When social design works, you get SPAM. When it works well, the community helps get rid of it.
Cnet’s Elinor Mills, in a piece describing Digg rigging on a wide scale, writes:
“dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media sites [...]

Continue Reading: Yes Virginia, there is SPAM on Digg

I recently got the chance to virtually sit down and have a chat with Brian Oberkirch about social web design, including lessons we can draw from Digg, Delicious, MySpace and some of the other leading social apps. Brian asks some really good questions!
Edgework - Joshua Porter 59MB MP3
More details on Brian’s site. Also, check out [...]

Continue Reading: Podcast on Social Design with Brian Oberkirch

Why and how scale in social tagging systems can leverage the Wisdom of Crowds (much like Google does with links) to make the incorrect tags less influential than certain Aristotelians would have us believe.
Ok, so I got into hot water for my Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture post…
But I’m completely fascinated by [...]

Continue Reading: Why Scale Matters in Tagging Systems

Editor’s Note: (I have written a follow-up to this piece: More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture. Since I wrote this piece, I’ve had many conversations with information architects and designers alike, and in the new piece I’ve tried to really outline the problem: IA at its most basic is the wrong frame [...]

Continue Reading: Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

This is part 3 of a conversation with Luke Wroblewski on design lifecycles.

In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2 on Luke’s site.

Joshua Porter
First off, I think that Craigslist and MySpace exposing their full content is a design decision…maybe one made without much thought but a design decision nonetheless. If *all* sites simply exposed their content to the world like these two sites, we would probably be better off. So many successful things have come from happy accidents that it doesn’t bother me to think that MySpace might be a happy accident…until you read how relentless they are about updating the site with useful things. Kathy Sierra’s talks more to this…

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 3

Luke’s got part 2 of our conversation on design lifecycles up: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

In case you missed it, here’s part 1: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

Earlier this summer I got the chance to interview Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. Luke’s a great writer and longtime web application designer currently working on Yahoo! Social Media. Following the interview we kept up an informal dialog around the idea of a design lifecycle.

Well, we ended up archiving it in Writely, and filling it out a bit. Luke’s got the first part up now. (I’ll be publishing some parts of it during the week).

The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

This past week’s Digg controversy is one in a growing number of incidents that suggest that a small group of users are having an undue influence on the promotion of stories. In response, Digg is changing the way that it handles votes by adding complexity to its ranking algorithm. I think that’s the wrong approach, so here’s another idea: change the actual design of the site…that’s the real problem.

The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged?, an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage). The Top 30 includes Digg founder Kevin Rose.

This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon. On April 18 of this year Macgyver at ForeverGeek posted Digg Army, which included screenshots of who dugg two recent articles on the site. Each article had the exact same 16 people digging it in the exact same order. Of the first 19, 18 were the same. Included in that list of people was, again, Kevin Rose. ( for an in-depth history see Tony Hung’s excellent: A Brief History of the Digg Controversy)

These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence…

Continue Reading: Digg’s Design Dilemma

Social software has been around for a long time. Email, after all, is the canonical example. But it’s been only recently that web designers as a whole have embraced it and really started innovating. We’ve got social news aggregators, social encyclopedias, social bookmarking, social networking, recommendation systems, social tagging…all of these things add up to huge changes in the way we use the Web. Though some folks see it as nothing more than social networking, there are elements of social software being built into most software today.

Who: Social software helps people by modeling their social lives online.

What: Social software is software that supports social activities.

Where: Social software is nearly everywhere.

When: Now.

Why: Social software is important because that’s the way that software is trending.

Continue Reading: The 5 W’s of Social Software

Do we all love the Nike logo because it’s inherently a great logo or do we love it because we’ve had good experiences with Nike shoes? How about the FedEx logo? The Apple logo? Chanel No. 5?

Michael Bierut tackles this question in his great piece The Mysterious Power of Context over at Design Observer. He uses the example of how the word CHANEL is written in a very plain, sans-serif font that is quite boring on its own. But placed within the context of a Chanel bottle and our experiences with the perfume, the logo becomes powerful.

Bierut suggests that we love the logos only after we’ve become accustomed to them, saying that it is the context in which we engage the logos that matter. I think Bierut is exactly right, and so in the tradition of the Del.icio.us Lesson,, I’m going to have some fun and call this the Chanel No. 5 Lesson. The Chanel No. 5 Lesson is that we have to experience something before we have strong feelings about it: that experience precedes branding.

Continue Reading: The Chanel No. 5 Lesson