Keith’s Mini-games submission: Another Web 2.0 Obit.
At 3 years of age, outfitted with an oxygen tank and other hefty life support devices, Web 2.0 took it’s last whirlwind tour around the globe.
It was an appropriate end to a life of turmoil, misunderstanding and lots and lots of debate. Web 2.0 was nothing if not talked about.
No one is quite sure when Web 2.0 was born, but I, along with many others, believe Web 2.0 to be the child of Tim O’Rielly. Born on the stage at the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.
Web 2.0 came into this world kicking and screaming, seen as many a a herald of better times and great innovation. And there is something to be said for it’s work as a catalyst for great change and as a leader, bringing so many to the light that is the web.
Web 2.0’s father described Web 2.0 as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
Vague? Sure. And many didn’t have the same vision for Web 2.0. In fact, as Web 2.0 grew and began to wield it’s influence heavily over every aspect of life, many began to notice that with all the good it brought, not everything was rosy.
“If I have one more client ask me for a ‘Web 2.0’ style site,” said Jeffrey Kalabas, of Juno, Alaska. “I’m going to go postal.”
There were even those that thought Web 2.0 was a minor blip, not even to be acknowledged as a player in this Internet game of ours. The venerable Tim Berners-Lee, for example, decried Web 2.0 as a new name for more of the same.
There might be something to that.
Be that as it may, and like it or no, it’s clear that Web 2.0 is no longer among us. On October 14th, 2008, Internet officials have declared Web 2.0 dead after having been missing for many months. The cause of death is unknown, but foul play is highly suspected. There are many who had just cause to wish for the death of Web 2.0, and it seems those wishes have been made true.
Web 2.0 is survived by father Tim O’Reilly and its spouse of 1 year, Michael Arrington, editor of Tech Crunch. Web 2.0 has no known children.
Services are 2 p.m. Saturday at Evergreen-Washelli Funeral Home, 11111 Aurora Ave. N., Seattle. Memorials may be made to Foundation Fighting Blindness, 11435 Cronhill Drive, Owings Mills, MD 21117, or Salvation Army, P.O. Box 9219, Seattle WA 98109.
Tom’s Mini-games submission: Remembering Web 2.0.
On October 21st, 2008 in an unexpected turn of events, Web 2.0 passed away. In what people are describing as “shocking” and “unbelievable”, she appears to have vanished from the internet. Initial reports this morning are that Web 2.0 was out late at a Digg Kegg’r in San Francisco, stumbled out around 4 a.m. and then just didn’t make it back to her Mountain View, CA bungalow.
Since Web 2.0’s rocket to stardom in 2004 at an O’Reilly conference, her late night escapades have been well documented. Numerous sites have likened her to both Courtney Love and Amy Winehouse, but recently many had thought she’d turned the corner and was on the road to more legitimate place on the internet.
Offices across the country have reported seeing Web 2.0 hanging out with CEO’s, Web Marketing Managers, and even some junior level developers. “Her name has been dropped more than designers drop gradients” L. Tail of Wired said in interview. “I was really starting to think she had some substance. Looks like she was still high on herself.”
One of the attendees, a long time friend of Web 2.0, Gratuitous D. Shadow, was interviewed shortly after the Digg party and said, “Web 2.0 and I were just pounding back a few with with Overly R. Corners and she seemed fine. I did see her head into the bathroom G. Text and she’s been having a rough time, too. They both came out pretty giddy.”
Reports are still hazy and we’ll know more soon, but for now we’re willing to confirm the end of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is remembered by R.S.S., H. Services, Social N. Sites and W. Ikis.
Kenny’s Mini-game submission: Web 2.0 is dead, a poem.
A poem upon the loss… of a true friend.
You charmed us with your silly cats,
and your social networking.
You told us to join in, sign up
and did with viral marketingYou told us that we had to share
and that video was the future
You built a look of rounded corners
of ajax, flash: your suture.You gave us all these weblebrities
who indulged in their fames
You gave us organic cafeterias
and some pretty f**ked up namesIn fact in passing you have shown
that you have mastered the art
Of great concepts like friends and sharing
and tearing them apartAnd what of writing hath you wrought
is it something noble?
No, just a deusche like Arrington
and a giant dork like Scoble.What about design, did that go well
If YouTube could attest
You took design and killed it’s father
churned out the most grotesqueWell what of film, the greatest art
that opens everyone’s eyes
You gave us the vision of a cup
and two girls who need to sanitizeUser-created content,
a mighty vision that stands tall
what better way to make the money
then doing no work at all?So tweet, so share, so make a friend
and know as 2.0 passes
Some hot new movement on the web
will be coming out of our asses!
With the best “Web 2.0 is dead” haiku we’ve seen to date…
Round candy colors
reflection, used and abused
epic fail whale
How to Know If You Have a Good Job.
I came across this pithy piece of advice while researching management techniques the other day. When evaluating your job, the following questions are worth considering:
1) Do I know what is expected of me?
2) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
3) Does someone at work care about me?If you can answer “yes” to these three questions (so the advice goes), then you probably have a good job (and manager).
Slides from Design and Development: Behind The Scenes.
A few weeks back Jeff and I spoke to a very engaged and fun group of folks at the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session in Atlanta. It was a great conversation where we went into quite a bit of detail about our current redesign, the design and development choices we made along the way and the goals behind those choices. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about our business and the thinking behind all that we do at Blue Flavor.
I’m happy to share with you the slides from that event. I’m not sure they’ll make complete sense without us talking over them, but I hope they’re useful to someone out there.
Slides from Day One which focused on design, branding, marketing and the like:
Slides from Day Two which was centered around development, CSS frameworks and Django.
In my bajillion years of writing papers for school assignments, there was one mantra which dripped endlessly from the pointers of fastidious English and Humanities profs: “Know your audience. Then, write specifically to that audience.”
This mantra is carried through writing for the web, where we persona-writing, primary-user calculating, plucky writers prostrate ourselves upon the altar of due diligence. In every respectable copywriting guide I’ve read, there are entire chapters dedicated to clearly defining an audience.
The reason for this is obvious: We can’t just go rattling of taglines, press releases, and web copy in some willy nilly, self-centered fashion. To sell stuff, we have to know who we’re trying to sell TO.
Still, if you’ve ever tried to write for anyone who’s not your diary, you’ve probably noticed how difficult imagining (much less writing for) this ghostlike audience can be. You may also have had to contend with stakeholders, differences in tastes and aesthetics, and various business/strategy goals.
The problem? It’s easy to lose your voice trying to recognize everyone else’s. And when you lose your voice, your writing suffers—a lot. So how do good writers keep it together?
Master the Craft. Find Your Voice.
William Zinsser’s great book, On Writing Well, does a great job of explaining this issue. In his chapter on “audience”, he writes:
Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?”…It’s a fundamental question and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the mass audience—every reader is a different person…Don’t worry whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge in a sudden impulse of humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in.
In terms of craft, there’s no excuse in losing readers through sloppy workmanship. But whether the reader likes what you’re saying or how you’re saying it—don’t give him a moment’s worry. Be yourself when you write.
In other words, the is trick is master the craft of writing (syntax, grammar, flow, style) while cultivating the attitude of someone committed to expressing her own, authentic voice.
Or, to put it another way: Sure, you have to know your audience—knowing how to write well will help you target that core group. But if you want your audience to be captivated, conjure a voice that is deeply personal.
Because the convincing tone of an expert craftsman who writes for himself is what keeps readers coming back for more.
Welcoming Martine To Blue Flavor.
Today we’d like to welcome the newest member of the Blue Flavor team, Martine Kline.
Martine will be helping out with XHTML/CSS coding and web site production on a contract/part time basis. We’re very happy to have her as she brings with her a lot of great experience from her time at FindLaw. Having worked with her a bit in the past (she did the initial coding for Happy Masochist, Danger is my first name and Boomarung! ) I’m really excited to see what she can do for Blue Flavor and our clients.
AAOMS has gone live, and we couldn’t be happier. They were great to work with, and it was a fun challenge to design and architect a site that both served a general audience and catered directly to their members.
I headed up the project management and information architecture of the new site, Kevin did a wonderful job on the visual design, Kenny created a fantastic set of standards-based templates and Mike Aparicio at AAOMS did a bang-up job integrating everything into a new Expression Engine system.
For more details on the project be sure to read our case study.
On Monday, November 10th, Blue Flavor will open up its doors to freelancers and other independent, community-minded creative and technical people, with the grand opening of Whitespace.
Co-working, Blue Flavor Style
Whitespace is a coworking arrangement for professionals who are passionate about their work, but tired of working alone at home or in noisy coffee shops. Think of it as a co-op, artist and tech space. It’s also a great environment for relaxing and collaborating with like-minded people.
We offer three coworking packages: a daily membership, a part-time (four days/month), and a full-time (monthly) membership. Each membership comes with high-speed wi-fi, access to the space (which has a kitchen, dining room, conference rooms, and more) during normal business hours, and free admission to Whitespace events.
You are invited to our grand opening event on Friday, November 14th at the Blue Flavor offices. Please RSVP via Upcoming or Facebook. Hope to see you there!
For more info on packages, pricing, scheduling, etc., visit rentwhitespace.com
Over the last month or so we’ve been working on a super-secret social-ish web application. (Cue the hype machine!) It’s been a really fun experience for the whole team and we’re learning quite a bit about the whole web application design and development process from the ground up. Something we don’t usually have the opportunity to do, as we are usually brought in after the initial goal setting, etc. You know, once they’ve already decided what needs to be built.
Anyway, it’s been fun and we’ve had some pretty unique learning experiences along the way. Today I wanted to talk a bit about one related to design and user interface.
The project was conceived as something fun for us to work on and as a learning experience. As such we’ve all had a hand in it. Who knows what it’ll grow into, this thing seems to have a mind of its own! It’s already grown in scope beyond what we had originally worked out, luckily quite naturally.
We started out, as we always do, with goals and a pretty solid set of features, interactions, flows, data models, etc. that we needed to design. It was pretty slow moving and, well, normal. That is, until Jeff jumped in and built about half the application before we even finished the UI and visual design.
At first I don’t think anyone was too comfortable with this, but Jeff was excited and doing really solid work really quickly, so we let him keep at it. He was able to build so much, so fast, that we could hardly keep up anyway. Seriously, Django is amazing. It’s crazy what you can do in a short amount of time. In any case, in about a week, Jeff had a fairly functional application built, it had most of the core features, most of the user flows, etc. All it lacked was the UI and visual design.
We learned quickly, however, that we could actually use it and proceeded to do so. It was an experience like no other I’ve had. Using an application via very simply styled forms alone really hammers home how important UI/UX is. At the same time it helped guide the design of the application a bit. We were able to see where things needed to be simplified and where we needed to rethink things. It was almost like working with a “functional” prototype, except it was actually functional and looked nothing like what we envisioned the final application to look like.
I’m not suggesting designers and developers go about building an application this way, however, what I think might be good and interesting is to go and use applications sans-design and UI. This should be relatively easy to do in many cases with an alternate style sheet. When you break down the interactions, tasks, actions and flows to their most basic you can see things you might not have seen before. Things that could really help the overall ease of use, etc. of your application.
Try it some time. Let us know how it goes.
Motive Interactive has released a new version of its advertising platform, called Advent 2.0, and the new user interface has gotten a lot of praise lately. Blue Flavor worked with Motive to create the front-end design of their previous system Advent 1.0. We are exited to see Motive continue to develop this system and flattered that they kept many Blue Flavor inspired design features from the first version intact.
ShoeMoney.com recently published a story on the new release that goes into a lot of detail. Jeremy Schoemaker explains: “At first glance, I’m really impressed. The interface is fast-loading and easy to use. …2.0 looks pretty sweet. I guess it’s run off of an ajax system, so everything is running off of one page. Very nice.”
You can read more about the details of our work with Motive Interactive in the Motive case study. It’s really nice to see our work so well received. Of course, it helped that we had a very cool client, who saw the value Blue Flavor brought to the table.
SXSW Information Architecture Work.
Last spring we were approached by the great people at SXSW to help re-structure and re-organize their every growing and often hard to navigate web site. As huge fans of the festival and designers who’d actually thought about the problem a bit in the past we naturally jumped on the opportunity.
The work was done and launched, to pretty rave reviews, a while back and we’ve just now gotten around to writing up a quick case study covering the process and work that was done. Go and give it a read if you’ve got a minute. Or, better yet, head on over to SXSW and check it out for your self. You should register to attend while you’re at it. We’ll be there and are planning another on of our famous parties! We’d love to have you!
It was a great project, with great people that we really loved doing. Really the best of all worlds. And it was very well received by our friends and peers, which is a great bonus to doing good work.
We Love Album Art for Software.
Looks like our wild plan to revolutionize how we display our work is getting great feedback. People love the posters that Joe Alterio and Elliot Jay Stocks have created to depict our projects, proving that foregoing traditional color-branding and screenshots for more original artwork can be good for marketing.
Check out Joe’s recent blog post , in which he talks about how using “album art for software” and “hiring weird artists” can help you up your cool cache and stand out. In Joe’s own words:
So, you companies: go hire weird artists! They’ll thank for it, you’ll be operating in the tradition of the Medicis, and in the end, you’ll get some great looking stuff.
I wanted to take a quick second and talk about a network of sites I’ve been working on. Over the last few months I’ve, very slowly, been putting together a small network of three sites running on ExpressionEngine: The Bottom Line Network.
About The Network
The concept is simple: I wanted a place where I could publish short-form articles as I’ve been pretty strapped for time with the running of the business. I initially thought of a single blog, but then the designer/developer bug got ahold of me and I had the idea of having a networked set of sites. So I began designing and brainstorming and tinkering and came up with The Bottom Line network.
It’s made up of three sites:
- Happy Masochist - A place for me to talk about small business and entrepreneurship.
- Danger is my first name - A music blog. Look for mixtapes and such there!
- Boomarung! - A travel log.
The sites are up and running, and I had a lot of fun working with ExpressionEngine to get everything powered. Also, a big thanks to our new front-end developer, Martine for her help with the templates. That made my work so much easier.
So, the site’s are up, but I’ve not had near enough time to write for them. I hope that changes, but with this crazy economic time coming up I’m not holding my breath. Be that as it may, I’m going to try my best to keep them all somewhat up-to-date. I’ve also got a few more things I want to tinker with on the ExpressionEngine front. I’ve got some fun ideas for pulling it all together with the multi-site manager that runs everything.
If you’re curious, have a look at my most recent post: Our Recession Plan over at Happy Masochist.
Refresh.