My obligatory Twitter post. An interesting thing about Twitter is that, on the web site, the read page is also the write page. On the very same page that we read aggregated posts from our contacts we write our own posts to them. This is different…most tools don’t have this except IM. Not SMS, not […]

Continue Reading: Another reason why Twitter is so interesting

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

Continue Reading: How Social is Amazon?

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

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

Last week I wrote about How to prevent valueless design in social web sites. My main point was that most of the value people get from the sites comes over time from the interactions with other people, not from the sublimity of the visual design.

In that post, I used an analogy that pissed people off. I used the analogy that great-looking interfaces can at times be like a public speech out of touch with an audience…solidly executed but sending the wrong message…

Continue Reading: Can we talk about politics and design at the same time?

Did you know that February is Blogtipping month?

I didn’t, but Bokardoan Bill D’Alessandro, who writes the nice blog Ready, Fire, Aim, does. He wrote up Bokardo in his February is Blogtipping post, which from what I can tell is when you do a super quick review of a blog that you read and add a tip at the end (neat idea). Bill does exactly that, and points to probably the weakest part of my interface:

“I’m not sure I’m a fan of the excerpts on the front page. Some of them aren’t long enough to indicate the subject of the article. I’d suggest reducing the number of posts that appear on the frontpage, but including their full text.”

Bill’s right. I have to do something different with the excerpts…

Continue Reading: Bokardo has been cowblogtipped