A few lessons learned in 7 years of blogging.

Continue Reading: 9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers

What an Amazon product page looks like from 50,000 feet.

Continue Reading: How Social is Amazon?

I love this design philosophy of the Shakers…goes for designing anything.

Continue Reading: The Shaker Design Philosophy

Five high-level principles that guide my design.

Continue Reading: Five Principles to Design By

Brian Oberkirch has a nice post about how we need OpenID to corral the proliferation of identity information out there on the Web.

Continue Reading: Domain as Identity Getting Closer to Real

Anne Zelenka, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Adobe Engage event on Tuesday, adds a valuable viewpoint to the recent gender discussion started reignited by Jason Kottke. (Anne and I have cross-linked in the past…she’s a deep thinker on social issues)

“Gender is an important category of diversity because women experience radically different life patterns and external expectations than men and so by including a critical mass of women you are more likely to get some orthogonal perspectives than if you include more men. Now of course you can go after diverse men too–and you should if you are concerned about overcoming groupthink and echo chamber effects. But if you leave out women almost entirely, you are leaving out representatives of half your potential audience. Even given similar intelligence profiles, career paths, and temperaments, a woman and a man are likely to have very different views on technology… because they come at it from vastly different experiences of the world. We experience more conflicting messages and more ambivalence around working in technology and working with technology than men do. Society expects different things from us, so we in turn may focus on what seems unimportant or uninteresting to men.”

More here

Continue Reading: Gender Issues

How “information architecture” is defined much too broadly, frames design in the wrong way, and suffers from infoprefixation.

Continue Reading: More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

This will be my first trip to the venerable SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin. If any of you, my fair readers, are attending I would love to meet up and chat. Drop me a line via email or in the comments…

Of course, we wouldn’t chat about blogging…probably more along the lines of Texas BBQ and beer. 🙂

Continue Reading: Going to SXSW

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls, in the must-read Building an Relationship Economy:

‘”All markets work at three levels”, he said. “Transactions, conversations and relationships”. Eric is an atheist. Sayo is a Christian. With those two triangulating so similarly on the same subject, I began to figure there was something more to this relationship business.’

Doc starts this excellent piece by wondering what we can learn about economy from open-source practices. A lot, it seems. When we look at something like the incredible creation of Linux, what does that tell us about what we value and why and how we get stuff done?

Continue Reading: Designing Relationships

Looking down the headlines at Techmeme lately has been like looking at the news headlines from the big corps in the world.

Of the first five big stories at the moment, 3 come from the New York Times, 1 from Google, and 1 from Microsoft.

Continue Reading: Rebuilding the Old Boss