Happy to Join the DynamIt Technologies Team
Greetings to those coming here from the DynamIt Technologies blog!
You hear a lot of companies pay lip service to creating a fun work environment that helps people focus on quality work and customer service. The simple truth is that creating that kind of atmosphere depends on putting together a team that wants to see it happen, and that’s what has happened here.
I use the term quality work a lot, and I use it a lot more now that I’m working here, because it means so much to me. I believe that, in an area of business that changes so much, that has so much potential to change how we all do what we do for the better, and that, unfortunately, can come with a pretty steep learning curve, I think that doing ‘quality work’ really means helping everyone involved understand what can be done and then working with them to get it done in a way that exceeds today’s core expectations.
Browsers, browsing platforms, audience and customer expectations, and business requirements are changing too fast to work to today’s requirements and stop there, and the best relationships we can form in this business are those in which we all learn from each other.
I know I’ve formed one with the folks here at DynamIt that will teach me a lot, and I couldn’t be more excited about that.
Does Your Site’s Flash Help The User Or Hinder?
There is an old saw credited to football coach Vince Lombarti that “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” When it comes to developing and maintaining a Web site, it should be said that meeting your users’ goals and priorities in the most useful way isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. And this is often where the Flash-based Web site falls down, because developers usually use Flash because of the sparkle rather than to enhance the utility of the site, and it is often true that what doesn’t add to utility detracts from it.
Today’s example is the Web site for Noodles & Company, which failed to help me perform a basic task this morning and annoyed me in the process. This Flash-based site greets you right away with a truly impressive number of annoyances, including the fact that the wierd-o audio is on by default, that it loads slowly and offers no option to skip the Flash-site until it has both completely loaded and then gone through its dippy load-up animation sequence. You can not mute the audio until the intro animation is complete. And finally: the link for a non-flash alternative site goes to a .Net error page if you click on it on the location-search page, or at least, it did for me.
Also note that navigating the site requires loading a menu - waiting for more dippy animation - then waiting for the site to animate the process of loading and unloading each of the pages between the home page and the one you’ve selected in the menu. All the little flash animation slows the page down to a crawl on my system, which is neither a dinosaur nor a hot rod.
And then, if you happen to be looking for the hours of operation, like I was, you’ll find yourself picking up the phone after all that anyway.
If the goal of the company was to provide me with a goofy animation experience they succeeded. If they were trying to convince me to go eat lunch there today and help me do so, they failed.
We’re Podcasting Our Road Trip
You can listen to me test out the Gabcast service which lets us podcast by cell phone as we travel.
Social Networks, Social Applications & Aggregations: Do We Need Declared Tiers?
I feel that it’s almost sacrilege, but I’m feeling a little burned out on Twitter right now. I’m sure I’ll step back into the light, but first I’m doing some hard thinking about what social networks and applications are for, who decides what they’re for, and if it isn’t time for us to declare class of applications as a user community.
The idea I’m toying with is this: RSS feeds and APIs have created a world wherein Joe and Jane User can put their data in using whichever interface they like and have it piped all over creation, so maybe we need to be explicit about where we are actually inputting original content and where we are just piping it in. In other words, if I’m reading your blog in my Google reader and you start Twitterfeeding it into Twitter, I’m getting double posted on all your blogs, and if you also produce original tweets under the same account, I’m in the position of having to choose whether or not I want to put up with the extra noise in my Twitter feed or ignore your tweets.
I’m working on a longer post about Twitter Etiquette, but in the meantime I just wanted to get this idea out in the open: should we be thinking about classifying some applications as primary and others as secondary sources about us, and, in light of Friend Feed, which is specifically designed to aggregate, is it really necessary to use Twitter as a blog post, blog comment, bright kite, flickr, etc, notification service in the same feed as your regular tweets?
There Are Still Newspapers In This Country That Are Not Online Yet
Don’t bother browsing over to southhaventribune.com - it’s a parked domain. There was content there at one time - a fact you can confim by checking out a South Haven Community Site that links to the old home of the Tribune online. I do not know why they aren’t online, but I do know that they aren’t.
My father is a columnist for this paper, and I just browsed over to see if they were putting his stuff online yet. Well, it turns out they aren’t putting anything online anymore. Read more
Molly Friday, Highbanks Edition
You’ll forgive me for not posting a Molly Friday on Friday, I hope, as I haven’t posted a Molly Friday at all in a few weeks.
We took Molly to the fantastic Highbanks Metro Park last Sunday. It was really in full splendor during the heat wave, but that was a serious heat wave. However, that was one serious heat wave, so we cut the hike a little short, because, as this shot shows, the heat really takes it out of you.
More Molly action shots below the fold . . . Read more
A Good Problem To Have
We keep a quote on the wall of our studio at home: “A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Albert Camus said it, and I could not agree more.
Now that the job hunt is getting serious, I’m asking myself which direction I want to trend in with this whole Web journalism thing: reporting and writing with a digital toolbox, or a digitial commando working in the future of journalism? Of course there are a ton of realistic, concrete reasons to be thinking about this question. “Which has more job prospects?” for example, along with, “which one pays better?” But what I’ve been thinking about is this, more important question: “which one is more fun?”
Because, serious, I love them both. Read more
Teach Content Management Systems
I gave a presentation to the Society of Professional Journalists Student Chapter here at The Ohio State University a few weeks ago about what sort of Web skills an aspiring journo could get from a sort of survival kit stand point, and I spent most of the time talking about CMS, Content Management Systems.
As the journalism program at this institutions struggles to get its head around the Web and become a school that turns out journos ready to lead the field as it plunges into the digital future instead of new members of the embittered, FUD-filled ranks, this is probably where they should start, along with photography, audio and video basics. Learning to code up (X)HTML and CSS is not rocket science, as I am fond of saying, but it also isn’t likely necessary for the average front-line journalist today and probably won’t be tomorrow. However, understanding a modern CMS is.
I have a few suggestions as someone who routinely works with them and just completed this journalism program. Read more
