See also Designing for Blogs, Part 2: Screenshots.
I'm an unabashed fan of working smarter, not harder.
In 1999, before I first happened on blog software or even the
precursor called "EditThisPage," I was working with a few student
programmers on a similar system in PHP, for classroom uses,
collaborative projects, and portfolio-based active learning. What I
really wanted to do was get away from the limitations of WebCT and
Blackboard for more student-centered learning, instead of reproducing
traditional classroom structures online. And I didn't want to have to
keep teaching students HTML in classes that had other work to do.
When I saw that EditThisPage, Radio Userland and other applications
were already doing what I was attempting to build from scratch in my
dining room, I realized that the idea was so simple and such a logical
next step, hundreds of people were probably doing exactly what I was
doing, in different arenas, to make publishing accessible to more
people. I saw that I could use blog tools for just about anything I
could imagine with HTML and Flash, and save myself a whole lot of work.
And why did the blog idea catch fire as the killer app, when content
management systems on the corporate side were plentiful? I strongly
believe the answer is a timely combination of the rise of Google along
with RSS.
Even though feed readers are having difficulty reaching non-tech
users, feeds and tags are becoming an intrinsic structure in nearly
everything we build. Quite simply, I won't build another freelance/contract web
site that is not RSS/Atom-enabled. It's a no-brainer. Blogs are the
display and feeds give the display legs. Technorati.com
would not exist without feeds. And the massive social movement that is
the blogosphere would not exist at all without RSS behind it.
So these days, rather than endlessly re-inventing the wheel, I'm
primarily designing for CSS and the content-management shell blog
software provides, a shell I can pour nearly anything into. Do I ever
wish for the old blank-slate, starting fresh with a new audience/user
interaction model every time?
Sometimes, but Web functionality is
so crucial to interactive communities and a public commons that solo work in
Flash feels
empty to me, like an essential piece is missing. I think we'll end up
one day defining "interactivity" as something that essentially must
have more than one author, perhaps even many authors.
And lately, when I want to push on the limits of what interactivity
can do, I find myself reaching for an even more robust system, pmachine's
Expression Engine, where I can situate multiple blog modules in
different contexts on the same page, and still retain my permalink
archives and flexible CSS designs.
My only complaint so far is that I want some of the features I find
in Scoop, features of audience-driven, "self-organizing" sites.
Not too long ago, someone asked me to predict where interactive
media and the Internet would be five years from now. I refused to give
an answer, because I don't get to decide. The beauty of a grassroots, bottom-up
social movement like in the blogosphere is that the social structures
provide an organic kind of direction and structure, and the social
structure is the authority, not "industry leaders" or "futurists" or
any other professional prognosticators striving for control or a
first-mover advantage.
Interactivity is about giving up control.
What I strive to do as a designer and a participant in this
grassroots social movement is to create tools that empower the most
people with enough freedom to set their own directions. I'm not
interested in herding cats. I am interested in watching and learning
inductively from where cats go.
That's what Web 2.0 is about. That's why it rose from the ashes of
the top-down corporate- and VC-driven creations that crashed and
burned after all the money turned to vapor. What we valued most was
what remained. Communities, interactions, strong ties, weak ties. Rich
relationships over time. Rabid flame wars. Not endlessly pitching
widgets while dropping names to bugger your Google/Technorati rank.
That's also why, in what some are calling a Web boomlet, I see
business people desperately trying to appropriate blogs for various
business models, proclaiming themselves authorities on their blog
content niche as if they were following a stock professional
copywriting formula, many diluting content in search
engine-optimized blog sites that literally suck all the life out of
the real reasons for blogging, the real reasons for writing and communicating
online.
They claim they are dispensing value in a kind of knowledge-log
"how-to" format, but as this genre of blogging multiplies, the sites
look to me like little more than human-written, SEO-focused link farms,
one step away from machine-generated link farms. Where is the real
value in that?
Where I will stand in this new wash-out is with the commons, the spaces where real
people talk, where conversations are alive with an energy of their own.
The interfaces I will build for these communities and cybercultures
will be interfaces that allow patterns of use to co-create the
interface structures themselves.
The most creative, edgy projects I
want to work on compulsively on my own time will not just employ
user-centered design. They will allow social network structures to
literally create their own designs.
In part two on this topic, I offer a visual snapshot into the kinds
of blog-based sites I design, build, and often, host. One got 2,500
hits in its first 48 hours online. Others get very little traffic,
because they are e-books I'm committed to maintaining as part of our
common online library. Others are simply labors of love, my own
contribution to the "real."
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