Here’s an insightful document by F. Randall Farmer, on how you should think how and when a content is consumed by a user, instead of taking the easy way out on how you can make a web page “sticky”:
I’ve noticed it intuitively at Montreal Tech Watch or the other blogs I’m following on RSS, but here’s a post written by Nick Carr which sheds a new light on the audience shift on the web.
Admittedly, I am very late to the concept of blogging, having only started one about 18 months ago, but I did see the “power” and reach of blogging. You gather a few thoughts, and if there were a tad original and interesting, the “community” found it, commented on it, and re-blogged the post with other original thoughts. And once in a while, there would be conversations, where two or more bloggers discussing a hot topic.
It doesn’t happen nowdays, not anymore. I have the feeling nobody reads the entirety of a post anymore, and if they find something interesting, one of their first reactions is to put it on twitter or facebook or a bookmarking place like hacker news. A twitter/friendfeed discussion will then continue. The original post on the blog would then act only as a tinyurl reference, and not the central focus of discussion.
It’s easy to understand how we came up to this: It’s much easier to setup a twitter or an identi.ca account, than setting up a blog. It’s much easier to throw you current state of mind in 140 characters than writing carefully crafted paragraphs. And people do answer you immediately on microblogging platforms. Plus the fact that a user own their content on a tweet whereas it’s not the case on the blogger’s website.
For me, this means that the old dream of having a personal blog that would have a world reach, a presence on Google, and being able to reach out to the “community” and starting a discussion is dead. Yes, this old dream is a thing of the past. You will now just get heard on your immediate network (read: co-workers, immediate friends, family); unless it’s a professional blog, with a marketing plan and a sales team that would allow it to become the leader in a market. In a few years, we’ll probably just have a few huge web media companies, brand names such as Huffington Post, Revision3, Giga Omni Media which will have mass media influence, equivalent to the current omnipresence and power of Time or NYTimes.
You probably played a role in this, by having a twitter or a facebook account, and spending time adding links and notes here and there. The question left unanswered is: Is there a way to still keep the influence and the discussion? Probably not. Microblogging, social portals like Facebook are going to stay, and they’re the fastest-growing destinations on the Internet. Instead of fighting the change, you’ll have to embrace it. I’m looking forward to tools that would gather discussions, and highlight at the same the tinyurl’d web page. I’m looking forward for tools that would disseminate content on these platforms, but still keeping a trace (with a token for instance in the url) and show where it is going and landing. This is the kind of tool we’re heading towards to at TechEntreprise, but I won’t be surprised if there are new websites already working on this.
Original illustration: Atomization by Didier Bonaventure, a Montréal artist.
I’ve been working on TechEntreprise for the past 4 months, and while it’s not official or launched yet, I still want to share the project on this blog.
In the technology world of Montreal, I am mostly known for having started MontrealTechWatch, a blog whose tagline is “Technology and Innovation”. The blog covered extensively technology events, new projects and ventures, entrepreneurship. It was especially exciting since it followed the birth of the technology community in Montreal. I was there for BarCamps, for Blitzweekend, or for any other *camp or technology event.
This has been a wonderful learning opportunity, since it was my 2nd blog, and was also started 2 months after I decided to try out the “blogging” thing.
The blog grew then from a little place on blogspot to a full-blown wordpress blog, with its own customized template and domain name. I especially have to thank every person in the Montreal Technology community for giving their time and offering the gift of reading and interacting with MTW.
After a while though, it stalled … or should I say, I saw more opportunities about the concept. With its mix of tech news, jobs, events, articles, and also user comments, I foresaw the possibility of having a public place where everyone could contribute.
Here is a screenshot of TechEntreprise, on the Montreal network:
Visitors can signup, have a profile, contribute to news and public forum section. There’s also dedicated sections for jobs, events, groups, and articles. I especially like the events page, where you can see who is going to an event, and then have a look at their profile in case you want to meet them at the event.
I’m planning to open up networks in Seattle, Cape Town, HK, and other places like Boulder and Boston. And yeah other cool places too.
Now, where does it lead us? Here’s a mission statement from the website:
… bet that any city can become a technology centre, and believe that TechEntreprise can be a key resource and platform for this to happen…
The sentence is for now a bit incomplete since the final mission goes much more beyond that, but it should be more than enough for now.
Now, before TechEntreprise officially launches, I want to use my blog to gather my thoughts and share the different aspects of the project to you, such as technology, product design, marketing and also monetization (drum rolling on this last one) That’s about 4 to 6 posts for the upcoming 2 weeks. Hope you’ll enjoy the ride!
Since working on montrealtechwatch, I’ve kept an eye on how media websites present their content, and how they deal with the dilemma of quantity of information vs usability & readibility.
I especially like the Guardian’s layout. It’s a generous design, with lots of white space, nice typography, with a good balance between iconography and text. But the thing that pleases me most is that it’s really a web-native interface, one built from the ground up to take advantage of the strenghts of the Internet - and try to minimize its weaknesses.
I could list what they have done, but for the sake of simplicity, here is just one detail.
See it? Headlines starts exactly at the same line, even though they are on two different columns. It’s the same for the features below, they “magically” match withouth discordance. Of course, the Guardian hasn’t invented it; grids & baselines are avalaible to everyone thanks to frameworks like CSS blueprint.
Of course, the design is not perfect. You could argue for instance that the design lacks personality and dynamism. Here’s then rue89 another media website that convey personality while still keeping a great user interface. Rue89 uses a distinctive red color for highlighting, black lettering, high contrast, and headlines that “scream”.
The bold typography and distinctive graphic design is suited for their writing style, which is caustic, unapologetic, un-politically correct, although still with lots of original information and thourough investigation.
Like in the Guardian’s case, Rue89 manages to pack and present lots of information to the user, while still maintaining hierarchy (what’s the most important news of the day?), readibility, usability, and also shortcuts to special sections and features for power users.
As a sidenote, it’s interesting to know that the original rue89 team were ex-reporters from lemonde interfactif, making them a web-native media website, where readers can comment, vote, and send over news and pictures.
You would think that writing about a new editorial line for this blog would get me to actually follow it. Instead, what I did was posting about events in Burma and a photo sent to me from Madagascar 
Anyway, here it is, I promised to post about stuff I worked on, so I will post for now a simple HTML website, one that I did 3 months ago, and next, there will be stuff that required programming. It’s the website made for a friend, she has a bed and breakfast on the Plateau, Montreal, and wanted a website for her summer clients.
This is a pure CSS/html website, there was no programming behind, just some design discussions and some (over)use of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. She also wanted some Flash effects (snow falling from the leaves) but I somehow managed to run away from her suggestion. She also wanted some curvy lines and fancy fonts, to which I responded a blank look. Our opposite “design” philosophies finally landed chezfanny
screenshot of the homepage, other pages follow the same canvas
The website works best with Safari or Firefox. It has a funky logo, have a lush background mixed with a moving menu system. We also wanted to change the website’s theme according to the season and the weather, by changing to white in winter for instance, but she didn’t have enough material to do that. But it’s ok, we really liked the overall result and so did her customers, and that’s what matters.
If you want more info., here are the tools that were used for the process:
* textmate
If I had to redo it again, I guess I would use StaticMatic
_Note: this post was originally for MontrealTechWatch but I thought this blog was better for personal opinions_
I am seeing a lot of facebook-related posts accross the web, and it doesn’t seem to stop. In the screenshot above, I have 273 blog posts mentionning facebook in Google Reader (see above), which I use for tracking blogs in Montreal.
To put things in context: yes, I have a profile at facebook, and find myself logged in the service every two days, because of the occassional invite or the random be-friending. Second, yes, I admit they have done a very good job. The graphical design is one of the best you can get on the web; the flow between pages and the user interface are so well crafted that every other website seems broken compared to facebook.
This is all great, but if you ask me, I am not betting on it. It isn’t because of the data-mining advertising, where they now advertise lavalife, because I haven’t put anything in my relationship status. It isn’t either because they will soon make your profile avalaible to Google. Or because they force you to login to update your status, as opposed to other websites that have open interfaces. I understood that Mark Zuckerberg is determined to monetize facebook, and it’s his rights to do so, in any way he wants. And every other entrepreneur on earth would agree with him.
I registered to facebook one year ago, when they opened the platform to universities outside the US. It was very cool at the beginning and I spent a lot of time filling out pages and adding people. Seeing what your friends are up to was magic. But eventually my interest faded. And even though apps have revived the interest, I am pretty sure facebook’s design is fundamentally flawed. I follow what Joshua Porter is doing, and I think he nailed it, personal value must preced network value. In this case, Facebook has 0 value if you don’t added friends yet. zero. nada. You can’t make it do something useful for you.
I just read Artecnica, an initiative by a couple from California; I haven’t finished reading yet the article from PingMag, but it got me excited so I decided to write something about it right away.
Enrico Bressan and Tahmineh Javanbakht
The couple have a design and architecture background, and are now “designing with conscience”. They don’t use any toxic material, and so have many constraints as most beautiful objects as we know them are made with expensive and toxic materials. Products are made in developing countries by local artisans.
Beads and pieces from Peru
The system as they think of it exclude production of mass, industrial products as we are used to. But that’s ok with me because I am not a consumer of those anyway.
Now, this must all make some sort of economic sense, because you surely end with more expensive products. They are hand-made, they are unique, and they use sustainable materials. And to make it succeed, people would need more arguments than the “Save the earth!” motto. So i though of another “business” model I have seen, wich is Dole Organic.
Label on a dole organic product
Each Dole product has a unique number, you then “use on their website”:http://www.doleorganic.com to view where it comes from, what processes were used to produce it, and who were involved in the production. It tells a unique story, and each fruit you eat becomes unique, in its own way.
How cool would that be to have a unique label for each product you buy? you could see who is the artisan who made it, view pictures of the work processs, what is the product’s story. It would provide a link between the buyer and the worker and you can also let them start a conversation, in a way that has never been done before. And it would also provide more meaning and more value to what you have just bought.
I am saving this for future reference for the microcredit project.
I found this video of Hans Rosling breathtaking - especially in the 2nd half of the video. Favorite quotes:
Culture brings joy to life. It’s the value of living
my experience from 20 years from Africa is that the most seemingly impossible is possible
When I first used the Internet, it was trendy to pick an obscure user name, mixed with dates, superhero references and other exotic puns. You had then sexy_girl_2000 or spideyman_xXx or whatever movie character was fashionable at that time.
A few years later, when I went to college, I just knew there was no point using again the same scheme. All other students were using pseudos while I was one of the 3 people who chose their first name, simply, to name their computer on the university LAN network.
At that time, I thought I had nothing to hide - and I might as well display my real name. Since then, I have been using heri as the username for services I use, as in “tumblr”:http://heri.tumblr.com, “flickr”:http://flickr.com/photos/heri_quebec/ or “twitter”:http://www.twitter.com/heri.
Sometimes though, there is the occasional web app I just want to try out - a new service I knew I was just going to use once, so I would register using the fictionous username of joewall. It was the name of the main character in a cartoon, a soldier from WWII who would never say his name, and I thought I was in the same role. And joewall is a pseudo that is never taken online, while heri was often taken by some other user.
Somehow, I have just been thinking that I should drop the pseudo joewall and use my real name everywhere. I have discovered that people are reckless and have random behaviour when interacting with users who have made-up names. In the other hand, if I use my first and last name, comments and posts tend to be (a little bit) more polite. And if everyone was actually using their real name and show a real photo, I am sure there would be less stupid behaviour.
Now my point is: if you are building a web service, ask for your user’s first and last name and display them. People would then begin to trust each other and use the service for real stuff, like organizing their events and groups, _Ã la_ facebook. Don’t ask for a username. Ask instead for an email in the registration process. Your users will thank you for that, and you will get a service that has actually a meaning for the users.
© 2007 2008 Heri Rakotomalala
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