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December, 2006 Monthly archive

Le Web 3 fails, politicians and organization to blame

Le Web 3

The web is up in arms with the events that took place over at Le Web 3 Paris, when the conference was “sabotaged” by politicians causing schedule adjustments and mass criticism against the organization.

I wondered up until the last minute whether to attend the conference (as conferences on blogging are a rare thing in europe), but now I feel lucky I didn’t. Moving speakers around to accommodate presidential candidates shows a grave lack of respect towards the audience – particularly if they know nothing about the space the conference is about, or talk in a language a big part of the people listening don’t understand.

Funny part of the whole thing is that the event was called an “unconference” by Loic Le Meur. How can an “unconference” (if you’re wondering about the term, read Dave’s post on the definition) shift towards political propaganda? Clearly, someone’s never been to a Barcamp.

Some good takes on this story by Nicole Simon and David Weinberger. Follow the story through Techmeme – a lot of ink (well, you get it) is being spilled over this issue, and rightfully so.

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Emotional attachment in web-based applications

When was the last time, using a web-based product, that you felt in good hands? Are there any applications out there that make you comfortable – not only because they help you, but because you know they won’t fail you? Because you actually “feel” them as an extension of yourself or your brain?

It’s becoming harder and harder to find applications that make you feel emotionally connected. Taking the physical example of the iPod, which by being tactile in its nature (through the click-wheel and its UI) makes you feel like you have a grasp on your musical collection, can the same sort of emotional attachment be created on web-based UIs?

I don’t think we’re anywhere near the optimal interfaces to connect to and use computers – the keyboard and mouse just don’t convey the experience you may want to get out of a computer-based (or web-based) product. I’m not sure what the solution for the interface will be (although touch is fundamental – as our whole nature is mostly around it) and although my job designing is to create interactions, I always feel pressured by the limitations of the web as a medium.

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Last week in the blogosphere

Things we noticed on the blogosphere this week, from the 3rd December until the 9th.

Kathy Sierra had a really good post on how to build a user community, where she highlights the impact of people helping other people, and how to harness the knowledge of members of your community to benefit other less experienced users.

24 ways continues to amaze with this years series. Since its been a week and a week means 7 posts, I should just point you to the page itself and let you be amazed on your own.

Anne Zelenka over at Om’s Web Worker Daily has a good post on how you can screw up email-based negotiations by not replying, replying late or replying with way too much text. Most of our projects begin with email-based conversations with clients, so email is certainly something we care about.

Dan Saffer has a really good list of interaction design blogs you should be reading (even though I’d say Valleywag isn’t really ID related, ei Dan?). And speaking of lists, fimoculous’s list of best blogs from 2006 has some really great stuff you probably aren’t reading (But should).

Have a great week!

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Last week in the blogosphere

It’s that time of the year again and the guys at 24 ways have been delivering daily presents. Check out the three articles to date: Tasty Text Trimmer, Faster Development with CSS Constants and Flickr Photos On Demand with getFlickr. Christmas-y indeed.

And speaking of christmas presents, this Eboy poster so needs to be under the tree in a few days. It packs a lot of “Web 2.0″ (bubbles included), and if you look closely, you’ll see our logo design for Techcrunch on the left, above the Myspace logo. Awesome!

Eboy

Over at the always great Adaptive Path weblog, Chiara Fox has an essay about tagging vs cataloging. And keep an eye out for her next one which she hints about on the darker side of tagging.

For the developers, there’s a good roundup of tools for intermixing Ruby and Amazon’s services over at the AWS weblog. From libraries to example projects, there’s a little bit of everything. This week we’ll be posting about our experience launching Goplan on Amazon’s EC2.

Luke has a good series of articles on being a Design Strategist (here’s part 2) over at Functioning Form which you should definitely read if you’re in the field. In fact, if you don’t subscribe to Luke’s essays, you should start by doing just that.

Over at the Texas Startup Blog, Frank Demmler has a great piece about Hiring the right people – he highlights some of the overlooked parts on the process, and more importantly, has a few good tips for starting entrepreneurs.

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