Clay Shirkey:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Everyday, we answer small business customers’ questions on how to “show up” in search engines.

David Mihm has done an extensive survey of local SEO experts and distilled their responses into a fantastic summary of local search engine ranking factors

David doesn’t provide a summary of all of them listed in rank order, so I’ve taken the liberty of creating a summary spreadsheet.

It’s important to note that these have been reverse engineered from the search engines in one way or the other; but this is a very valuable snapshot of current common wisdom among local SEO folk.

(via screenwerk)

Laura Alter analyzes how to make an app compelling using game-design principles:

• Collecting things


• Earning Points


• Getting/giving feedback


• Exchanges/Gifting


• User Customization


• Syndication


• Competition


• Tipping Point

What if we applied those to designing jobs?

• Collecting work one is proud of – give folks a way to show off good work to co-workers


• Points – measure performance metrics that an individual and team has immediate control over


• Getting/giving feedback to and from clients, co-workers, supervisors in semi-real time


• Exchanges/Gifting – exchanging points


• User Customization – give folks some latitude in designing the work they do


• Competition – there’s definitely a risk with competition becoming a corrosive or antagonistic force, but I’d guess in most work environments there’s a way to create pretty benign but fun and engaging competitions focused around the work being done.

Not sure how syndication or “tipping point” apply as they’re geared more toward network effects. Perhaps in a virtual work environment they’d be useful to distribute information that the factors above are built on.

As a matter of fact, if features “tipping point” were applied well, it could be a powerful recruiting mechanism.

I did a short presentation today at the Washington DC, BarCamp.

I briefly reviewed eight applications that can be used to manage your to-do’s according to the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.

(This is the first presentation I’ve done in the very cool S5 format. You can view it online or download the zip file.)

Great quote from Steve Wozniak in Founders at Work:

So Mike was going to finance us, and then one day he said to me, “You have to leave Hewlett-Packard.” And I said, “Why? I designed two computers [Apple I and Apple II] and cassette tape interfaces and printer interfaces and serial ports and I wrote a Basic and all this application software, I wrote demos, and I did all this moonlighting, all in a year.”

He had been living and breathing hardware design since he was a kid, culminating in this breathtaking creative output.

Needless to say, he left HP to co-found Apple.

Adpative Path has a thought provoking post about using design to communicate otherwise hidden social and environmental costs.

Jennie Winhall’s talk at MX on Designing for Social Good has made me think about ways that we, as user experience designers, could use our understanding of psychology and behavior to develop creative and positive solutions that help people see hidden costs and make better decisions. Some examples…



Grouchy experience: Big warning sign featuring fines you’ll receive if you dump toxic waste into a storm drain.

Positive experience: Design storm drains to look like fish. You wouldn’t want to dump junk on a cute fish.

Not haven driven for almost two months (after my car was totaled and we decided to give FlexCar a try), I’ve been amazed at the increased quality of life—lower stress, more time for productive thought, lower costs, more walking—and less risk that I’ll be seriously injured by a guy running a red light.

I wonder how that would be communicated graphically?

I just added a couple of new pages to this site based on 30boxes very cool calendar mashup widget.

One is what I’m calling my “lifestream”—it’s a compilation of my flickr photo stream and the rss feed from this blog.

The second is flickr sailing, a combination of photos from flickr in the sailing and sailboats pool and those tagged sailing or sailboats.

It’s pretty cool to be able to take any feed and see it visualized on a calendar.

I’m digging MarsEdit.

I never realized that going to the site, logging in, and posting via a clunky web interface was as frictional as it turns out to be.

I’m enjoying knowing that posting is just a command-tab away.

I started looking for a desktop blog client today—and lo and behold it’s the day that MarsEdit got acquired by Red Sweater Software.

I also checked out:

• MacJournal
• ecto

Between John Gruber and other mac luminaries saying they use ME for the vast majority of their posting, I thought what the hell, might as well give it a shot.

This is my first post, and so far so good. Textile worked on the post, I’m editing this one right now…

How about a photo? Hmmm. Not so fast here, bucko… When I try to upload a photo via ME, I get the error

Can’t upload file for Software Sports because this server reported an error: No uploads allowed for this site

According to this WP Ticket, this problem should be resolved. Maybe ME is using a deprecated API call?

Update, 2/23—turns out that photo support was remarkably simple: just had to enable file uploads in WP admin (Options -> Miscellaneous). I’m using a pretty stock version of WP and no path changes were necessary on either the WP or ME side.

Another option is to upload photos to Flickr then use flickit to find and paste the img location into your post. That’s how I did the photo to the left.

Jonathan Korman’s Where Do Product Managers Fit? presents a case for product development with interaction designers, marketing and engineering working in concert for product success.

His approach is summarized in his diagram:

Importantly, he advocates that the product be significantly defined by interaction or user experience designers, an approach that’s very attractive to me.

But it seems to me that his model misses a key element of user experience—namely, users’ experience with the product through all phases of its use.

In particular, this includes any point at which the customer may touch anything related to the product—including customer service, community presence, and in certain cases, operations or professional services.

User guides, phone support, forums and blogs are critical touchpoints that can powerfully catalyze customer evangelists and they should be included in all product development strategies.

Additionally, operations or professional services must have an equal seat at the product development table products to determine features and feasibility of service-oriented “products.”

Together, thinking about product development this way is a call to rethink the long-neglected “admin interface.” Whether it’s customer support or operations personnel, just about any product has internal features that directly impact customers’ experience with a product.

It also begs the question of “managing” communities (forums, blogs) that may or may not blossom up around a product and heavily influence a user’s experience with the product and a company’s brand.

What impact do these additional factors have on the product development process?

• First, customer service must be involved to identify costs and feasibility of customer support
• Second, a community strategy should be part of any product development strategy
• Third, for a technology-enabled service product, operations must play a key role during product development
• And Fourth, tying all these together, interaction designers should be tasked with designing for internal customers—customer service and operations—just as much as they should design for external customers