.
I knew about (and use) most of these HTML elements, but I’d never seen optgroup before. Very handy.
I’ve been struggling for a while with the fact that no one outside our rather close knit group of very Internet savvy friends and colleagues has heard of Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, digg or any of the other web 2.0 “revolutionaries”. I heard Joshua Schachter speak at Carson’s Future of Web apps and he referred to his lead users as The Priesthood. I’m honestly starting to wonder whether there is anyone in the choir for these priests to preach to, let alone anyone in the congregation.
A good take on AJAX interface complexity from Sean McGrath, a man whose output I have respected for some time. He is absolutely right - good design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in.
The secret is out - Web 2.0 isn’t about usability, folksonomies or even ambient findability —- it’s all about the colour scheme.
How long till we see Isotoma Blue on there do you think? ;)
