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Digital Curation, Web Design, Self-Publishing and Fun!

April 2nd, 2010 · Link Roundup, SEO, Web Design

Dope Data is the blog for Erin Scime covering content strategy ideas and her portfolio.  It’s an excellent body of work and example of how great ideas can win through.  This notion is backed up by an excellent article from Erin on A List Apart entitled Content Strategist as Digital Curator.

On the topic of digital curation and museums, the Collections Trust blog has a post entitled Getting Started: Building a Digital Agency.  It’s the first part in a series that guides museums, and anyone else who cares to listen, through the process of setting up a digital department.  What to do and what not to do.

Keith Burtis has a great post, Exploring Character vs Human Face as the Representative of a Digital Brand on keithburtis.com, a good and totally relevant take on social media and the representation of you or your business online.  With some many business large and small going online with social media these days it is important to get the mix right when reaching out to your audience.

On another tangent, and on the topic of web design, this is Give PNG a Chance on the phpied site. In the excellent article by Stoyan Stefanov that talks about the pitfalls of using PNG, what works and what doesn’t, and how best to integrate it when using it on your website.  Definitely something that more designers and creative directors should be fully aware of in the process of how their design is going to end up being cut up and used on the front-end of a website.

For those interested in the actual construction of site and the usability and experience architecture behind them, the following is a top down review of the art of User Interaction Design: Complete Beginers Guide to Interaction Design.  The article is on UXBooth, an awesome site which covers many great related topics, and more recently reviewed a plethora of UX Testing apps, Information Gathering – A Roundup of UX Apps. An article definitely worth reading too.

Back on my favourite topic of museums and design, Nina K Simon, the lady of Museum 2.0 fame and much more, has written an incredible series of blog posts detailing the story of self-publishing her latest book, The Participatory Museum.  The series is entitled The Participatory Process and is split into 4 parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

On to my next favourite topic of search engine optimisation, and back to what I repeatedly bang on about in terms of effectiveness, here is a useful guide to 10 free tools for small businesses in the battle of SEO on the Small Business Computing website.  They provide the tools, but as an end user you need to know how to stretch beyond this, so reading more around the topic is also a good thing, with plenty of good articles on this very site (apologies for the self-promotion).

Anyhow, time to hang up my boots for another post.  I hope you enjoyed it, and happy reading!

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Things to Learn About Managing & Developing Product

April 1st, 2010 · Opinion

Wired’s Webmonkey recently caught-up with Google’s Todd Jackson.  He is the product manager for Google Mail, and more recently Google Buzz.  The interview is an interesting mix of talk about GMail, Buzz and how his team manages development and maintenance the products. Their are some great take home points to glean from it if you are developing products and services online.

So in summary, here they are:

  • “Eat your own dog food” – There’s nothing quite like using the product you develop for your own resources, before forcing others to use it, and to this end the GMail team all use the product to run their operations.
  • Learn from the hiccups – There is always something to be learned even from the most negative events, and the GMail team cover every last detail of issues to ensure that periods of downtime do not necessarily occur again.
  • Learn quickly – The privacy issues surrounding the roll out of Buzz really kicked up a storm and Google got plenty of egg on its face.  The sweet and the short is that you need to learn and respond quickly to such concerns.
  • Respond to the smallest outages – In Google’s case, even if only 0.1% of users are affect that still represents a massive number, made even more acute when the outage is to a mission critical service such as email.  When people rely on your products you shouldn’t wait around if there are issues.
  • Communicate with users – When there are problems, or when users are making requests for new features, it is always good to provide channels of communication to ensure they are kept in the loop, this both eases concerns, but also makes them feel valued.
  • Redundant sections – To increase the level of redundancy you need to ensure that sections of functionality are not inter-dependent.  Dependencies are bad.  To this end, make sure that sections of your product are resilient to outages.  In google’s case, contacts outages int he past had rendered GMail unnecessarily inoperable.
  • Performance & speed are features - More speed = more usage.  When Google sped up Picasa 2 times, the usage levels double.  This is a pretty conclusive driver for improved speed on sites and faster loading times.  Speed is good and with the availability of broadband, ever more critical.  Don’t make users wait around.
  • Avoid noise – People loved buzz, but they hated the noise it created in the box. Noise not just in people’s inboxes, but online as a whole is a real problem.  It hinders productivity and can kill the working day.  Helping users cut noise is a good thing.
  • Keep public & private separate – When developing products and services, remember that people do like to keep public and private personas.  Keeping these separate is a good thing, and allowing people to keep them separate helps.  Invading them constantly as Facebook does only gives yourself a bad rep.

Many great points and things to be learned by product managers and development teams around the globe.  Some nice extras, but as well as a few things I have covered before in topics such as my review of the Whitney Museum website, as well as the aforementioned institution’s response to negative feedback.

Anyhow, a useful lesson for the forthcoming Easter weekend.  Enjoy!

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Dear Fast Company …

April 1st, 2010 · Opinion

Alas I can’t even flag this as a poor April Fools joke, but Fast Company is reporting the death of Flash, based almost purely on the switch of a plethora of web sites to HTML5 video players, in their article: Apple Winning The Flash War.

I am not sure at what point the journalist who wrote this junk actually stood back, took stock, and drew on years of web development experience to come to that conclusion, because from my perspective, Kit Keaton quite clearly did not.

There is no way that HTML5 video tags will replace the full flash experience of flash, and to suggest that Flash is merely a video player is quite inane.   As a video player it may make a lot more sense to shift away from Flash, if not for performance reasons, purely for compatibility cross-platform, cross-device and cross-browser, without the need to any additional installation, despite 97% coverage by Flash on desktop, and who knows how much on Smartphones.

Whether Apple was waging war on Adobe Flash or not, HTML5 would have come along and we would probably be in the same position.  It could perhaps be said that this battle has raised the stakes of the game, but I think this provides more importance to Apple’s position in the war than need be.  Apple doesn’t exercise any prescience in this matter, they are just a convenient standard bearer.

From a developer’s perspective I personally feel that Apple needs to pony up and find a workable solution.  Flash CS5 is coming soon with its ability to create a wrapper for Flash so that such software can be sold via the App Store, so why not go that step further and actually provide an optimal browsing experience rather than just making such claims, which are untrue.  Flash is available on other devices, so it’s hardly an uphill task to bring it to the iPad and iPhone.

Above and beyond bringing Flash to their platform, maybe it is also time web design companies the world over started developing content properly, and rather than over utilising Flash as a medium, slapping it in wherever it is the “quick and easy” option and actually build sites and HTML content properly, as it should be.

As producers and as consumers we need quality over content.  This should be the driving force going forward, whether in Flash or HTML, and we definitely need to get over this iPhone obsession, as pointed out in this hilarious Quirksblog post: The iPhone Obsession, and touched on lightly in this excellent piece on Google’s bundling of Flash with Chrome.

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Design, Marketing & The Web – Roundup

March 31st, 2010 · Link Roundup, Web Design

Here are some interesting links that I have come across in the past week and definitely worth a read or keeping up-to-date with:

First up on the link roll is CX Partners‘ blog post on the Myth of the Page Fold.  It an interesting look at the theory of the page fold and why, in their opinion it doesn’t matter.  They base this opinion and user testing and also take you through some thoughts on what inhibits page readers from actually scrolling.

Second up is a great SEO-related blog by Malcolm Coles.  I hesitate to call him a guru, but his blog clearly and very honestly covers the search engine optimisation niche, and providing opinion, reviews and interesting related info.

In the same vain, Planet Anarky by George Rosier, also provides useful insight into the world of web design and the process therein to get the job done.  He frequently reviews sites, and details a range of information on the likes of effective display advertising.

The Web Usability Blog is another great resource for, as you guessed, Web Usability.  Articles and topics that they cover includes SEO aspects and making the most use out of meta descriptions, titles and other elements in your web pages, but also talk about usability, and building web pages, debunking theories and cementing others.

Whilst on usability, back on my favourite topic of the iPhone and mis-guided app dev for it, Marked Lines has a great post of masses of iPhone-friendly websites.  I say iPhone because they are clearly optimised for that screen size, but they still provide good lead on some great ideas for mobile friendly websites as a whole.  The article entitled 45 Web Design Inspirations for the iPhone is at least worth a look in.

Almost perfectly slotting in after is the piece on quality, an interview with Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO, on Contagious Magazine and entitled Quality Emphasis Late (And Integral).  For those of us who do care about needs based output, rather than simply pushing a project out the door based on tight deadlines, then its worth a read.  Quality should always trump everything else!

Following on is Seb Chan’s ridiculously expansive blog post on how he and the rest of the Powerhouse Museum tech team launched the web presence for their successful Building the 80s exhibition, the post is entitled: Building the 80s – a multichannel longitudinal exhibition web presence.

On an interesting and more light-hearted note is OK Trends, the official blog of OK Cupid, the free dating web site.  They take a wry look at peoples use of the site, as well as trending.  Blog posts such as The 4 Big Myths of the Profile Picture and The Democrats are Doomed or How A Big Tent Can Be Too Big make for interesting and useful consumption.

And to finish up this dandy round of mixed up bed-fellows, Swiss Miss, a lady out of Brooklyn NYC who does an amazing job of collecting posts on a plethora of incredible topics and items.  I love the blog and found so much good material on it, both to learn from and to make my own commentary on.  Forthcoming soon will be one on the post, Why You Can’t Work at Work.  As an aside, congrats to her on blogging and giving birth, at almost the same time!

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100 Blog Posts!

March 30th, 2010 · Personal

And so I have finally reached the 100th blog post.  It has been quite a journey from April last year (2009) and covered many a topic from SEO to my favourite coffee shop in London, Brill on Exmouth Market.

I have come across many cool people in the process, from the likes of Internet Strategist Sarah Worsham, to Museum Marketing guru Jim Richardson, as well as old friends, long lost friends and new friends.  It has been a wonderful process, and perhaps a goal I should have reached sooner, but such is my fortune.

As well as hitting the 100 mark, yesterday was also special, because daily traffic traffic hits its highest peak since I started the blog.  An unexpected surprise and one that helps make the blog feel like it is a worthwhile endeavour, whether keeping friends informed of my escapades, exalting my virtuous opinions or helping those with my shared knowledge.

So again, a slap on the back for good old Vincent (hahah!)

There have been plenty of vociferous moments, but plenty of good ones also  Hopefully the next 100 will be as useful as the first, and no doubt there will be things learned anew and shared with the throngs of interested readers.

And as if on cue, released today is the latest work by Stink Digital for client Anomaly on behalf of Diesel.  It’s an online music video fashion catalogue for their Spring/Summer 2010 collection which the aptly titled “a hundred lovers” and performed by Josep, a decidedly catchy tune, that will have you whistling from the get-go, whilst the film directed by Arno Salters, a recreation of the dance scene from Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à part.

So thanks to all those who have read, commented and continue to follow my pranks online and here’s to another 100 greats.  Come and join the party!

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