I usually don’t plug blog posts on other blogs unless there’s a good reason, and this time I believe there is. Michael Arrington (who I’m working with on Edgeio and TechCrunch) just published a great article on the top Web 2.0 Venture Capitalists. All in all, Mike talks about some of the things and people I’ve been thinking about since I flew into the bay area early last month - how even here some people get the Web 2.0 space, and some don’t, and how that plays in the business world.

During this month, I’ve had the chance to meet most of the VCs Mike talks about, and it’s good to see how they understand Web 2.0 and share the excitement that we entrepreneurs are feeling. It is also true, at least for me, that those that don’t get the space and still want in are usually not the best people to make deals with: because if investor and investee are not on the same wavelength, the result cannot be good.

From an entrepreneur perspective, I know I would much rather prefer bootstrapping a company to getting into a partnership with an organization who doesn’t know and feel what I’m doing - hence the importance of dealing with the right people.

Let’s admit to the fact that I didn’t admire the VC world until I flew here - mostly because VC in Portugal, where I flew from and where I’m going back to soon, is either non-existant or pure crap. Some of the guys Mike talks about though actually made my view over their world change - to the point of making me consider VC as something I’d like to get involved with in the future.

I don’t like to preach to the choir - and trust me, I know the choir - but again and again I come back to thinking (and talking, like today at lunch with Gabe) about this topic and feel like I should post about it. No more holding back, the post is here.

In all the years - even with the highs and lows - I’ve been involved with the open-source and linux communities, which I love, I’ve always been frustrated with the endless discussion about linux on the desktop and the little to no real effort to actually do it properly. Since talking about it is again, just talking about it, I won’t do much of it. Instead, since I have a lot of smart people in my audience, I’ll point out the problem, some of the proposed solutions, and how you can help out too:

The problem

For linux to be widely accepted as a desktop-oriented operating system it needs a unification effort of some sort. Ever since the real competition between KDE and Gnome began some years ago, a lot of people argued that having multiple desktop solutions was an unsolvable problem - it is. Now the solution isn’t to merge the projects (like that would ever happen), but to find a way for both to interoperate as much as possible.

And Gnome and KDE aren’t the only projects out there. Many other desktop environments and window managers exist for the platform: each targetting a kind of user or environment. While different kinds of users have different ways to view their operating system, a unified behaviour would ultimately result in a consistent and joyful experience for everyone.

Some proposed solutions

Currently, there’s two approaches to fight the problem, one of them very recently announced:

• Freedesktop, that has been around since 2000, proposes a software and standards layer on which development for open-source platforms should be based upon so consistency between windowing environments is maintained.
• Tango, recently announced (post) at the Gnome boston summit, proposes a set of guidelines for user experience for the linux platform. This encompasses a base icon library by the awesome Jimmac, a style guide and a icon naming standard. It isn’t much yet, but it’s a start.

How you can help

This wouldn’t be a call to action without, well, a real call to action. If you feel the pain of the inconsistent experience on linux, there’s always something you can do to help - trust me, I plan to help too or I wouldn’t be writing about it.

The guys at Freedesktop have their mission statement up, that should guide you in what they do - if you’re a software developer, this is where you go. If you have the user experience and usability eye, Tango needs you, so drop by and help out.

This being said, get out there and help build a better free operating system!

Jakob Nielsen does the list thing again, and this time targets weblogs. In his latest alert, published today, the - considered by many - main evangelist for website usability talks about the top 10 issues with most weblogs. Read the whole article by clicking here. My comments on some of the issues he points out are below:

No Author Biographies and photo

True, an author biography is necessary when the author wants to be known. I don’t like weblogs who have links to “about me” pages that have nothing more than a full name. Even worse than this, though is something I’ve covered in my own post about website usability - and that is the lack of contact information. Believe it or not, I had to almost pummel Gabe from Memeorandum into putting having his email on the website.

On the photos though, its time to disagree with Nielsen. I personally don’t see a necessity for a photo with the biography information in a weblog. While I have no problems with having my photo in the about page, I can see a lot of people not willing to have it in their website for privacy reasons. Sure, it increases credibility when you add a face to the words, but reasoning that “it connects the virtual and physical worlds” isn’t really about usability but social psychology.

Nondescript Posting Titles

Very true. With the abundance of information on the web, sometimes the only thing that distinguishes something I’ll read from something I won’t is the title - mainly because going through the 1200 average blog posts per day my current subscription list gives me is overhaul. The best thing to do to get inspiration for better post titles is to look at regular publications and see the patterns in length and keyword selection.

The Calendar is the Only Navigation

I’ve posted about this on an old article. People who visit weblogs aren’t usually interested in browsing archives by month or week, but by topic. Hence, it is a good rule of thumb to have proper categorization measures, so that your category navigation returns meaningful results. Search (that Jakob doesn’t mention) is also an extremely important asset if your weblog has articles of an atemporal nature.

Bottom line: Allow people to find your content, but don’t assume they keep up with the dates you’ve posted on. Category navigation is more important than date archives, that most people insist on keeping on sidebars.

Conclusion and further reading

Jakob’s latest alertbox proves its value, but I would say most of the other tips are based on common sense - chances are, if you’re reading articles on the blogosphere or are a part of it, you have already considered most of these issues, consciously or not.

For those who want more tips on website usability, my series on pleasing Jakob Nielsen by tackling the 10 biggest design mistakes may be a good read: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I’ve been thinking a lot about categorization, tagging and bookmarks. Everyone seems to have an opinion on why and how social bookmarking will change the browsing experience, and how services like Joshua Schachter’s Del.icio.us have an impact on categorization and taxonomies. There are a lot of projects around this topic, and this post is a dissertation of possibilities.

One word of warning: this is a theoretical and philosophical post - commenting is appreciated - I would definitely like some outside opinions. (more…)