Category: Analysis

Dave Winer tells us, “HTTP had to be graspable by a single mind, because it was designed by a single mind.” Similarly, Bob Frankston says, “X.400 … was designed over a period of ten years yet failed against SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) which could be implemented in an afternoon.”
I’m going to keep looking for examples of how simplicity trumps complexity on the Net, because I think there’s something profound (and reassuring) about the idea. I’m also on the lookout for counterexamples.

“Click here” seems like a vestige of 1995. There are a lot of approaches for wording links; I favor complete thoughts that summarize the linked item. But “click here” is almost always the wrong choice, and there are some interesting arguments for in the replies.
Conventions change as we become more experienced. Right now, it’s still problematic because there are plenty of new users on the Web who are still unclear about how hypertext works.
When I joined IDC in 1998, their envelopes still proudly bore the dated declaration “Check us out on the World Wide Web http://www.idc.com”. They didn’t change them until some time in 2000, when it was seriously embarrassing.
That doesn’t mean we’re entirely sure how to use URL’s in our writing. I still use full URL’s in email , despite their apparent redundancy, because most mail clients automatically link them. That’s a big advantage.
I recently had to decide how to show my Web address on my business cards. I chose “www.mediasavvy.com” over “http://mediasavvy.com”. Although the “www.” is unnecessary, “mediasavvy.com” by itself seems inadequate, and “http://” is still more fit for software than humans.
We’re still struggling with similar problems in writing telephone numbers. When long distance was a special occasion, putting the area code in parentheses made a lot more sense than it does now, when most cities have multiple area codes.
We have moved from electronic mail to e-mail to email in the last seven years. We no longer admonish print readers to “point your browser to” URL’s. The styles we use for writing on and about the Internet are in a state of flux and we need to reexamine them often.

We should think of the market as a commons. The universe of customers, consumers, clients, end-users, partners, prospects, suspects, targets, pigeons, chumps, marks, rubes, and suckers is shared by the universe of marketers, each of whom is competing for the attention of the market.
Every time some twit at a brand-name advertiser or agency pushes the envelope of good marketing practice, we all pay. As marketers have tried to become “edgier” they have lost track of the edge itself.
First, legitimate marketers have abused click-wrap EULA’s (end-user license agreements) to get consumers to agree to things they haven’t read. Second, Gator and Kazaa use click-wrap EULA’s to trick unwitting users into agreeing to the installation of spyware and hidden P2P client, the redirection of affiliate commissions, and delivery of unwanted advertising. Finally, the FriendGreetings virus uses the pretense of email from a friend to get you to agree to install their software and let it spam your friends and business associates.
First, the Direct Marketing Association fights a master opt-out list and confirmed opt-in for commercial email lists. Then, Yahoo, eBay, and others set your account to opt-in by default. Finally, spammers pretend to have your opt-in and insist that you reply to their fake addresses to opt of their mailing lists.
The DMA’s renunciation of responsibility for spam will result in the destruction of email as a marketing medium, if not the destruction of email itself.
Until big Internet marketers agree to a binding, concrete, bright-line code of conduct, they will continue to provide unintended cover to the destruction of the marketing commons.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the issues that Dave Winer is talking about in this essay on RDF, but something he said really hit home for me:
“If you can’t explain it to me so that I understand what you’re doing — you’ve got a big problem.
It’s a cute, and all-too-common tactic to say that people who don’t get it are dumb. I’m not dumb, but RDF makes me feel that way. After all these years, I’ve concluded that if I can’t understand it, it doesn’t have much of a chance in the market. All the powerfully successful technologies of the past have had simple explanations anyone could understand.

If you look back at what really works on the Net, despite the Law of Leaky Abstractions, simplicity always seems to be the big winner. This may be at the expense of technical excellence, but it’s also very liberating and democratic.
I don’t think I’ve ever regretted choosing simplicity over technology in my personal or professional life.

KikkoMan to the contrary (and you simply must check it out), I’m beginning to feel that Flash is a cancer on the Web.
In response to Jeremy Zawodny’s note about Flashturbation, Marc Canter posted a unconvincing defense of Flash. The essence his argument seems to be that although Flash is the source of a lot of commercial and noncommercial crappiness on the Web right now, rich media clients are going to be the future of the Web and we should keep Flash around so that Macromedia will own the format when that day dawns. Besides, those crappy Flash ads are paying the bills. He concludes:

Lets just close this diatribe by saying: “Please don’t turn off your Flash – it’s taken Macromedia 10 years to get to the point where we can START to define a new world. Now that we’ve finally gotten beyond straw sipping – don’t shoot yourself in the foot by getting rid of your Flash. Give us a chance to change your world – again.”

Marc doesn’t explain why we should put up with flashturbation in the meantime, just so his proprietary format will be the winner in the long run.
A couple of days ago, I was going to post a more moderate entry, motivated primarily by the abovementioned KikkoMan– which I reiterate if you do nothing else today, you must check out. Then I followed another link from Jeremy to an interesting-sounding flash animation on a local TV station’s site that shows Bay Area cell-phone dead zones. The Flash crashes both Chimera and Internet Explorer on a Mac. Interestingly, it crashes with a error message that says I should increase Flash’s memory allocation, despite the fact that OS X doesn’t work that way.
So, I can’t tell you whether the designer needed Flash to convey the information. But I can tell you that Flash (1) is a proprietary format, (2) locks non-Windows users out, and (3) still brings more junk than information to the Web.
One of my favorite press mentions is this from an article about Shockwave.com in Forbes in April of 2000. With the exception of adding “communication” to the list of Web attributes, I stand by this today:

As a reminder, Shockwave.com prominently posts a trash-talking billboard in its lobby as psychological motivation for its 125 employees. “The Web is not going to be an entertainment medium for a long time, if ever,” the sign says, quoting analyst Barry Parr. “It is a news and information and shopping medium.”
“When will they ever get it?” [Shockwave.com leader Rob] Burgess says, shaking his head.

When will they get it, indeed.

“K” is right in the comments on the previous item. Now that I’ve changed the body copy on my site to black, I need to rethink the MediaSavvy’s color scheme.
I’m not convinced that gray is the wrong color for either the navigation headers or the information at the end of each entry. All that stuff is subsidiary to the content. You can find it and use it if you need it, but I don’t think it should draw attention to itself. The color of the links is another matter and they definitely need a boost.
Rather than do any more incremental tweaking, I’m going to rethink the color scheme (and maybe the design) over the Thanksgiving holiday.

MediaSavvy Looks a little different today. I’ve been using Moveable Type’s Plain Jane template with a few modifications. I really like the way it look. However, I began to realize that it gets some of its good looks by making text gray, instead of black.
I’ve been noticing more and more gray-text sites lately and it appears to be a mini-trend, even among those who don’t use MT. Poynter’s new site is the latest example.
Unfortunately, this design gets a lot of its power from reducing text to a gray block–just another design element instead of something to read. I’ve decided to strike a blow for contrast and change the color of the blog body from #666 (coincidence?) to #000.
It’s not quite as beautiful, but it’s a lot more readable

Newspapers are in danger of losing the recruitment market for good. Steve Outing does a good job of interviewing researchers who have looked at this market, laying out the issues, and suggesting strategies.
Clearly, the quality of current offerings, including those from market leader Monster.com, is poor. And CareerBuilder hasn’t delivered the quality and business opportunities that newspapers need.
In the housing slump of of the eighties, the San Jose Mercury News lost a lot of real estate classifieds, just as you’d expect. But in the housing boom of the nineties, that advertising didn’t return. The advertisers had found more efficient and less expensive ways to sell houses. When the Bush recession is over, I doubt that newspapers will ever see recruitment classified linage return to their peak levels. Their big advertisers were already weary of the treatment they were getting when the Web became an option.
Unless newspapers can deconstruct the recruitment classified business, all that will be left of the recruitment advertising business will be ads for telemarketing jobs and work-at-home schemes.

“Don’t focus on making or building or managing anything called “a community.” Foster good and energetic conversation. Give it a place to happen. Let the network know about your network. Invite interesting and outspoken people. Let community happen if it’s meant to. If the juice is there, people will stick around and make it interesting.” This is part of a great note on Mitch Ratcliffe’s site.
Cliff was one of the key people in building The WELL, the “place” most people think of when they talk about online community, whether they know it or not. I was a lurker on The WELL in the early 90’s and most of what I learned about the Internet and online community came from the conversations and meta-conversations that took place there.
Community is still happening all over the Net, often in unexpected places. To my knowledge community has never been a commercial success, despite all the lip service paid to it during the Bubble.
I’ve learned a lot more about my physical community from a local mailing list than I have from the local newspaper, and the people I met there inspired me to get involved in a (local) political campaign for the first time in my life.
I don’t think anyone could have guessed that community could evolve among thousands of individual web sites, each of them a virtual monologue, but web logs indeed coalesce into communities. Dave Winer deserves a lot of credit for creating and empowering that community, and for creating by example the nature of the conversation that happens there.
Surprisingly, there are still a lot of communities on Usenet. It wasn’t that long ago that when reporters referred “the Internet”, as in “What does the Internet think of Jerry Garcia’s death?” they meant Usenet. Google deserves our gratitude for rescuing Usenet’s archives from the ashes of Deja News and for creating a usable Web-based interface for new postings.
I used to call “community” the Big Lie of the Internet, mainly because of the way that people who didn’t understand what it meant intended to harness it for commercial purposes.
Creating a community is still the hardest thing to do on the Web, or anywhere else.

The Poynter Institute (“a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalism”), which hosts a lot of important content about media, just redesigned its web site. It looks nice.
I wish they hadn’t dumped clear and obvious URL’s (http://www.poynter.org/medianews) for obscure URL’s that were clearly designed by a programmer (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45).
But I cannot believe they broke all their links in the process. Any links to eMedia Tidbits on this site are now worthless. Any items that contain those links are a lot less useful than they were yesterday. Big chunks are missing from our conversation.
You would think that after screams of pain about the way that Knight-Ridder’s redesign damaged the Web by destroying historical links that Poynter would have known better.
Making something irretrievable is another way of destroying it.