Lessons in RSS advertising

February 12th, 2006 * Comments(0)
Contextual targeting gets turned upside down, it seems…. …. Apparently this logic falls apart when it comes to RSS feeds. When Feedburner started testing contextual ads, it found that they didn’t do well. So, they switched gears and started targeting ads at a site’s demographic of the site,

 Businessweek – Some Lessons on RSS Ads from Feedburner

Feed grazing and web 3.0

February 10th, 2006 * Comments(0)

I’m suprised they’re not calling it web 3.0 beta but I guess the beta suffix is oh so web 2.0.

Anyway, some people seem to think that web 2.0 is too old school, gone with the wind so to speak, so they came up with concepts we might see in the future of the web.

 Anne Zelenka might be a good start. She describes it as:

In Web 3, the basic Web element is more granular. I don’t know what to call the individual elements, but each has its own URI. This is the semantic web, the read/write/process web, the active web. The web will “know” so much of itself via semantic technologies like RDF that tasks that previously required human input will be able to be handled mostly by computer algorithm. The web’s greater level of understanding means that users can go further than publishing their thoughts, they can create programs that help them achieve broader goals. Better yet, the active web itself can create and run programs to help users achieve their goals online.

 EirePreneur gives us a nice graphical comparison between web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 as well as an introduction into the concept of feed grazing.

And finally –  Richard MacManus explains what feed grazing actually is.

I think they’re onto something. Obviously information overload is becoming a major problem, Fragmentation and mashup of content might be the key here and we see it happening already but the concept of feed grazing is going beyond that if I understand correctly. Just where and how, from the user perspective, remains a bit of a blur to me at the moment.

Badly designed yet highly successful

February 08th, 2006 * Comments(0)

Andy Rutledge offers some interesting points on highly successful yet poorly designed websites (like Google, Craigslist etc.). Why do they work so well in spite of appearance?

Poorly designed “simple” is far easier to swallow than poorly designed “complex.” It works okay in spite of the bad layout and un-design.

Read more in UX Mag – Hungry? Want another bullshit sandwich?.

To be honest, I think that whenever a website is as successful as the examples he points out, you might as well admitt that they got it right. Design and content wise.
Are those websites perfect from my or his point of view? Most definitely not. But apparently not that many people care and that’s what it’s all about. They’re not out there to please a bunch of designers, they have to please everyone and as they say… beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And on a related note… what should Google & eBay look like according to him? He did that as well…

 Google Redux: a design exercise

 eBay Redux: a design exercise

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