Posted by Joss Winn on 22nd February 2010
These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.
Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.
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Posted by Randy on 17th February 2010
What is the continuing role of electronic portfolios? An article in Campus Technology reviews the issues related to ownership of the content, and what happens when the student graduates. A student-centered approach seems most logical to me — effective use comes when the student feels ownership of the content and sees a practical use for its existence (like getting a job). If they find the portfolio tool useful after graduation it seems short-sighted for the school to terminate the relationship. If the institution accepts that the student ‘owns’ the content, and that the school simply provides a service — just like facebook or any other such service — then this relationship, and any risks, should be clear. You have an acceptable use policy, and if users abuse the policy their accounts get shut off. But this also means accepting some institutionally uncomfortable, or at least potentially uncomfortable, situations. Welcome to the world of user-centric content!
LaaN vs. Social Constructivism ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes
According to Chatti, “learning as a Network (LaaN) differs from social constructivism in four different ways:
- In LaaN, knowledge is a personal network rather than an object that can be constructed.
Here, There, & Everywhere — Campus Technology
the current debate on the future of ePortfolios: How are they evolving with the growth of Web 2.0? What are the right tools to create them? And do they have a role beyond the academic setting as part of a person’s lifelong learning endeavors?
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Posted by Randy on 3rd February 2010
As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open. So how cool would a Google tablet be? After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?
Google’s Tablet versus Apple’s iPad: Open versus Closed?
More importantly, though, Google’s tablet will have one major advantage over Apple’s iPad: it will have an open application platform.
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Posted by Randy on 28th January 2010
Jay Collier at Bates ponders the strengths of Drupal and WordPress MU. In my experience WordPress is quicker to get going with, and for most web sites it can rise to most any challenge. And it is the king of multi-site installations. Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but can better support needs such as a work flow-content approval path, or something less traditional, like a content repository system. In meeting a business need the technology is normally the least important element — what are your goals, who is the audience, what do they need, etc. — those are the important questions. Once you have those answers you go looking for a technology. My advice? Look at WordPress first — if it doesn’t do what you want, in a quick straightforward way, keep looking. But in my experience that won’t happen very often.
Evaluating Drupal and Wordpress MU | Bates Web Communications
As part of our new Web Hub program — and in previous discovery projects (2008 | 2007) — I’ve been evaluating open-source content management software. Our two finalists are Drupal and Wordpress MU.
Displaying enterprise data — such as course listings and directory information — has been the greatest challenge in site architecture prototyping. Both software packages provide support for collections of
custom fields, but what’s important is determining the best repository for each type of data and how to present it on public-facing Web sites.
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Posted by Randy on 27th January 2010
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash in this month’s Website Magazine suggests that elements such as wild background colors, garish text, visual embellishments (eye candy) and animation/video distract website visitors from important content. In a case study of a redesign of the CREDO website they found an 84% improvement with a simplified design. The case study used a new service called AttentionWizard.com which uses computer algorithms to approximate eye tracking studies of a web site. The idea is these will reveal what point on the page the visitor’s eye should land on. If it is what you want them to see — like a buy now button — bingo, you are doing well. If their eyes don’t land anywhere, or on the wrong things it is time to make some adjustments. I thought it would be fun to compare the Yale and Harvard main websites using the service.
First up Yale. According to the article Yale’s website does earn extra points for its simple, white background, plain text and simple graphics. But don’t start celebrating so fast. The eye tracking study also doesn’t find anything that does grab attention. There is some focus on the graphic, but the links on the left side don’t register too high, except for the about Yale:
Yale's landing page
Yale Attention Heat Map
Now for Harvard – strong black background, white text — low marks. On the attention scale they do a little worse — again the image gets the most attention, but otherwise the eye wanders around the screen not really landing on any other focal point.
Harvard landing page
Harvard Attention HeatMap
It is not clear to me on either site what the key objective is. And in fairness these sites have multiple objectives, mostly trying to give people a lot of options. It might have been fairer to compare sites with clearer objectives, like a sales-orientated site. But then I wouldn’t have been able to tweak the classic Yale/Harvard rivalry. And I may be biased, but while neither site did great, I do think Yale finished with a slight lead. Go Bulldogs!
Two notes on the article: 1) it is written by the CEO of SiteTuners.com, creators of AttentionWizard. 2) in my experience it is the client who wants the flashy, distracting eye candy. Most graphic designers I’ve worked with have better taste than that (good article, bad title). You can use AttentionWizard in a trial version — 1 upload/analysis per day. Give it a spin on your favorite site!
AttentionWizard FAQ’s
The eye gazing path is represented by the numbered path shown on the AttentionWizard heatmap. The eye gazing path starts with the number 1 and follows in chronological order. The eye gazing path depicts the path that your users eyes will take when they first get to your page. Depending on the image submitted (full page or above-the-fold) the eye gazing path can differ significantly.
Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash – Website Magazine – Website Magazine
You were led down this path by your internal creative team or outside interactive agency. Because of the limitations of their unique perspective you have been forced to sacrifice conversions in the name of “coolness.” So, you have actually come to think that your baby is quite beautiful and have, in fact, grown very fond of it.
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Posted by Randy on 21st January 2010
Yammer use took off in our workplace late last year, but since everyone has returned from the Christmas break interest seems to have dropped off somewhat. Maybe something like TeamBox, with its richer toolset, might be more attractive. Teambox organizes communication around projects. Users are members of projects, and a project has communication divided into conversations, task lists, pages and files. The concept seems to have similarities with Google Wave, but at first glance the user interface seems a lot more familiar. And TeamBox is open source allowing installation on your own server — so you can own the data. And can customize the app (built with Ruby on Rails). Now I just need a project to test it with…
Community: Teambox is a public open-source project.
Installing:If you want to run your own server with Teambox, some knowledge of Ruby on Rails and UNIX is very recommended.
Blog Archive » The quiet majority in collaborative communities
Message traffic on our company Yammer network is following the classic 80-20 principle, although in our case it is closer to 85-15.
Twitter for Teams: Teambox Launches Web-Based Collaboration Tool
The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration – including distributed teams – we can see this application going over very well.
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Posted by Randy on 21st January 2010
Starting sometime early next year the New York Times will start charging for content on its web site. Is this the start of a new internet business model, or the last gasp of a dying industry? Times will tell (pun intended). But it seems to me that they are on the right track. The charge will only affect more active site visitors, who presumably see value in the content and would be willing to pay for that. Occasional site visitors won’t need to pay. Makes sense, but how do you track this? Will those casual visitors still need to log-in somehow? Enter your email here? Or maybe limit how many articles can be viewed from an IP address in a day? It will be interesting to see how they pull this off without scaring users away.
New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.com
The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.
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Posted by Randy on 19th January 2010
I recently read Jaron Lanier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
. It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising. Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments. And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting. A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy. Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions. I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead. But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book:
- The hive mind/crowdsourcing vs. the individual: Does aggregation of content occur to the detriment of individual effort? Are we starting to fall victim to group think passed on through the Twitters and YouTubes? That’s one way of looking at it. However my experience is that the Internet today offers more opportunities for individual content to find an audience than ever before — you’re reading this, right?
- Is the free economy hurting indvidual artists, killing the profession of content creation, and lowering our culture to its lowest common denominator? If you’re in the newspaper, colllege textbook, sheet music or music distribution businesses you’re sure feeling a big pinch. Yes there is a shift going on, there have been casualties, and it is not clear where this is going. But there is no returning to the pre-internet golden days. And new business models will evolve — people are still willing to pay money for content and services that they value — the trick is to figure out what those are.
Perhaps the bigger question is whether there is anything to really worry about. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, How America Can Rise Again raises the point the our country through its history regularly sees doom and gloom just around the next corner in the midst of abundance. Thomas Jefferson was as sure the country was headed to hell as today’s Fox news pundits. With the abundant flows of information, outlets for individual expression and rising opportunities for social interaction is there any fundamental problem with the Internet? Sure there is room for improvement and contrarian views are useful in exploring how these further.
Book Review: The Computer That Ate the World – Newsweek.com
Today, the futurist Jaron Lanier warns in his persuasive new manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, the danger is less that our network of machine intelligence will fail than that it will endure—that Web culture, and its chiliastic faith in the superior wisdom of computers, will triumph.
Findings – Jaron Lanier Is Rethinking the Open Nature of the Internet – NYTimes.com
He argues that old — and bad — digital systems tend to get locked in place because it’s too difficult and expensive for everyone to switch to a new one. ..It can sound plausible enough in theory — particularly if your Windows computer has just crashed. In practice, though, better products win out, according to the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis.
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Posted by Randy on 21st December 2009
So after all the hype I finally got a Google Wave account and well…. well…what was all the hype really about? And I guess I’m not alone in being underwhelmed. Now yes, it is really beta (not just a perpetual beta that really isn’t) and they are trying to do something completely different. Plus, as with any social networking/collaboration tool it isn’t much fun when there aren’t many people using it. I do fault them for producing something that doesn’t run in Internet Explorer, and didn’t even seem to run too well in Firefox. Browser dependent behavior is a cop-out at best. Maybe it, or the protocol will become useful for something really good over time, or the user community will embrace it in numbers to reach some tipping point. But until then I’m much more interested in the possibilities of other tools — like BuddyPress.
Top 10 Failures of 2009
Google Wave Sucked: This is one case where the hype was as noisy as the app – and both were deafening. We have to hand it to Google’s publicity team; we don’t know one geek who wasn’t positively salivating for a Wave invite.
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Posted by Randy on 21st December 2009
Web page design best-practices used to dictate designer for a monitor of 640 x 480 pixels, then 800 x 600 pixels, and at a recent meeting I heard one of our schools lead web designers say they’re new minimum is the 11xx screen width. Which with browser windows, toolbars, etc. give an effective width of something like 960 pixels. But want to be sure? Take a quick tour around the Google browser sizer .
And as far as width across the screen 960 will match the screen size of 90% of the audience — not too bad. But look how quickly the dimensions down the page drop off. More than 500 pixels down and you risk putting content ‘below the fold’. Common wisdom says the users won’t scroll, and content lower on the page will be missed. In fact the Google browser sizer page makes this point in its default view. But for appropriate content is seems users are willing and quite able to scroll. Just make sure there is some indication that something is down there — i.e. cut off text. Or check out why The Fold Doesn’t Matter.
This doesn’t address the needs of mobile browsers. On our server they are still a small percentage of the visitors, but expect that number to grow quickly over the next year.
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.
Blasting the Myth of Below the Fold
Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.
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Andre Malan
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