I saw an interesting Tweet from Josh Bernoff today:
This made me wonder, what is the importance of coolness vs usefulness. Paper.li is a pretty cool idea, but I would have to agree with “everyone” that every experience I’ve had with the service comes off as spam. On one hand it does a great job of creating usefulness to it’s users as an aggregation tool, but if there is no usefulness created on the publishing end of the service then why is this better than something like Google Reader?
Usefulness is always going to be more important than coolness. I look at services like Backupify and Dropbox that create a simple solution to a problem in a very useful way. These are great services that focused on usefulness first which created coolness later. The moral of this story? Create something useful, and let the coolness happen.
If you haven’t heard, in an attempt to make the web a prettier place, Google offers the world a Font API. These are fonts that anyone can use on their website outside of the standard web safe fonts that we see on every site on the web. This is really an exciting opportunity for designers that I really have not seen utilized as much as it probably should. I recently redesigned the landing page for my little corner of the web, and I wanted to give the Font API a try. You can see the results over at jeffhertlein.com.
It turns out the be incredibly easy and can really make a difference in the feel of a site. The first step is to pick out your font you want to use. From there, you just copy and paste the code provided into your header and use the font name in your CSS like it was any other font. I used Yanone Kaffeesatz as my font, my header code looks like:
Simple. The most incredible part is how much it makes a site stand out from other sites to add something as simple as a different font to your design.
With the new year upon us, I have made the decision to commit to doing a Project 365. I’ll be doing a photo a day. I can’t promise that I will post my photo every day but plan to take a photo every day and at least update every few days or so. Just to be clear I am by no means a professional photog but part of the reason for me doing this is to improve my skills.
I’ll be housing the photos through Posterous and Flickr (an idea I stole from @lenire). My Posterous page can be found here. I am excited to be doing this along side @lenire and @tw3nty3ight. Here’s to a new year full of fun and photos! Cheers!
I recently read the Cluetrain Manifesto, and found it to be one of the most important books I’ve ever read. A quick note, I read the 10th anniversary edition with added commentary. Here is my reaction.
I found this book to be fascinating, inspiring, and important. I am a little ashamed to say that I had never heard of this book before seeing on my class book list this term, but it is extremely relevant to the work I do every day. While I was encapsulated by the first 71 pages, I was taken aback at the relevance of the rest of the book which was written 10 years ago, millennia in internet time. The biggest point that comes across from this book is that the internet is a media that people look to for un-filtered and de-corporate information, opinions, and interactions.
The book made me realize that the term “social media” as it applies in 2009 is really nothing more than an irrelevant buzzword. From the beginning, the internet as we know it was a media spawned by social people outside the boundaries, or “silos”, created major corporations or government. For this exact reason, it is important that we continue to fight for a free internet. What truly makes the internet special is its ability to allow people to share information and thoughts on their terms. It is important that the internet not be controlled in the way that we are told what it is and what it is to be used for. It never stops amazing me the huge amounts of creative ideas that are part of the “web 2.0” (I’m not a fan of this term, but it best describes my point) revolution. A point that Christopher Locke and David Weinberger bring up on page 238 is that the web has no “trajectory” or “direction”; it will become what we make it. This is still relevant ten years later, and the only way the web will become what many optimists believe it can, and for this to happen, un-filtered creativity must thrive.
In relation to social media as it is today, we see it as kind of a confirmation of the thoughts and claims of this book. Truly the Internet was created on a social basis that was a landing pad for people to express their opinions and share information on their terms. I think the “social media” movement that we have seen the past few years really is just a period in which tools were introduced that allow us to do what the Internet was intended to be in a much easier way.
Overall, social media is the future of the web and I believe the future of marketing. While I believe print, radio, and TV advertising is not going anywhere for a long time, marketers who are serious about building relationships and focusing on more than just numbers will look to social media as their primary focus for building relationships with their customers.
Note: You can still read the original text in it’s entirtey at The Cluetrain Manifesto website.