About breakfast cereal, they are made for the boys, girls and calorie-aware ladies. Why not for men? For courageous men who have to work hard every day!
Is it because men never change and keep eating the boy-cereal? Does it prove that boys will be boys? Otherwise, why not?
I need to say it! I can’t hold it! I need to get it off my chest.
Before I insult anyone or sound like a pretentious web-know-it-all:
I’ve been guilty of doing some amateur information architecture and in that time I made many mistakes (believe me, there are pro’s who almost killed me for that). I love to be able to make mistakes, they deliver their own insights and ideas. So, let me be clear about this, I’m all about experimenting and playing around with novel concepts but their is a time to look back and learn from what we’ve done.
As the title suggests my rant is about tagclouds (or weighted lists). Like many others I was seduced by these cool looking things and being an enthusiastic person I used them. But some time ago I started realizing something about them and I seem to be on my own about it.
They’re a lazy solution and cheap-ass excuse for a navigation!
Never use them if you want your users to navigate though your tags. Really, check your analytics, people rarely use it.
I love the concept of weighted tags but the difference in size makes the tags very hard to read or scan, try it, it gives you migraines.
There are many other ways to navigate tags. What about oldskool alphabetical dropdowns + numbers to show the amount of items? I’m sure those rich-interface-flex-guru-types also have some great alternatives.
Using them to make your website look 2.0 is also not done (I’m not going into the 2.0-look thing, that could be a rant on it’s own). FYI, they have been around for some time now and they lost all of their novelty value, it’s as hip and bold like wearing jeans in church these days. At least try to do something new and make new mistakes.
I have to admit, they’re not all bad. They’re great to quickly “feel” the subjects on a blog or other sites that have no fixed topic. Having one for that reason is OK, (and while it’s there the tags might as well be clickable). Just know that no person in their right mind really “navigates” on these random-topic sites.
Anyway, a tag cloud is a data visualization thing, not a navigation thing.
A few months ago I visited FITC in Amsterdam and Toronto. The whole event was fun but what bothered me was the way most of the sessions started, “Sorry, I’ll be using powerpoint slides”.
Altho almost all the speakers used this most of them thought it was a very uncool thing to do. Slides don’t feel right.
This vibe was perfectly picked up by adobe evangelist and Toronto keynote speaker Mike Downey. He didn’t need to apologize, no, he didn’t use powerpoint or keynote to make slides. He made them in AIR, the crowd liked it. I however, I just saw another kind of slides.
But what’s wrong with slides? These days we need them more frequently to sell, share idea’s, explain concepts… There’s noting wrong with slides, it’s something else.
EriK Natzke, for example had his presentation build in flash (I think). It allowed him to jump in and out, go back and forward insert more files, go deeper into stuff… The presentation had a treestructure just like you would expect from a simple site. Not linear at all.
It made me think on how I’ve been presenting all these years and how difficult it is to make a good keynote. The software is childsplay but the hardest thing is to put a concept in a linear story that can be understood by your client or audience. It’s always a lucky guess…
A good concept isn’t a linear thing and this is why I would like to put my slides in a mindmap structure. This way I only need to think of my approach on how to present it but i’m not stuck in a one-line story. If the audience responds differently I can adapt easily and tell my story in a way that fit’s them best.
Keynotes and powerpoint haven’t really evolved and I don’t think Iwork or Office will do that soon. From time to time we see new software to make slides like sliderocket and 280slides but next to using cloudcomputing they don’t do anything new.
I wish adobe would take on the challenge to build a great slide-machine, revolutionize the way we make and use keynotes. Not a keynote with more functions but something more flexible and dimensional. It’ll be more easy for us to visualize our stuff and allow us to present in a more interactive way.
I think Adobe is able to make the slide cool again… They’re missing it in their catalog and a big amount stuff that is made with adobe software is sold with slides. There is no shame in slides.
Update: Could also have used this graph but I don’t like to point fingers.
Today I was shocked to hear and read all the coverage on the landing of the endeavor. It seems to be big news when a shuttle doesn’t explode… people just don’t have faith in space travel anymore. And this is no surprise!
I mean, what’s wrong with our rocket-scientists and their friends? Are they spaced out? Shuttles get sabotaged, probes get lost and astronauts fly drunk…
It’s frustrating. It feels like our space travel capability didn’t evolve from the time monkeys played astronaut. I grew up with space travel, as a kid I was obsessed by it. I believed that by the time I grew up Star Trek would be a reality.
After all these years I have to conclude that human space travel still is primitive. The only real connection between today and Star Trek is drunken astronauts such as Scotty. And he also experienced some bumpy rides lately.
Thinking about this makes me wonder how Richard Branson is doing. This king of commerce might be humanities’ only hope for smooth space travel. What could come from that?
Pic from Psychotronic Cult Trash flickr pool.
As most of you know, I’ve been between jobs since 2 months. And with These Days missing I found myself with 3 months pay and a whole lot of time… I wasn’t ready for work so I spoiled myself and got some quiet time.
And it was great!, being on Sabbath literally throws you in that other dimension, the one where work is optional.
I discovered it is fun to be alone, I had the chance to watch series and read work-unrelated books. And since I’m planning to come back and start sharing again I decided to share some of the best distractions I had.
Ugly betty: The best discovery of this summer (picture).
Betty her looks really don’t work for her but she has the ambition for two. This ugly duck wants to work in journalism and picks up a job for the fashion magazine ‘Mode’ where she meets lots of fashion cliché people in a gay Star Trek environment. Sounds a bit like The Devil wears Prada but it is totally different because of all the twists and marvelous one-liners. It’s 23 episodes of pure drama, comedy, mystery, farce, camp, soap opera, and satire and has been renewed for a second season.
Earth final conflict:series from star trek creator Gene Roddenberry
Aliens have made first contact with humans and saved the world from hunger and war. They call themselves our companions and share their technology with us.
This series is full of interesting novel technologic concepts and cultural references. I’m glad I got around to see it, my sci-fi knowledge expanded again and I picked up some fancy ideas.
Eleanor Rigby: a Douglas Coupland Novel
I really like the characters Douglas portraits in his books, they always look upon life in a original and funny way. This time It is about Lizz, an overweight ginger woman who can be very funny even when luck isn’t always on her side. The book totally pulled me on the emotional rollercoaster, I almost cried and I had a few good laughs. Emotional stuff is something I like to avoid but this time it was different… Can’t wait to read The Gum Thief.
Hyperspace: A scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warp and the 10th dimension.
A farewell gift from These Days and a good one too. The book describes every detail about modern physics (the one they don’t teach at school).
While reading it your worldview really changes and in between reading you can’t stop thinking about it, it rocks your mind! Now I can finally explain you without any problems the strings theory. Those who saw What the bleep do we know may find this book to be more down to earth and thus far more scientific and less esoterical.
Conclusion: Some might say I’ve spoiled 2 months but I like to think of it as 2 months of mind-expansion…
Some would be reading marketing-books and other professional content but being away from all that showed me that all those things are narrowing your mind and make you lose the big picture. People tend to drown in all that marketing twitter and when you ignore these things for a moment, you’ll notice that the hypes that we, digital people throw ourselves upon are just concepts that give us the fake feeling that we’re in control, making us uninventive and dull…
Monday I attended a debate in the Vooruit in Ghent about the value of online journalism and critique. Some bold statements were made by Clo and Stefan Kolgen (via video video messages) about why paper-journalists should pay a bit more attention to the onliners…
While there was a majority of online publishers in the panel I found that the “online mind” was underrepresented and that the debate was kind of short minded. This was because the online publishers that were present are people who just want to write stuff and don’t care if it’s in ink or pixels (and why not, should there be a difference?). The real onliner on the panel was M. Vuylsteke (gent blogt) but he was clearly no match for the others.
When the debate moved to critiques on cultural events like theatre and movies I was quite shocked that some people in the panel were still convinced that online publishing did not have anything to offer. The pretentious professionals figured that comments and ratings (like the ones on imdb) are worthless and superficial. Plus, their idea of bloggers wasn’t better.
Personally I only read critique from somebody I know (like doodgewoon) and likeminded bloggers. So I stood up and mentioned that I think it is more relevant to read critique from somebody who knows my taste or at least a stranger who likes the same stuff. The comment was thrown away and no comments followed, except for this blog.
Yesterday
My friendDruppels showed me this output from a Forrester research… (more…)
Advertising on blogs? It is something adverpeople been wandering about for some time now, me too. We’ve all seen that blogs can make a difference but only a lucky few of us adverpeople have been able to implement it in their marketing strategy with success.
To successfully implement blogs in a strategy, the adverpeople have to work with the blogosphere, this is for most professionals to time-consuming and demanding (and sometimes very frustrating).
The demand for simplicity in the social sphere is high and that is why adver agencies hire community managers and entrepreneurs create new services for our sector.
Services like Adhese, Metatale and Buzzer may get critique from blog guru’s “it’s too superficial”, but for now and for most campaigns I think these services will be sufficient.
In the end what most adverpeople only need is visibility, the same kind you can get with billboards, TV-commercials and banners on msn.
Basically, adverpeople take their money, go to ClearChannel and think of something to fill the empty space they just bought.
They reason like this “the more people see it, the more people will buy it”, it’s the ClearChannel-mindset.
Bloggers are also people and having visibility on a blog is not that bad because not only random visitors will see it but so will the blogger himself, if he likes the concept and it’s relevant for his blog he will write about it.
If there would be something like a ClearChannel blognetwork more bloggers will get more advertisers (and more money) and they see more of the commercial messages, the chances that more campaigns will be blogged is bigger, jeuj!
So please ClearChannel, buy Adhese, Buzzer, Metatale and make it simple. You’ve bought Rock Werchter, I(L)Techno because advertisers got interested in events, these days they love blogs…
At least we would not have to worry about blogs and advertising anymore…
img via
What she says…
it is probably the only car in the world that would survive me sitting behind the wheel.
Ine: the wrong thing with 4×4 is the eco-factor, luckily you can buy the Niva with LPG-tank and adjusted motor.
Another nice car in the old fiat Panda (DIY paper model)… same genre and almost indestructible
The P2P Blog posted that heise.de reported that 2 French members of the EU parliament want to broaden criminal enforcement rules against copyright infringement. They want copyright infringers to be treated the same way as any other “commercial infringer” or in other words “thief”. (with fines of at least 600.000 Euro)
To give you a clue where these 2 picked up the idea to do this: One of them is Janelly Fourtou, she is married to the CEO of Vivendi a French media giant who makes money with music, television, film, publishing, telecommunications, the Internet and video games. It is a company that would have lots of financial gain if these extra amendments turn in to law.
She is using the votes she got from the public to push and idea to support the few (her husband and friends) instead of the many. This is pure lobbying!
So there is still some time left?! I was not aware that the EU did not yet have any clear guidelines for these copyright issues. Somehow guidelines are necessary to protect creators but the amendments handed in by Fourtou and Fontaine is a bit to one-sided. Apparently we EU citizens have a chance to prevent the downhill movement of our personal freedom with culture by giving more power to the dominant media giants.
We saw this before in the states. US lobbyists with the same dark agenda got their wishes turned in law resulting in a power-driven strangulation of our culture. The one thing lead to the other and now they are ruining net neutrality (covered before) trying to control the data distribution over the internet.
What the members of the European parliament should keep in mind is the fact that there are more content creators outside the media monopoly than the ones inside of it. These independent people benefit from filesharing and net neutrality, it’s their way to get an audience. With these radical amendments approved it would be impossible for these people to get an audience, they will loose their voice ans so will you…
Lawrence Lessig (professor of law) described in his book “Free Culture” (download audiobook or pdf) a realistic model for copyright protection that would protect the creators and also enable our culture to grow further instead of being controlled by a few people with an agenda.
Here is a video explaining a bit of his ideas (via)
We still have time, the amendments could bring alive a discussion among the members of the EU parliament, but they need to be informed well. (I think we should get organized)
If a fair discussion is brought alive this could all end in a progressive modern copyright law fit for the digital content era in a society of free speech.
