Nick Finck explains why weighted lists didn’t work for digital-web magazine.

The other day someone asked me if User Interface Engineering (where I work) had any standards on what the “about us” section of web sites should contain. I answered her that we did not, because the decisions that go into a good “about us” section aren’t all that generalizable.

More specifically, every web site exists to conduct some sort of unique transaction. You may be selling unique goods, providing unique web site design, or simply writing a blog with unique content.

If what you provide is not unique, it will either become unique or fail to survive. If you do it better than others, then you will stand alone in your uniqueness. If others do it better than you, then you will fail to survive.

I could have answered the woman that every “about us” section would do well to include contact information, information about the site, and some sort of mission statement. That may have made her feel better, and perhaps been what she was asking for.

But that’s not what makes anybody unique. Sure, people may be looking for that sort of stuff, but that’s not doing good business, it’s doing average business. What makes a web site successful is exactly what is done to be better than the standard, not what is done to follow it.

Doug Kaye has posted some graphs showing the attention being paid to podcasting at ITConversations. I’m thrilled that Doug is succeeding, and I’m proud to add to his tip jar periodically. He’s doing some of the best work on the Web. Check out ITConversations.com.

As you’ll have noticed, the site is under construction lately. This is not specifically for the May 1st reboot, but I may ride the coattails of that event so as to blend in.

A couple of things I’m working on…

1. Cleaner, simpler design
2. New comment/trackback layout
3. More personal contact info
4. Blogroll/links section (I’ve never had one!)
5. Increased interaction with Del.icio.us
6. More focused posts
7. Restoring GTB, a blog with my high school buddies
8. A subsite dedicated to a particular topic

As always, I’m interested in what you have to say. If you’ve got any feedback/comments/ideas, let me know. After all, without you this site is not read.

Via Dave Weinberger on Many2Many: Matt McAlister says Infoworld is now using Del.icio.us to add folksonomic functionality to its articles. This is important because now we’re seeing existing sites adopting folksonomies…and not just a few cool folksonomy sites. Months ago when I started getting on the folksonomy bandwagon this was the major hurdle and the major question everyone had…Are they useful for the rest of us?

The way that Infoworld is using them is interesting: the editors are tagging the content and then pulling down those tags from Del.icio.us to get to related content…so they’re harnessing both writer tagging and user tagging…hmmm.

So, folksonomies seem to be useful to at least one major publication…

If you were somehow given the choice to predict the behavior of one of your friends or a complete stranger, with your life in the balance, which would you choose? You would probably choose your friend, right?

Ok, so the answer is obvious. Of course you would choose your friend! What isn’t so obvious, though, is the reasoning behind which we make that choice. Put simply, it is something like the following: by observing past behavior we can better predict future behavior, and this results from people being habitual creatures.

Given this, why do we reinvent the wheel so much in design? Why are we coming up with so many designs that must (or should be) be “tested” before we actually know if they work? Can you imagine if we were paid according to the actual effectiveness of our web design, and not the hours we put into it?

When this does come to pass, when we are paid on the efficacy of the design and not the hours we put into it, we’ll see a lot more features that aggregate past behavior in order to predict future behavior. It’s what we do all the time, just not in web design.

I was talking with a woman last night about her experience with SEO. She had some consulting work done for her by an outside SEO firm who quickly set to work driving traffic to her site. She thought all was well…until several weeks later when she was blacklisted on Google because the company who did her SEO work was blacklisted, too. One of their SEO “techniques” was comment spamming. Because of this activity and the blacklisting, her results on Google plummetted, and she has yet to gain her pagerank back. She’s contacted Google several times and the best they can do is to tell her to “switch domains”.

I then went out on a limb and suggested that much of SEO was bunk. We’re building social systems on the Web, and Google has shown that social systems leave artifacts that, when measured, tell us what we want to know. For the most part, Google weighs their results depending upon incoming links, which is a definite social artifact. The old tricks (old SEO) of keyword farming and the like don’t work on Google, because they are not socially supported…if we can build systems based on the input of many sites, the power to game the system by a single site decreases.

What does work, of course, is good content. Even the folks at Search Engine Watch make sure to pay homage to quality content, as in this article by Frederick Marckini: Why Quality Content is Key for Search.

This has been linked to quite a lot lately, but I don’t want you to miss it. So, if you haven’t already, check out this podcast of Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated talk at ETech this year.

If you haven’t read Shirky or just want to listen to someone thinking way ahead of almost everyone, take a listen. It’s well worth it, and deserves its 4+ rating.

Over at Functioning Form, Luke Wroblewski has written a post called The Impact of Interface Design Markup which deals with interface design technologies, certain to be a major topic in the future. He includes a quote from Bob Baxley suggesting that future visual designers might lay out more of their design in production code, rather than in some visual-editing application like Fireworks or Photoshop. A prime example of this, of course, is SVG, or scalable vector graphics. If browsers get support for these, then graphic designers can start laying out complete pages in code, with nary an HTML tag in sight.

Jeff Veen has an interesting post about when/how design happens. He suggests that often the solutions to design problems come after he’s stewed on them for a while. This sounds right, but the usability side of me cringes a bit, knowing how the most inspired solutions, which work great for designers during their time on the project, sometimes end up working not at all when real users get their hands on them. Probably not in Jeff’s case, but users are the ultimate arbiters of any project.

Finally, if you haven’t already, go read Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel Spolsky. And obviously, don’t just think in terms of software…

Big news out of bloglines. They announced an update yesterday that allows users to track packages (yes, UPS, Fedex, etc.) through their service. They also hint at future additions: “Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.”

So, what does “unique-to-me” mean? I think it means more granular RSS feeds in the form of things that only matter to you. In other words, these feeds have a single purpose only, to update you on something that you’re interested in, most presumably personal content. For packages, you’ll only need them for a short period of time and you’ll throw them away. For stocks, you’ll probably always keep an eye on it.

Talk about aggregation! This is the future: watch it.

Also, I’ve been interested in Eric Meyer’s Emergent Semantics presentation at SXSW, where he talks about microformats as a way to bring together bottoms-up semantics. Here’s a good microformats intro page at technorati. As I mentioned the other day, Bud Gibson is working on xFolk, a folksonomies microformat.

What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and as far as I can see there has been a lot of pushback on the “nofollow” microformat. But what about the others? I know of rubhub.com, but what use is it? Any ideas out there? I’m new to this stuff…

In other news, Del.icio.us gets funding. Excellent! Now we’ll have more things to investigate as Joshua S. beefs up his already great system.

Also, I haven’t said anything about Ajax yet because I’m still amazed at how simply naming something could be such a big deal. Take a gander at the Q&A of Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax article in which he basically severs all ties between him and the technology, presumably as the result of all the press he received.

But the lesson here is clear. Naming is hugely important, because it allows people to communicate more concretely about something they, in some cases, couldn’t talk about before.