By chris on November 26, 2008
Still pimpin’ sites, this time a good one: Rachel’s Mountain Reviews is a great place to find member-created reviews of ski and snowboarding runs across the US.
Her profile page should give you a better idea of what the site is all about. You can join and create your own profile using the “Sign Up” links in the upper right on every page on the site.
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By chris on November 21, 2008
Yes, I love that widgety goodness, so I’ve set up Widget Death Match to create a home for the best widgets on the web. Currently running KickApps on the back end, I’m working on augmenting it with Pligg (Drupal-based Digg clone) so it’s easy for people to share and vote on widgets around the web.
Update: First off, it turns out that despite it’s popularity, Pligg is a POS. It’s not even based on Drupal! For that, you need Drigg, which is the bastard child of Pligg’s former dev talent. It was all too much, so I switched WDM to use Wordpress; it’s now waiting for a skin job.
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By chris on January 21, 2008
Fitts’ Law is one of my favorite UI concepts (even though it is often overlooked), so it was cool to see Particletree’s recent visual description of the law. One small item they didn’t mention was the answer to question 3 in Tog’s quiz, which surprised me a bit, since AJAX-y interfaces like Wufoo‘s make it easy to keep buttons close to the mouse pointer.
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By chris on December 7, 2007
Despite some social networking juggernauts’ efforts to become global standards, a quick survey of the most popular social networks seems to indicate that social networking experiences cannot easily be optimized for ubiquity.
Why is Fotolog a relatively photo sharing site in the US but wildly popular in Brazil? Hi5 and Bebo are both able to capture the attention of many social networkers in India and the UK, respectively, despite the hype around MySpace and Facebook here in the US.
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By chris on December 3, 2007
After doing some research, I realized there was a major flaw in my previous post regarding the potential of OpenSocial – the new standard will not allow member data to move between the various participating social networks. For now, the gardens will remain walled. Cattle? Safe!
So what this means is that if you build an app, you can plug it into any social network that participates in the OpenSocial standards, but not across multiple participating social networks.
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By chris on December 2, 2007
This clip from the people at Quirkology that illustrates the difference between vision and perception. It was mentioned during a discussion of eye-tracking technology in the IxDA forums, and it has an obvious parallel in what we’re now calling “banner blindness” – a phenomenon where web-savvy users unconsciously ignore content they believe to be banner advertisements.
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By chris on November 2, 2007
Update: check this for a clarification on a seriously flawed assumption in this post.
Initially, I spent a lot of time thinking about OpenSocial in terms of Widgets/Apps/Gadgets, which is I think where people want us looking: it’s in the big graphic on the Google documentation and it’s what made Facebook so sexy to developers.
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By chris on October 30, 2007
John Musser offered a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo titled Open APIs: Big Picture and Best Practices (that’s a PDF link).
His slides #4, explains why publishers should care about APIs:
- Ebay uses them to make money: Over 45% of all products get listed via their APIs
- Google Maps uses them to build their brand, seeing 300% growth vs 20% MapQuest
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By chris on October 17, 2007
Social networks are valuable two big reasons:
- They cheaply attract eyeballs to your pages
- They provide heaps of data about your audience
For reasons to be addressed in a later post (or in my recent FOWA presentation, if you were one of the five people in the audience), both of those benefits are best achieved via targeted, niche communities. That means YOUR community, not those big social networking warehouses. Until recently, setting up a scalable social network with plenty of rich media, Widgets, and whatever else was a big pain in the ass.
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By chris on August 20, 2007
Alan Schulman‘s recent “Algorhithmic Creative — A Formula For Feeling?” article warns against the promise of algorithmically-generated ad ideas, copyrighting, and design. It makes sense for a paid “creative person” to fear a trend that may cost him his job, but I’m not sure his Skynet prognostications are a bad thing.
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Quickies