September 2007
I’m continually impressed by people who have the time and motivation to create a daily blog. I had never thought that this would be a daily thing for me, but I’m surprised to find that I post here in spurts; a few posts a week here, a few there and then I neglect it for a while.
In all honesty, daily updates are, if I may be permitted to use an annoying phrase, so Web 1.0. I, like many of my friends, keep track of the blogs (and many sites) I read through an RSS feed. RSS feeds tend to frees content from its immediate temporal place. They make it so the old-school Web metrics of “eye-balls” and “time on site” are not really relevant any more. Back in the dot-com days it used to bug me that time-on-site was considered an important metric to measure site success. I figured that if a user was looking to buy something, the quicker you get them the item they were looking for and get them through the checkout, the more successful the site is. Being on a site like that for a long time, it seemed to me, was a sign that something was wrong, not something to be celebrated.
Having said that, I used to look forward to each day’s edition of Suck, which was more insightful and better-written than it had any right to be. And I have been reading Salon long enough to remember that they used to shut down the site in the late afternoon in order to upload the day’s new content.
One of the most pivotal moments of my career was sitting in a conference room in a barren post-dot-com office building in north Toronto watching a demo of a new generation content management system and thinking “where the hell have I been?” At the time I was managing a 1500 page Web site using Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Cute FTP. I felt like I was letting my organization down by not being aware of these tools and ever since then I’ve been out in front of most advances. Oh, my workplace now has a pretty kick-ass CMS.
Along the way, the way content has been delivered - hell, the way content is defined, has changed and how it is delivered and consumed has taken on many different forms. Before it was brochure-ware, which became articles, which became articles with calls to action to buy something. Now social processes are the big thing. It makes sense if you think about it. The Internet was originally a social instrument, a tool for collaboration. Think: e-mail, usenet. Then, with the Web came an individualization. Think: Personal home pages. The emphasis changed from the public to the personal, or, put another way, the “us” to the “I”. Now it’s changing back.
This is what I’m working on with my work these days. While social media is a pretty trendy term, and it seems like everyone involved in UX design has now adapted it as one of their interests, I have to wonder what took so long? And will it stay?