Danny fires an anti-FUD missile in the direction of my bosses:

“The BBC, in theory, shouldn’t care how many times you share a copy of, say, Dixon of Dock Green. On the contrary, it should thank you. You’re taking the hard work – and cost – out of distributing the works you have already paid for with your licence fee. So not only does the BBC not need to care about Napster and other file-sharing systems – it can actively take advantage of them. Distributing content in this way does not reduce the BBC’s income, but it can reduce its costs. Copy protection devices and clampdowns on internet copying just get in the way of the BBC’s mission.”

» Guardian Online: Auntie’s digital revelation

Mike Lee is another convert-to-typepad, and over at his new digs he has a nice little post of pattern language, familiar to architects and software designers; for dealing with project politics and introducing new ideas, such as using pattern languages!

Some examples:

• Adopt a Skeptic – Pair those who have accepted your new idea with those who have not.
• Big Jolt – To provide more visibility for the change effort, invite a well-known person to do a presentation about the new idea.
• Corridor Politics – Informally work on decision makers and key influencers before an important vote, to make sure they fully understand the consequences of the decision.

» CuriousLee: Patterns help introduce patterns (or any new idea)

It’s always seemed to me that those non-pithy sentences that people dream up to motivate their staff and enrapture the marketplace, are more of a product of what could be agreed upon internally rather than what would work. Their all-too-bland nature is underlined by this survey.

What are the worst mission statements or taglines you’ve come across or worked under?

» 17 top CEOs shared their elevator pitches, but few understood them

Jon Udell colourfully illustrates (using Trinity from The Matrix) problems of closure and information anxiety:

“Don’t get me wrong. Too much information is a good problem to have. Beats the hell out of not being able to call Tank and download the pilot program. But it does create an interesting new dilemma. If you like to be well-informed, as I do, it’s getting harder than ever to draw the line and say: ‘Enough research, time to act.'”

From Richard Saul Wurman‘s “Information Anxiety 2”:

“”We live in an age of alsos, adapting to alternatives. because we have greater access to information, many of us have become more involved in researching, and making our own decisions, rather than relying on experts. The opportunity is that there is so much information, the catastrophe is that 99% of it isn’t meaningful or understandable. We need to rethink how we present information because the information appetites of people are much more refined. Success in our connected world requires that we isolate the specific information we need and get it to those we work with.”

We all need Tank.

» Jon Udell’s Weblog: “Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter”

Well, the websites, anyway.

“…a good government website can be defined by compliance with the following points:

• It has clear input from stakeholders on its aims and audience.
• Preliminary research should be carried out into what users need.
• The site is frequently tested to ensure it is meeting users’ needs (especially for usability and accessibility) and that the aims of the stakeholders have been achieved.
• It will then be continually adapted to meet users’ needs.
• It will be accessible and usable.”

The points around continuous assessment and adaption are interesting. I hope they publish more detail on how they are going to put in place the processes for this.

» Kablenet.com: Going simple online

Jeff Veen on the perils of inertia:

“Tight deadlines and other resource constraints do the same thing. If you’re doing any amount of user research—and you better be doing at least some user research—large budgets can actually hinder you. It’s easy for Web teams to get stuck in what we call “analysis paralysis.” They have so much information that they can’t act on it. Likewise, I’m frustrated by massive projects that span multiple quarters and have hundreds of dependencies and deliverables. I’ve never once seen a project like that come in on time or never have major revisions along the way. I’m much more interested in quick wins. Have a vision for where you want a product or Web site to be in nine months, then see what you can accomplish in a couple of weeks with the staff and resources you currently have. Keep chasing down the next quick win, and eventually you’ve got significant change. This doesn’t necessarily work for every project in every company, but it’s certainly a good way to build some credibility and heal the immediate pain you may be feeling.”

In the meantime I realise I’ve been back at the BBC for two years now, and have launched just one service (BBCi Search) although I did two iterations of it… My current project has now been ongoing for one year and two months…

» DigitalWeb: An interview with Jeffrey Veen
[via paranoidfish/links]

“For Microsoft and IBM, it’s like designing a giant metropolis, laying out the roads, agreeing on traffic regulations, putting in plumbing, and so on. For the hackers, it’s more like “let’s build a city: everybody bring a brick.” This is not such a bad idea: it’s basically how the PC industry and the web succeeded. But how it will turn out in this case is anybody’s guess.”

» Guardian Online: “The third era starts here”

Lots of good stuff in the comments field of my last post on the subject. And this from Jared Spool’s excellent recent article: “The quiet death of the re-launch” [found via ia/]

“Our findings show that consistency in the design plays second fiddle to completing the task. When users are complaining about the consistency of a site, we’ve found that it is often because they are having trouble completing their tasks. On sites where users easily complete their tasks, the users seem to pay little attention to glaring inconsistencies, often telling us in their ratings that the site was indeed very consistent”

Echoes Fiona’s view that: “Consistency is an end, not a means”.

Enough on this for now.

…build a beautiful part of the web, part 8967:

“Complaining about built-for-the-web content taking over the web, is like complaining about the cars when you’re trying to pogostick down the motorway.” – Ben Hammersley

Do we have a list yet of what makes something “web-native”? It’s something about ease-of-linkage-to-fundamental-blocks-of-meaning, “neighbourliness”, meshing with the web (as best you can) in terms of standards and protocols, being liberal about what you accept and rigorous about what you put out: both in terms of of data and some aspects of user-interface I suspect.

Not just “decorated-directories”, but “Turning your website inside-out” (- Simon Waldman, in the pub once).

More churning on this and why our designs fall between the two stools of reading text and reading hypertext too often… Brew, Brew, Barley, McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grump…

» BenHammersley.com: Unleash the bots

I wish life was late-binding. I think a lot of my projects are, deliberately.

“But [a] late-bound [language] has some deeper and more profound properties that include abilities to actually change the both the structure and metastructure of the language itself. Thus an important new idea can be assimilated into the constantly evolving process that is the system.

Another aspect of late-binding is the ability to change one’s mind about already instantiated structures that are already doing work. These can be changed automatically on the fly without harming the work they are already doing.” – Alan Kay

Lisa Rein has done a fantastic job of annotating and videoing Alan Kay’s inspirational ETCON keynote.

» On Lisa Rein’s Radar: Lisa Rein’s Tour Of Alan Kay’s Etech 2003 Presentation