12 months ago
A couple months ago, I watched David Recordon's presentation at Webstock 09 on Vimeo. He covered a lot of ideas about how to build a better open social web.
A quick Google search on Recordon lead me to the Diso Project website, which aims to "facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web." The DiSo Project lead me to a blog post from Chris Messina about Activity Streams.
From the Activity Stream draft spec:
For the purpose of this specification, an Activity is a description of an action that was performed (the Verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the Subject see Section 6.1 (Feed Subject)), usually on some social object (the Object). An Activity Feed is a feed of such Activities.
Facebook and MySpace have already adopted Activity Streams as the standard way to disperse users' activity data out to the web.
What Facebook and MySpace are doing is a great first step, but the usefulness of this format would be completely realized if we could work towards something like what Chris Messina described in his blog post (i.e., "consume activities based on human-readable content types, rather than by the service name on which they were produced"). Meaning, it wouldn't matter where you uploaded your photo, posted your blog or updated your status, we could all follow each other independently of which network we were on. Sure, this is like what FriendFeed now offers, but as Messina said, we could offer this without "hardcoding support" for the myriad social networks' API or feed format. It would just be up to the individual services to build in support for Activity Streams (which is merely a beefed up Atom feed).
This may be another pie-in-the-sky movement for the social web, but this is the first one (since Microformats) I've seen that looks useful.
1 year ago
Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 are surely the impetus for all this web font discussion. Designers and developers can see the promised land, but it's just out of reach. Nevertheless, here are two more good articles on the current state of things:
Food For Thought #10
1 year ago
If you want to do great work, focus on one thing at a time. Finish it and move on to the next thing. It means some things aren’t going to get done as fast as some people may want. It means some people aren’t going to get your full attention for a while. But doing a bunch of crappy work, or making a bunch of poorly considered decisions just to get through the pile isn’t worth it.
1 year ago
Last.fm recently added a feature to their profile pages that I thought was great. "Paste Your Taste" assembles a block of text describing your overall top music picks for use on social networking profiles.
For example, my current selection is:
I'm into indie, rock, alternative, electronic and experimental, including:
Thrice, Queens of the Stone Age, Squarepusher, Plaid, The Avett Brothers, Radiohead, dredg, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Poison the Well, Muse, Mastodon, The Books, The Walkmen, Shiner, Incubus, Against Me!, Spoon, mewithoutYou, Iron & Wine, The Beatles, The Decemberists, Arcade Fire, He Is Legend, Death Cab for Cutie, Paul McCartney, The Smashing Pumpkins, Annuals, Codeseven, Slow Runner, Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Aphex Twin, The Knife, Ebu Gogo, Prefuse 73, Head Automatica, Silverchair, Deftones, Far-Less, Kaki King, Clark, Cory Branan, Killswitch Engage, Maximo Park, The Life and Times, Elliott Smith, Department of Eagles, Bloc Party, M83, The Streets.
Check out my music taste: http://www.last.fm/user/heyrevolver
Compared to the other technology working on their site, the "Paste Your Taste" functionality is nothing special. However, it solves a common problem—albeit a minor one—and makes it very easy to share your own taste in music. A great example of a feature that compliments the service while requiring minimal development.
1 year ago
I normally would not post this kind of thing here, but my hosting company, A2 Hosting, is offering a 40% discount on hosting purchases for the month of July. The coupon code is economystinks (expires 7/31/09). That will get you a technically unlimited, reputable shared hosting account for around $4.77/month. There have been a few hiccups along the way, but I've been very pleased with their support.
1 year ago
Since my last post on web fonts, a pair of new websites have launched related to the cause. One is proposing a big step forward, while the other is a nice resource.
Typekit from Small Batch Inc. aims "to develop a consistent web-only font linking license." According to their blog:
We've built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
With a free version promised from the outset, it sounds like a great offering. However, the mentions of a "low-cost way to grow" and "scalable professional version" leaves me a little apprehensive. I'm not making any judgments until they launch the service, but facing recurring charges for the unforeseeable future doesn't sound like the best solution.
Next, The League of Moveable Type (no relation to the blogging platform) simply provides "well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts." The fonts are available under a Attribution Share Alike Creative Commons license for personal and commercial use. Most members just want to see what you do with their fonts, but a credit in your website's colophon couldn't hurt. The files themselves are either TTF or OTF—so, you'll just need to convert an EOT for Internet Explorer using WEFT.
1 year ago
David Bliss at Odopod recently posted a rundown of how his company handles Flash and SEO. He used the term "progressive enhancement" to describe the technique. According to Wikipedia:
Progressive enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page.
This strategy is something I've been employing for a while, but without the terminology to succinctly describe it. As Bliss mentioned, with SWFObject, SWFAddress and the Flash Search Player from Google, it's becoming easier and easier to confidently sell SEO and Flash together. Next time you pitch a client, wrap this process up as "progressive enhancement." It would be nice to make the term an industry standard.
Food For Thought #9
1 year ago
Designing for many people doesn't mean designing for the lowest common denominator.
1 year ago
Back in April, I launched a redesign for RVA Magazine. I collaborated with Richmond, VA designer Gabriel Ricioppo of Brandbuilt on the project. RVA is one of the most widely known culture magazines in the Richmond area. Their old website didn't allow them to adequately showcase the massive amounts of content they generate on a weekly basis. I went with Drupal to deliver the amount of functionality the magazine required while staying on budget. The site also utilizes quite a bit of third-party services: Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Yahoo! Pipes, ShareThis and Issuu.
Nearly two months after launch, the RVA staff is still publishing tons of weekly content, their sustained traffic is up over 100% and they're regularly the first result when searching for RVA on Google.
1 year ago
E-dreamz, an interactive firm in Charlotte and where I interned at during college, recently published a blog post discussing the "similarities between Twitter and Inbound Linking strategies." Simply put, Twitter has mutated into another way for businesses to hock their wares, while the real draw of the service is from nothing of the sort.
For me, Twitter is the asides between the conversation. Quick commentary and reflection, no matter how mundane, is what has made Twitter successful socially. Twitter is not a notification service for your latest blog post—that's RSS.
Setting up a Twitter account doesn't automatically create the appearance that a business is "connected" to its customers either. As Merlin Mann commented in a recent podcast from SXSW (I'm paraphrasing): setting up an account on Twitter does not make you Zappos—putting resources behind serving your customers makes you Zappos. It takes time and effort, like everything else.
0 comments
