online culture

Happy New Year! Now can we put an end to all the "milestoning" already?

You know what I mean. The changing of a year provides a far-too-easy opportunity for writers -- journalists, opinion leaders, you name it -- to look back or look forward any of these tired ways:

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example:

I finally updated the presentations page to include PowerPoint decks from last year and this.

Without prejudging the outcome either way, try this little sociology experiment.

Count the number of times people ask you questions like this:

"Did you see [such-and-such happened]?"

More than two years ago now, I changed personal e-mail addresses and gradually retired an old one that was simply collapsing under the weight of spam.

In the mostly frivolous movie 13 Going On 30, the main character, after jumping magically to age 30 and the physique of Jennifer Garner, works as a creative leader at a fashion magazine she practically worshiped as a pre-magic 13-year-old.

The magazine publisher, under escalating competitive pressure, tosses out a word and a prospect that sends the whole staff reeling in horror:

Redesign.

In this Hollywood-coated glimpse at the magazine world, the term signals utter failure and bleak chances for recovery.

I've spent most of my career in the newspaper industry, including several years as an editorial creative director. I don't remember redesign projects taking on that air of disaster. I loved doing them, if only because of the ego feed of feeling like an auteur, and in no small part because I did redesigns in an era full of ugly papers that really needed them. It was hard not to improve a paper under those conditions.

Sounds like Web sites circa, say, now. :-)

But that's the perspective I bring to the conversation about return on investment for newspaper redesigns, which started in part here and extended to NewsDesigner's timeline charts showing circulation of several papers before and after redesigns. Pepper in a spirited discussion of redesigns' effect on newspaper revenue, and you start seeing people's true colors.

I chipped in on that discussion, too -- it's worth the time to read the whole debate in the comments on NewsDesigner. Some excerpts follow.