9 posts tagged “web”
Over on my other blog, [A Life Beyond Traditional Media], I'm asking people whether using social media sites, such as this one has changed the demographics of their social networks. Is your online social circle more diverse in age, race, culture, etc., than you're pre-internet life was?
I'm not taking responses on vox, but if you could head over to the posting, I'd love to hear what you think.
The latest article is up on my professional blogging site, [A Life Beyond Traditional Media]. It's actually a reworking of one I did here.
A Preemptive Strike: Death to Web 3.0 (and 2.0 while we're at it)
Bloggers, pundits, and industry analysts have been earnestly debating the question for a while: What will Web 3.0 be? Of course, they have their critics, those who call the term a lot of hype. Unfortunately, their critics need to get harsher. Web 3.0 is worse than a meaningless buzzword; its use is bad for communication, bad for the interactive field, and simply stupid.
Full post at: www.bill-snyder.com/billsnyder/2007/09/a-preemptive-st.html
Dear Vox neighbors:
Here's the deal. I've just launched my professional website, [A Life Beyond Traditional Media]. It looks at technology from a communications lens, rather than the other way around. It's certainly not a new topic, but I think the angle I view it from is fairly uncommon. Like any new blog, I need to build up links and readers. Even more important, though, I need this blog to be a dialog. I'm tossing out ideas, and I'm looking for people to agree, disagree, and expand. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in self promotion. I think it can be a lot more. The blog is 24 hours and one post old. You've all been great at commenting on this blog. I'd love to have you visit the new blog, and would love to hear your responses to what I put up there. It's focused on interactive communications and certainly more polished, but still the same me I hope you all know and love. Of course, the personal stuff will stay here on Vox. I really do want as many perspectives as possible on what I toss out, so please visit. It's at:
Today's client email:
Bill, these are awesome. I’m really happy with them.
That came from my longtime friend and colleague L. We've known each other since 1994 and have probably worked together, on and off, for the last 10 years. A comment like that from a client wouldn't normally be a big deal, but L and I, as old friends, are more likely to insult and degrade each other (in good fun of course) than complement each other. So this means a lot.
I'm really proud of this project, so I think I'll brag a little here. L is a partner is an interface design company. (The project is not confidential, only the copy. Likewise, the name of the company and what they do aren't confidential. All that said, I always feel funny talking about projects before they're live, so I'll leave out the names.) They started out as a web company, but really found their niche in interface design for internet-enabled aps, desktop and enterprise aps, touch screens, etc. The problem is that most companies don't really understand the role and work of a UI design firm.
In putting together their website, the company was really grappling with how to articulate what they do. (When people get what they do, it's usually true love.) This company had already gone through two copywriters before I came on board, and had very little to show for it. Not to infer the writers were bad. I know one of them, and she's quite good. But the messaging was elusive here, so it needed more than writing.
I dredged through their PowerPoints and internal documents. We went through numerous meetings. And I distilled it into a messaging/web-content strategy. Then began writing some preliminary text. As I wrote, they had something to respond to, and that helped them refine how they packaged their services. Between us, we were able to identify their key audiences, how UI was crucial to their audiences, and how they're services were packaged. (The last part was really the key. It's the idea of selling "solutions," though we didn't use that term. What do you do when you have expertise and technology that can be used in a variety of situations? Well, in order to sell them, you really have to give them some sense of concreteness when you talk about them. At the same time, you can't limit what your capable of. So, it's a fine line.)
In the end, of course, the success here has as much to do with them being a great client as it does with me being The Consummate Professional™. (hee hee. I really wrote that.) The aforementioned complement was in response to four web pages worth of copy. Not a whole lot in and of itself. But this is a company that works in the interactive space. They're not a marketing company, but they get interactive marketing. Yes, they hired me for six pages of copy. (The last two are higher level messaging and were on hold until we were settled on the more fundamental stuff.) They also know they were hiring me for the messaging/content strategy that would make the copy possible. And that, in truth, is really where their dollars went.
From a messaging perspective, this is one of the trickiest pieces I've ever done. And I am as proud of those four pages and all the work behind it, as I am of anything I've ever written. And I can't wait until the site is live and potential clients can see it.
Of course, unless you are in need of a UI firm, you probably won't stumble across it but I'll be happy to point it out for you. If you are in need of a UI firm, well, don't even wait until the site is live. PM me and I'll put you in contact with them. They really are as good as it gets. I can say that, because I've used them.
UPDATE: An updated version of this post can be found on [A Life Beyond Traditional Media], my brand new blog on communications through technology, at www.bill-snyder.com. (Find this article directly at www.bill-snyder.com/billsnyder/2007/09/a-preemptive-st.html.) Comments on this site are closed, but cComments at the new site are encouraged. I'd love it if my neighbors who posted here would re-post your comments at the new site and give my professional blog a little wind in its new sails.
Dear Vox/LJ friends: I'm playing with some ideas that will lead to the launch of my professional blog whenever I get my ass in gear and create it. In the meantime, I'm using my social blogs as a testing ground for ideas. It allows me to spew and not proofread and figure out what sticks and what's faulty. I started this with The Media Makes the Message. If this bores you, feel free to move on to my personal posts. If this interests you, please share your thoughts. And do keep in mind, this is a staging ground, and some ideas are half-baked. Feel free to challenge me on them, but please do so gently. Once they appear in the professional blog, you have the right to rip my ideas apart.
The bloggers, pundits, and industry analysts have been at it for some time now: debating the question of what Web 3.0 is or will be. Then there is the other camp, those who call all this Web 3.0 hoopla a lot of hype. Well, I'm here to speak for a third camp, perhaps a camp inhabited by me alone, but I doubt it. I'm here to speak for the camp that says it's bad communications, bad for the interactive field, and simply stupid.
I should put my cards on the table here: I'm a communications guy, and interactive technologies are my medium of choice. In other words, I can geek out like the best of them, but for me, it's not the technology but how it's used. My best work pairs me with someone who is loves the technology and wants it to communicate. My friend Nate is like that. This is a guy who can write JavaScript (or XHTML, Flex, Java, PHP, CFM, and so on) in the same way a native Frenchman uses his language to seduce an American tourist. Fortunately for Nate's wife, few women have undressed under the influence of JavaScript. But my point here isn't seduction; simply that I'm the communications part of the equation and quite aware that the other parts of the equation must be in place for any of it to work.
Communications 101: Language shapes the way we think. We are more likely to make our reality fit our words than the other way around.
Today, everyone is obsessed with "Web 2.0." Yes, if you work in "the field," you may say the term is dying, but if you take a walk outside of the industry, it's actually gathering steam. As someone who has to communicate with non-tech people, I'm tired of it. I'm tired of explaining that Web 2.0 doesn't require a special Web 2.0 browser. I'm tired of explaining it's a concept ... well, a series of concepts ... well, a bunch of concepts but people don't completely agree on which ones are part of Web 2.0. Yes, we widely agree that "social media" is a big part of it. Some will say that the tools like Flex and AJAX, which allow for more dynamic content and make the Web feel more like an application are part of it. Many would agree that APIs and XML and all the other technologies that allow for technologies to work together leaping from Web to mobile to desktop applications are part of it, as are the ways those technologies allow for mash-ups creating uses of technologies and data in ways the original creators never thought of.
The problem with Web 2.0 is it's software talk not communication talk. Software developers have control over their releases and carefully track versions. (I'm sure there are developer out there who will tell me it's not that clear, but cut me a little slack here. I'm trying to talk about the Web not software development.) The Web doesn't have a development team to decide when the next release is. As someone who has spent a decade working in internet communications, I'd argue that I've seen more than two release; I've seen dozens or maybe hundreds. They're just not clearly delineated so they're damn hard to number. What we call Web 2.0 is sort of a snapshot in a continually evolving landscape.
Where interactive technology differs from software is that what is new does not necessarily replace what came before it. Often it augments. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was intended to replace CS 2. Windows Vista is intended to replace XP. Even if you include every concept I listed above in Web 2.0, it didn't replace Web 1.0.
The ramification of this are significant. I can't count the times I've seen organizations that are heavily invested in Web 2.0 but have missed the Web 1.0 boat: Their information architecture is awful. Their user interfaces are unusable, and their Web presence is completely out of brand. If you're a company that's using social media to drive a potential customer to your site, hopefully leading to a purchase or some other conversion, this is disastrous. If you are an information-rich site and nobody can find that information, well that's even worse. If to an increasingly interface-savvy population you look clunky — whether you've got an online magazine or a e-commerce site — you've lost your credibility.
A little while back, I was talking with my friend El, a usability analyst. Some of my earliest web projects were writing functional copy to improve the usability of sites El's company was developing. She commented that in the early days you really needed to test everything, that different companies' users reacted differently to a Web interface. Now, she said, there's been a codification of the language. People have expectations, some of them as simple as clicking on a logo in the top left corner of a site will take you back to the homepage. (And yes, I still see Web 2.0-invested companies that have their logo at the top of their site but don't use it as a link. You have to look for the "home" link elsewhere on the page.) That language was developed in Web 1.0, and it hasn't gone away, though it does continue to evolve. The belief that we are in a Web 2.0 world has caused some to overlook the basics we learned in the first ten years of the Web.
I wonder too if it has limited our accomplishments. If Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are things that are defined, have those definitions limited the way we think of interactive technology. Web 2.0 has never really been a thing. Interactive technologies are going in as many directions as there are creative minds to push them. There is no Web 2.0 and there won't be a Web 3.0, there will be thousands of Web 3.0s. The Web is leaping out of the browser in every possible direction — from internet enabled applications to mobile, from mash-ups to customized home pages to application that function in browsers but feel like they're on your desktop. With open APIs, XML, and a host of related technologies, people are creating tools whose real purpose is to allow others to find a purpose for them. Yes, Flickr is cool and so are Google Maps, but they're a whole lot cooler when you find they can be mashed together. What is Twitter for? Depends on who uses it. Don't like Twitter's web interface; download an application. Is MySpace a social site or a marketer's new frontier? Both. I SMS to my blog and receive IMs on my phone. In short, the web has grown, stretching beyond computers and beyond information. The Web is truly becoming a web.
The whole point of defining Web 2.0 was to figure out where we are at. Unfortunately for those who like buzz words, we are everywhere. The whole point of discussing Web 3.0 is to figure out where we are going. Well, here's the news: We're not all going to the same place, and that is the beauty of this medium (or perhaps these mediums). That's why I love technology as a medium for communications: The possibilities are endless and will continue to defy labels. We are just at the beginning of this "Web thing," and what comes next, well its going to be many things — some will die anonymous deaths and others will change the very nature of the way we communicate.
UPDATE: An updated version of this post can be found on [A Life Beyond Traditional Media], my brand new blog on communications through technology, at www.bill-snyder.com. (Find this article directly at www.bill-snyder.com/billsnyder/2007/08/the-media-makes.html.) Comments on this site are closed, but comments at the new site are encouraged. I'd love it if my neighbors who posted here would re-post your comments at the new site and give my professional blog a little wind in its new sails.
Between 1990 and 1995, I wrote an hour long monologue. It wasn't that I spent five years writing, but rather that it took five years to gather the material. The first words were written in a laundromat on the back of a brochure. I had no idea that I was writing a monologue or, for that matter, anything other than an idea.
The process continued that way. I wrote in journals and on scraps of paper. Then I'd sit down and type up the scraps. If it felt like it belonged, I'd look through the evolving script (it was probably a year before I knew it was a script) and see where it fit. The chronology of the writing had nothing to do with the order of the script.
As pieces emerged, I emailed them off to my college roommate Tom. I was in Minneapolis, and he was in Boston. he wrote back in response to my thoughts. Our emails worked their way into the script. When it was finally finished, I was amazed that it made sense. Not because I didn't trust my writing skills, but because I never sat down to write a script. It just sort of happened. Once things started to fit together, I applied craft to make it work, but the creation itself lacked intent.
This was the perfect way for me to create. It wasn't until college that I delved into creative writing with an earnest intent. By that time, we had entered the period of word processing. I developed my style by gushing onto the page and then cutting and pasting. It was as much about rhythm as it was content. If I shift that there, and move this here, and change that word, and cut that phrase, well it just feels right.
I am a digital writer. Yes, I keep a journal. With short poems, I start on paper. But I write by shifting fragments around, and that style, my style, shows the impact of the tools I used to develop it.
I won't bore you, or me, with arguments about the merits and vises of technology and communications. My point here is that the communication tools are at the heart of what we say and how we express ourselves. If the CD had been developed in the mid-sixties, we wouldn't have Abby Road side two. It was composed and created to fit on one side of an album. OK Computer, on the other hand, would fall a part if you had to stop and flip the album. Read Ginsberg's "HOWL," and you can taste the typewriter. I wonder how I would would write if that were my tool of choice. I can snap hundreds of photographs at no cost, shooting until I get things write. But I miss the intentionality I put into setting up a shot and then going into the darkroom to decide how to print it. I miss the feel of the enlarger and the paper in my hands.
I'm tired of hearing the moaning about how kids are losing the art of communications. Sure, how r u? isn't poetry, but you know what it means, and it's a good way to make something fit on a tiny phone screen. We text and Twitter and communicate in fragments now. I miss paragraphs, but love the fact that we communicate more. I love that email allows me to keep in touch with more people than I ever imagined, but I miss the well thought out, carefully penned letter. I love that my blog lets my Dad know things about my life that I'd never think to tell him. That a mix of Vox, IM, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter keeps Patty a part of my daily life, even though she long ago left Minnesota for the Bay Area. I love the fact that Vox allowed me to meet people through her, and that I got to know them in such a real way that it felt meeting them in person seemed more like a reunion than an introduction. I love that online connections allow Patty's daughter Annabelle and Deb's son Aaron to know me as more than someone who visits their parents every couple of years. Indeed, they communicate with their parents' friends more than I ever did with any of my parents' friends.
I love my iPod. It not only carries my music, but it carries my podcasts. On a short bus ride to work or a walk down the street, I can catch up on tech news or website usability best practices. But I wonder if that person sitting across the aisle or walking past me could be someone who might have made a major impact in my life if we weren't both wired.
And please, don't tell me kids are spending so much time online that they don't have real friends. I not only believe that's untrue; I have research to prove it. Online relationships extend into the real world. Twenty years ago, teenagers spent hours on the phone, but they still met in person. Now they spend hours online, but they still meet in person. My college roommate and I don't have the epic phone calls we had for years after college. I miss them. But we also communicate more frequently than we used to. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LiveJournal, WordPress, and the other millions of new technologies that have been so pathetically lumped together as Web 2.0 don't isolate us; they connect us. And if it sometimes lacks the intimacy of a coffee shop, well, it certainly increases the frequency of contact. And I do love the fact that two time zones don't prevent me from seeing what Laurel had for dinner tonight or what her cats were up to this morning.
And lets finish with blogs, perhaps the most important writing platform today. People share their thoughts, ideas, and inner lives in a way they have rarely been able to in the past. This is a new form of writing, one unconcerned with grammar or spelling, one that is simply about sharing what's in side of you with people who are willing to ... um ... "listen." Most of us don't corner acquaintances in coffee shops to tell them what's going on in our hearts. We know nobody wants to be forced to listen. We save these things for close friends and family, but then, only when we have the time to sit down alone. It seems that time keeps getting harder and harder to find. But blogs are a chance to say it and let people choose to read it. And people do read, and through this exchange we learn that our inner lives have a lot in common — more than we would have otherwise thought. We also learn that there is value in sharing even the mundane parts of our lives, which means there must be value in our lives.
I emailed Em yesterday, because I knew, through her blog, that her mother had gone through surgery recently. I was worried about her mother. What was odd about this was that I've never met or mother. For that matter, I've never met Em. But both my parents and one of my step parents have had treatment for potentially serious health issues over the years. I'm lucky. Not only are both my parents alive and healthy, but I have two wonderful stepparents as well, also healthy. I'm not ready to lose any of them (and never will be), so I know what kind of worrying you do when one of them is sick.
I'm not going to take a populist stand here about how Web 2.0 has brought mass media to the common man; how DV has opened the door for filmmakers, how digital audio has brought the studio into every musicians basement. Big corporations still control big distribution channels, hold big promotional budgets, and are even using to use the tools of new media. (Remember who owns MySpace.) We have not entered a digital utopia any more than we've entered a digital nightmare.
I'm simply saying that the media makes the message. It changes how we create art. It changes how we keep in touch. It changes how we meet people. It changes how we express ourselves. It changes how we play. There will never be another Abby Road side 2. You'll never know what OK Computer would have sounded like if it had been composed for two 20-minute sides. Then again, you never know what Abby Road would have been if John had said to Paul, "Screw the bloody individual songs. We have 90 unbroken minutes to play with here.
After seeing the mess that is the Vox user homepage get messier, I sent this off using the contact form. I'm posting here to share my frustration.
Please, I beg you, hire a usability analyst and a killer UI designer. In some ways, you have the most user friendly interface I've seen. The AJAX forms are beautiful. But look at the homepage, it's a mess. (I mean the user's homepage, not the one from people who aren't logged in.) Do I want recent updates or comments (is there a difference)? Why is TIG at the bottom, so far below the fold that I pretty much miss it. Can anyone use the space at the top of the page, the prime real estate less efficiently? (QothD, Vox Hunt, New Themes, and all of those silly arrows which let you flip through -- what exactly is it we're flipping through?) Why do I need to click explore to find the cool things that are going on in vox outside of my neighborhood. By the time I log in, check out my homepage, check out my neighborhood, do you really think I'm going to click explore. Why can't you aggregate content. That way, if I do explore, it's more than a random view of posts from people I don't know. And let's talk about technology for a moment. Vox integrates with YouTube, Amazon, and Flickr better than any other site. You've obviously have brilliant developers, but you can't seem to allow more than five links in a sidebar or sidebar widgets that display properly. You have the foundation of what could be the best blogging platform out there, one that could be used for multiple sites serving multiple communities and demographics, and your squandering it. Please stop doing that, now, I beg you.
Point of clarification: Am I being too hard on Vox. I don't think so. I think when they get it right, they do so brilliantly. Therefore, it's hard to see them get things so wrong some of the time. I've been accused of being too hard on the new "recent updates" module. Actually, I like it. What I don't like is the design. It's right next to the "comments" module, and it looks identical. It's like looking at a sea of sameness. It all blurs together on the screen.
I'm sitting in a Net Neutrality workshop as I type. This is a beautiful video on the issue. Visit savetheinternet.com.
OK, so as some of you know, I work in web communications. I was recently part of an amazing online debate about how progressive organizations can effectively tell their stories. Online, of course, is that you need to get people to come to you, but a lot of people are still stuck in a direct mail and advertising mentality.
Someone posted PETA's State of the Union Undress to the group as a provocative way of getting the message out. It sparked quite a debate. PETA's a fairly radical organization to begin with, but having a woman strip to get the message out brought up a lot of strong opinions. Some thought it was brilliant; others thought it was alienating. Some thought it was sexist; others asked why every time a woman uses her sexuality she's considered a victim. So, I'm curious what everyone here thinks. To far? Effective? Sexist? What do you think?
For the record, I have mixed feelings about it, but I do think it's effective given PETA's audience.
Warning: Though there is no sex, there is full nudity in this clip.
