15/06/06

June Emissions

Jakob Nielsen has a new book on web usability. Here are eight big no-nos that he says are still being broken.

The decidedly militant publishing 2.0 on exactly why advertisers hate the web: it’s measurable. And as a result, Google is putting its hands up and saying that it can’t really incorporate brand building advertising into its model.

I have been enjoying Coudal Partners’ CSS of late. Particularly how the visited links become a tick box on a reading list.

What’s so great about Wordpress? And again?

Borders show that loyalty can be bought. 6m customers worth of loyalty.

IF:Book’s column in PW.

The user-generated content argument from Medialoper.

Buk’s archives are now online.

I should probably just aggregate GOB. Here he talks about the future of publishing, albeit primarily from a novelist’s point of view. And then again on how to use the web to market yourself as a novelist, which references the Times’ profile of ST.

A few years ago, at Screenbase, we put together a proposal for the Scottish Book Trust (I think) which involved matching a book search to a widget that queried a national (i.e. Scottish) database of available titles in each library branch. I was pretty amazed that this technology existed - although it was quite basic, it worked - but it seemed to. Earlier this year, when I desperately needed to get a copy of an out of print Punk book (source material for the Eternity is Temporary book jacket) I ended up using that service, successfully. Now, in the week of death for british libraries, there is talk of a nationwide (i.e. British) ordering service. I’m not sure if that is what they mean, or whether this is for trade orders, or both. But it has to be a great idea.

Another Screenbase link. We spent a lot of time building a rights management application, using Flash Remoting as a very early Rich Internet Application. It was really cool, and well ahead of the curve. The problem was that it was also well ahead of the technology’s ability to deliver on the promises of that technology. It also required fantastic and very optimistic processor and bandwidth capabilities that - hindsight makes very clear - the publishing industry isn’t famous for. That aside, we were persuaded to take an ‘agile’ development course - very little documentation other than that of user stories, where the users tell the developers what they need the system to do. This should have been great (hell, everyone hates documentation - until you have an expectation gap on delivery). ANyway, it kind of worked and the agile approach was by no means the reason for the collapse of the project and, in some ways, the company. Why do I bring this up? Adobe (who, conincidentally ended up buying the company who ended up buying the company who developed the software with us) has an article which is in many ways about Documentation Hell and how to avoid it.

The economics of publishing, second part: paperbacking.

Is google killing the internet? I don’t know - but the comments on the above link do show you how far our expectations have been accellerated by the power of find.

Seth’s blogging tips for success.

This pretty much sums up the Wottakers / High St debate.

More on the apocalypse of the ebook.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Design, Future of the book, Google print, Publishing.