Falling Off A Blog

Heroes of the hour

Adam Tinworth (right) and Nick Booth relax with a well-earned plastic cup of champagne, after RBI successfully went live with Moveable Type 4.1.
You can get a flavour of what they went through to bring this project to completion on Adam's blog.

Vertical search is hard

I just checked out yet another search engine, SiloBreaker, on the recommendation of information industry analysts Outsell.

Their gushing report, about SiloBreaker and another search specialist called Collexis, said these tools "take vertical search to the next level and show the way forward for value-added search services."

You can see why I thought it was worth a visit. So how did it do?

Caroline Slootweg, new media marketing director, Unilever

Caroline's presentation is titled: "Beyond banners - an advertiser meets web 2.0"

"The web is inherently female. These days its about shopping, chatting, sharing - these are things that women do"

Caroline Little, CEO Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

Caroline is the keynote speaker at the AOP conference, talking about "The New Online Landscape: Local and Global"

The Washingtonpost.com has worked hard to build up a strong local audience. They find that local visitors come to the site more often, go deeper into the site and consume more pages. Visitors from further afield tend to come in through search engines and only view one or two pages. Sometimes they don't even know the Washington Post.

AOP Conference 2007

I'm at the AOP Online Publishing Conference today. This afternoon I'm taking part in a panel session on "Editorial Change", but this morning I'm listening - at the moment to conference chairman, Torrin Douglas from the BBC.

It's the content, stupid

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger isn't the first person to make this point , but it's worth repeating and it's something that I feel strongly about.

Google are in the business of helping their users find great, authoratative and credible content on any given topic and I’m increasingly convinced that the more you spend time building sites that have that content the more highly you’ll be ranked in Google.

Sure, you need to know some good basic Search Engine Optimization principles because it will help your blog reach it’s potential - but don’t obsess about it.

Blogging with ScribeFire

This is my first attempt to blog using the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox.

I just tried to upload an image, but couldn't work out how to size it properly.

Good vs great design - Cameron Moll

Cameron Moll, the first speaker after lunch at dConstruct, is currently Interaction Design Manager at the headquarters of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City.

A trick question: What takes longer, heating water in a microwave for 1minute 10 seconds or heating water in a microwave for 1 minute 11 seconds?

Answer: heating water for 1 minute 10 seconds (Dur - i said it was a trick question). Why? Because getting a microwave to run for 1 min 11 seconds involves hitting the same button (1) 3 times, whereas making it run for 1 min 10 seconds involves hitting 2 different buttons (1 and 0) - finding the extra button typically takes a user more than 1 second.

Waterfall bad, washing machine good - Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reiselt was the final speaker before lunch - she blogs at disambiguity.com.

At the end of a rather mundane presentation on the advantages of agile development over the waterfall approach, Leisa raised a challenge: how can we combine the principles of agile development with those of user-centred design? The short development cycles or sprints in agile development don't leave much time to involve real users in the process.

Leisa's suggestion is to combine development work with testing, user feedback and research in each sprint, and to lengthen sprints to make this practical. So, in a given sprint the developers would be working on the next changes in functionality, while at the same time the user design people would be getting user feedback on the development work done in the last sprint. Simultaneously part of the team would be doing research to help define what needed to be done in future sprints.

Seems like an interesting idea - certainly worth taking to the next stage and trying it out.

The Experience is the Product - Peter Merholz

Next up is Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path.

• "Products are people too." People interact with products in the same sort of ways that they interact with people. They associate a personality with them, they give them a character - they get angry with them. So if we want to build products that are cool, we need to understand what makes people cool. For example, they know who they are - not trying to be something they're not.
• You need an "experience vision" - what you are going to enable people to do, what the experience is going to be like. Like the original Kodak camera vision: "You press the button, we do the rest".