Making Content (Not) Suck

Posted on by John

Christine Perfetti, from User Interface Engineering, wants your content to suck.

Her presentation at the Public Media 2007 / Integrated Media conference this morning – “Why Content Must Suck” managed to draw a full crowd, despite being at 8am.

The concept, once you get passed the deliberately provocative title, is that rather than pushing users around, or forcing them through content in which they are disinterested, your content ought to pull users in, by virtue of its interestingness and applicability to their concerns.

(How many times have you heard discussion of making sites sticky, or driving traffic to a given page, or pushing users toward specific content?)

Creating content that sucks means focusing on satisfying user needs first, and then building the platform in such a way that it allows users to find the content which will satisfy their needs.

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Ajax hits the terrible twos

Posted on by John

(via Jeremy Geelan at AjaxWorld magazine)

Happy Birthday, AJAX! – Two Years Old Already
Yesterday marked the passing of two years since Jesse James Garrett posted online his seminal essay, ‘Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications’ and then went offline, on a trip. What he came back to is now a part of Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications history: it was as if simply giving a handy name to the technique behind a new, richer web somehow catapulted it into being.

Does this mean Ajax will now be headed into the terrible twos?

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Fly-On-The-Wall: NPR and Social Media

Posted on by John

Last week, NPR hosted a “small group of really interesting people from the Web 2.0 universe” to talk about social media.

Those interesting people included: Zadi Diaz, Jeff Jarvis, Rob Paterson, Jay Rosen, Doc Searls, Euan Semple, and David Weinberger. (In addition to David Folkenflik, Michel Martin, Andy Carvin, and others from NPR).

I was thinking, when I first heard about this, how wonderful it would be to be a fly-on-the-wall in that set of meetings. Luckily, since so many most all of those attendees are bloggers, I assumed we’d get at least some coverage of what they discussed.

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Closed by Design?

Posted on by John

At last year’s OSCON, one of the themes was the influence of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) on other areas – broadening the definition of “open source” to include scientific research, for example, or creative works (see creative commons).

The distinction between closed approaches and open approaches is clearly demonstrated by an article in Fast Company about the Los Angeles public transit system, and the recent announcement by Architecture for Humanity, a “charitable organization founded in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises,” that they will be launching the Open Architecture Network. Continue reading →

Want better community? Connect people around useful content

Posted on by John

There’s an interesting study reported in the February 2007 Communications of the ACM: “Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities”

(Jack Vinson’s written about it as well)

The authors, Joon Koh, Young-Gul Kim, Brian Butler, and Gee-Woo Bock, conducted a field study of 77 virtual communities in Korea.

The findings, while not revolutionary or completely unexpected, are interesting.

It turns out that the role of the individual leader was not a major influence:

Contrary to our own expectations, the efforts of community leaders were not directly associated with community posting or viewing activity. We conclude that community leadership affects a more foundational building block of the virtual community, while virtual community activity (such as posting or viewing) is directly affected by individual members’ needs (usefulness) and experience (offline interaction).

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