Luke Wroblewski has written a nice, picture-filled post showing the evolution of Amazon’s tabbed interface. Boy, do they have scalability issues, or what?

This mention of Amazon dovetails nicely with our recent talk about popularity. I say popularity is mostly evidence of attention, and isn’t so bad. Others see it in a more negative light. What Amazon has shown us, I think, is that (at least on the product page) popularity as input to navigation can be very useful, as demonstrated in both user reviews and the “people who shopped for this also shopped for that” feature. I know I often search out what is popular before I make a decision about buying something. Do you?

In his recent post Remove Forebrain and Serve Zeldman targets popularity (incorrectly). Instead of focusing on the exceptions like Zeldman does, I think we need to see popularity in terms of how people use it, as a proxy for good judgment.

Continue Reading: Read this Post because it has Zeldman in the Title

Richard MacManus of readwriteweb.com and I have written an article on Digital Web entitled Web 2.0 for Designers. It’s the first in a series of articles outlining what we see as the major trends of Web 2.0 and how they can/will affect designers. Don’t take my biased word that it’s a good read: go look yourself.

Comments are appreciated and welcome.

Jeffrey Zeldman writes a disparaging post about tag clouds, or interfaces that reveal the popularity of tags by making them larger, as can be seen here and here.

He says they’re the process and not the music…he also writes about popularity, and how popularity indices like blogdex aren’t quite fair. A very interesting post, well-written, and sure to get you thinking.

By the way, Zeldman’s got comments now. Be sure to read them for this article.

Over at tagsonomy.com, Clay Shirky and friends have set up a site about tagging. Cool! In the first real post (other than introductions from blog members that were insightful in themselves), Clay addresses a question brought up by Tim Bray. The site is barely a few days old, and it’s already very interesting.

Two examples (one since corrected) where setting the initial focus on a web page actually hurts instead of helps.

Continue Reading: Why Setting Initial Focus To Input Boxes Isn’t Always a Good Thing

Thomas Van der Wal talks passionately about “state” on the web. He points out that designers sometimes forget state along the way to being clever, or perhaps making their own lives easier. A good read, especially worth reading if you’re building a Web 2.0 application.