Cuene.com

Category: Web/Tech

  • Me vs. the Stream: Design Rigor Still Matters at BBC

    If you are a content provider (magazine, newspaper, TV channel), does the design of your brand and your content still matter? So many of the digital experiences we have today are mediated abstractions of the original and/or are driven by the device we consume it on. Think: we get our newsfeeds via RSS, read through our preferred reader (google reader, etc.), twitter updates in the Facebook stream, Facebook updates via text and email, NY Times stories on the blackberry. Does anyone see the content displayed as it was originally intended by the team of designers?

    Design still matters at the BBC. Check out this really thoughtful, really detail and very impressive overview of the BBC's efforts to rationalize and maintain a wholistic visual design framework. It's an amazing story, really. Well worth the 15 minutes it will take to read through it and digest it.

    As someone who is (now very) indirectly responsible for the visual design of some important content-driven digital platforms, I look at this with envy. I envy the time the designers had to be thoughtful, practical, intentional. I envy the trust the organization gave the designers, and i envy the power of persuasion that must have been employed to get the top of their house to believe so strongly in the value of an investment in a unified design language. 

    I love deeply immersive, well organized and thought-through digital experiences (like, well, the BBC.com website and the BBC ipad reader), but i'm worried about our ability to truly deliver them as we move into the stream phase of the digital evolution. The "content" we used to experience as a whole experience is getting broken into it's components (text, images, video) and we're losing a lot of control over the experience (if we haven't completely lost it already). 

    Question for designers: How much to invest in the "experience", when most of our content will get delivered via some device/reader/api/filter where we can't maintain control over the look/feel/design of our content.

    Counterpoint: Invest more in the design of the "original" content and create a remarkably better experience, so those who see it in the second-generation, mediated form want to come back to the original. Frankie Goes to Hollywood's version of Born to Run was good, but the orginal source was better.

  • Congratulations, Paul Isaakson

    Paul, Congratulations on the new move! Bold, but smart. 

  • This is why i haven’t been Too Worried About Mobile Marketing

    That is, if you define "mobile marketing" as marketing over phones managed/tethered to traditional carriers like verizon, Tmobile, etc. What i’ve been counting on is that the internet would be everywhere, cheap/free and thats where the marketing will get delivered. The device will be an internet device that has the size/form factor of a phone (and may have phone functionality) vs. the phone that acts like the internet. Seemingly subtle difference,  but tremendously important.
    Link: Technology Review: The Coming Wireless Revolution.

  • A Small Gesture of Reconcilliation

    I love stuff like this, made easier and more visible by social media. Another cool project from Ze Frank.

  • Playing with Skype. Finally.

    I’m jimcuene on skype. Just like everything else. It seems to work ok.

  • Facebook Group and Brand Pages Best Practices | Social Media Explorer

    Link: Facebook Group and Brand Pages Best Practices | Social Media Explorer.

  • The Atomization Continues: Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model

    The atomization of the web continues, as evidenced by the continued improvements to services like Gnip. The transition from "Pages" as the atomic unit of the web experiences to "posts" or "items" or "records" continues. Techcrunch has a nice write up on Gnip: Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model.

  • Revealing Portrait of Life on Planet Flickr, via the Community Manager

    heather Champ is awesome. And this profile of the community and Champ does a nice job providing some background on how Flickr manages its community, the heart of the site. A couple weeks ago i found myself in a meeting rattling on about "the soul of a site". The folks in the room politely smiled, but i’m sure i didn’t make much sense. This article gets at it much better than i could have, by focusing on the "spirit of Flickr".

    The essence of Champ’s job, she says, boils down to defending this
    imprecise but holy "spirit of Flickr." Indeed, imprecision is an art
    here. The list of community guidelines
    is an assortment of lawyer-vexing instructions like "Don’t be creepy.
    You know the guy. Don’t be that guy," and "Don’t forget the children."
    If you’ve spent any time online, you instantly recognize these to be
    meaningful and clear edicts. Champ is only half joking when she says
    her is responsibility is to keep things from "encroaching on Flickr’s
    serenity."

    "The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the
    teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the
    community," she explains."

  • I hate Comscore Too

    Until Quantcast gets critical mass, or Google grows, we’re stuck with them. Link: ComScore: The Internet company everybody loves to hate – Sep. 26, 2008.

  • Nerd Alert: Discussion of SOAP vs. REST

    I find this post strangely soothing to me, one of those "Now i get it!" kinds of articles. More than most of you probably ever wanted to know about SOAP and REST.

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