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04
Feb 2010

Fascinating presentation on Amazon.com site design

This is a highly informative and entertaining look at what makes Amazon.com’s design work. From the synopsis:

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it’s filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect. Some design changes in the last few years have not been the success that the team had hoped for. Amazon’s exceptional qualities and imperfections are critical knowledge for any designer that wants to dig deep into what makes the site tick.

via Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon » UIE Brain Sparks.

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04
Feb 2010

On trust and team building

If we were honest with ourselves, we would probably admit that trust is one of the scariest words we ever in encounter. It’s hard to earn, quickly taken away, and must be constantly cultivated. It requires us to open ourselves up to others, which is probably what makes it so difficult.

Trust can be a foreign concept to us in IT. We spend a lot of times interacting with computers, which do what we tell them to do (whether we believe it or not). But we don’t work in a vacuum, and have to develop relationships with our teammates, stakeholders, and others. Sometimes that trust needs to be developed quickly, particularly given how teams come together for projects and can disband once the project is over.

I heard about Rodrigo Jordan a couple years ago and was stoked to see this video of him speaking at Google about developing teams for success. He’s led a number of mountain climbing expeditions around the world. He took this opportunity to discuss his experiences and explain why some expeditions succeeded where others failed.

Dr. Jordan is an educator and mountaineer, President of Vertical S.A., and Chairman of the Chilean National Foundation for the Alleviation of Poverty. Dr. Jordan was nominated by Time magazine in 1995 as “one of the 100 young leaders for the new millennium,” and led the first successful South American expedition to Mt. Everest and K2. He has applied the leadership and team-building skills needed to climb the world’s most challenging mountains to business and education.

Dr. Jordan is a civil and industrial engineer, earned a Ph.D. in Organizational Administration from Oxford University, and is a lecturer in Innovation Processes and Management at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. In January 2008, Rodrigo joined a National Geographic team for the Larsen Ice Shelf Expedition which sought to document the impact of climate change on the lesser-known side of the Antarctica Peninsula.

Trust me, the video is worth your time.

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03
Feb 2010

Should media companies remove their content from Google?

A couple months ago Rupert Murdoch made waves by threatening to pull all of News Corp’s content from Google’s search index.  Needless to say, the blogosphere went nuts.

Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon who has long accused Google of ripping off content from his newspapers, said this weekend that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine’s listings.

Personally, I believe it was a bad idea then and may be an even worse idea now.  However, a new voice has entered the debate, and it’s one that surprised me. Mark Cuban, the dot-com billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has echoed Murdoch’s sentiments.

When that newspaper allows itself to be included in Google News it becomes a de facto endorsement of Google News as an acceptable and probably preferable “discovery destination” . The branding message to the consumer is “I dont need to go to the newspaper homepage. Everything the newspaper has  is referenced  here in Google News. So if there is something of interest to me from the local paper, Google News will send me to their site.  I don’t need to go to both sites any longer. I can just go to Google News.

Cuban is right, it’s a bad thing if news coverage becomes a commodity. Google News is a fantastic one-stop shop of news coverage, and it shows how much of an echo chamber media outlets can be by simply picking up stories from wire services like the Associated Press. It’s hard for companies to stand out amongst the masses when presented along side thousands of other outlets that picked up the same story. But that’s not a reason to pull content from the Google search index.

He’s also right that newspaper websites need help.  Generally speaking, they’re hard to navigate and attempt to be a sprawling digital replica of the print brands they digitally represent.  The root “umbrella” pages of news websites can be an intimidating plethora of links and images, and it’s hard to imagine users investing the time to sift through the links to find the depth and breadth of coverage the media outlet is providing.

It’s true that Google employs an overwhelming amount of IT talent, but there’s no need for media companies to match that investment. If an existing media company has a website, the public they serve already knows about them. Strip down the umbrella pages to be more usable and friendly. Invest in article pages to intelligently show related content and highlight the best content for users to discover. Make search engine optimization top of mind for all employees.

And while you are at, make it easy for advertisers to see why they need to be there. Cultivate a local marketplace, and bring classified ads out of the silo in which they are currently housed, but more on that next time.

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03
Feb 2010

Lemonade

Not only is this an inspiring video, it is beautifully done.

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31
Jan 2010

The case against paywalls is about more than business models

In recent weeks I’ve had a seriously hard time convincing paywall advocates of the larger implications of such a move. Why retreat into the old print model? Find new digital business models to replace the flagging print revenue.

To lock content behind paywalls or, worse, keep it offline altogether, merely casts a newspaper’s destiny into the hands of the remaining few who insist on getting their news delivered on dead trees at the end of their driveway. Unfortunately, they won’t be with us much longer. And I doubt any of them would be willing to pay the full cost of ink, paper, fuel and delivery needed to distribute their product of choice.

Now comes The Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, at the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture at London College of Communication, to better articulate the critical point that has eluded me. You can read The Guardian’s piece about the speech here.

“It’s not a ‘digital trend’. It’s a trend about how people are expressing themselves, about how societies will choose to organise themselves, about a new democracy of ideas and information, about changing notions of authority, about the releasing of individual creativity, about resisting the people who want to close down free speech.

“If we turn our back on all this and at the same time conclude that there is nothing to learn from it then, never mind business models, we could be sleepwalking into oblivion.

And maybe my favorite quote:

“If you erect a universal pay wall around your content then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content. Again, there may be sound business reasons for doing this, but editorially it is about the most fundamental statement anyone could make about how newspapers see themselves in relation to the newly-shaped world.”

Well said.

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12
Jan 2010

Jason Fried on the business of software

I had lost the link to this video of Jason Fried of 37Signals discussing the business of software. It’s a fascinating insight into the Chicago firm’s operations.

Get more 37Signals video.

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02
Jan 2010

Keep your crises small

Dr. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, discusses the company’s secret sauce, including developing great teams of people.

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28
Dec 2009

The history of the newspaper industry in a nutshell and how to turn it around

I’m going to sum this up:

Newspapers enjoy a monopoly brought on by the high cost of entry in the form of printing presses and legions of delivery boys.

Internet emerges.

Newspapers shovel their content online without regard to ways to exploit the emerging medium. They view it as another channel/platform for publishing the same content that they’ve already paid to produce. Online advertising is gravy atop their meat and potatoes print revenue.

Internet explodes with ubiquitous broadband access. It’s no longer just a publishing platform. And it’s more than a broadcast channel. Internet upends business models and revolutionizes communication. Newspapers are slow to understand the new skill sets and innovative thinking required to harness it.

Economy tanks, accelerating an already apparent decline in print circulation and market penetration. Old-school advertisers who would otherwise stick with print go out of business. Others flee a medium that is hemorrhaging readers no longer interested in reading yesterday’s news left on their driveways.

Desperate for revenue, newspapers slap paywalls on their online content. The problem is the content they’re publishing is commoditized. You can’t convince readers to pay for something you thought so little of before that you gave it away. High-value content borne out of authoritative analysis, shoe-leather reporting and critical thinking was thrown overboard with cost-cutting moves.

What’s needed:

  • Do what you do best and link to the rest, as Jeff Jarvis says.
  • Don’t turn your back on the Internet. Go all in.
  • Invest heavily in in-house innovation labs. Create new revenue channels and erect paywalls around ONLY those things you did not previously give away.
  • Extend the technology by embracing open-source thinking.
  • Fix your Web sites. They’re unusable. And while you’re at it, answer the phones and make it abundantly easy for the public to interact with you and to give you their money.
  • Hire content producers and outsource or automate sales efforts. Ad buyers sometimes understand the technology better than advertising staff.
  • Divert all remaining resources to producing truly unique content and watchdog reporting.
  • Continue your best efforts to remain impartial and unbiased, but allow point of view by engaging your audience to participate in the coverage.
  • Provide community leadership. Play a role in your readers’ lives. Rebuild any lost trust. Become transparent in everything you do.
  • Quit trying to be the mainstream media that is all things to all people. Pick your audience slice and target them to the exclusion of all others.
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19
Dec 2009

Understanding the job key to finding the perfect tool

When I moved into my first house I had a raft of home improvement projects but little money and few tools. The size of each project got magnified by my inability to buy the tools that would have dramatically reduced the time needed while increasing the quality of the work.

Fortunately, as my ambition for home improvement projects waned, my resources increased and I was able to buy the tools that made the jobs easier. Eventually, I simply hired a skilled expert to do the work for me.

Had I spent more time understanding the work and researching the proper tools I could have accomplished far more in those early years when I had more energy and fewer bucks.

The lesson was driven home this past week as I invested time learning about Mac development tools and getting a better grasp of what I’m trying to do with them. Not surprisingly, the more I learn the more I realize I have more to learn.

As I discovered with Textmate.

To get a taste of what Textmate can do, watch this video. My first reaction was to mentally calculate how many hours or even days of my life could have been saved by using a tool like this.

I think the tendency of most people is to find a way to get something done and to bang on it until the job is complete. The argument goes something like this: I can invest time to research and learn about better ways to do something, or I can make this other way work and get the job done even if it exhausts considerably more resources and energy.

Newsrooms are full of people like this because they’re places of intense pressure and unceasing deadlines. I understand that and in some respects I can appreciate the work ethic. What I don’t understand is the lack of inquisitiveness needed in order to discover whether there is a better way of doing something.

In newsrooms, a rejection of new technologies and methods is often a badge to be worn proudly.

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