“After studying the potential impact of Y2K on the telecommunications industry, health care, economy, and other vital sectors of our lives, I would like to warn that we have cause for fear. For the failure to address the millennium bug could be catastrophic” … Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The Last Year of the Century

At the end of the 1990‘s the top story wasn’t about the significant advancements in technology but rather about a programing decision made decades before. Y2K was a hydra like story spreading its tentacles into all recesses of media throughout the word. It became the world’s most famous bug. It really wasn’t a bug, but a memory saving programing decision of using two digits instead of four for a date. The solution was a simple BIOS update, and by Jan 1, 2000, to a world-wide collective sigh of relief it was a non story. 1999 had been a very busy news year: President Bill Clinton had survived impeachment. John Elway won his second Super Bowl title in Denver then retired. Lance Armstrong came back from testicular cancer to win the Tour de France. J. K. Rowling, a Scot writer’s first novel ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ hit the top of the New York Times best seller list. The US Women’s Soccer team won the world cup and Brandi Chastain’s picture made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. The New York Yankees won their second straight World Series title. Mark McGuire hit 65 home runs and Sammy Sosa hit 63. Tiger Woods won 8 tournaments including the PGA and was named AP Male Athlete of the year.

But the big stories, not withstanding Y2K, were still in tech. Both Nordstrom and auctioneer Sotheby’s decided to create unique ecommerce divisions, with significant investments from Benchmark Capital and Madrona Investment Group funding Nordstrom.com and Amazon as the primary investor in Sotheby’s. Merrill Lynch launched it’s online brokerage after Paine-Weber’s late summer launch and Morgan Stanley’s folding Discover Brokerage online trading unit in-house. In November Nike began to take orders for customized shoes, following this practice from P&G,  Levi’s and Maidenform. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft used monopoly powers to stymie competition. The forecasted dotcom bubble didn’t pop, but just got bigger and bigger. 200 net businesses had IPOs in 1999, double the combined total of the previous four years. From April through August net stocks declined on street talk that the bubble wasn’t sustainable. But a end-of-the-year rally restored value to the stocks, and on the desk of federal regulators awaiting approval were 16 new internet mutual funds. The words IPO, burn rate and VC entered the everyday lexicon, and billionaires were created through mergers and IPOs. 29 year old Atlantan Jeffery Arnold became a paper billionaire when his then obscure website WebMD merged with Healtheon, an internet service that connects doctors, patients and insurers over the internet. With all this news, and all of the Y2K panic in the press, the late 90’s provided some key developments that either directly or indirectly provided the philosophical foundations for the movement towards wine business ecommerce.

Google

In March of 1996, after meeting as Stanford computer science grad students, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin start to work on a web crawler called BackRub, developing a PageRank algorithm to convert backlink data as a measure of page importance. Search engines at the time ranked results on the number of times the search term appeared on the page. Paige & Brin were convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other relevant web pages would be the most relevant and produce better results. Inspite of impressive and innovative technology Brin and Page were grad students struggling for attention and financial support. In August 1998, cutting their pitch meeting short, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check made payable to Google Inc. The original BackRub had been renamed Google, based on a play-on-words in reference to the math term googol, and was registered and incorporated on September 4th, 1998. At the time Google was located in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. By June of 1999 Google announced a $25 million dollar infusion of capital from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This idea of organizing the googol of information available on the web, making it universally accessible to users would have a profound impact on ecommerce and on the dissemination of wine product information.

craigslist

In 1995 former IBM and Charles Schwab computer programmer Craig Newmark decided to jump into the conversation with the community of users on the WELL and in the Usenet by contributing information about events in San Francisco to an email list of friends. Through word-of-mouth the increasing number of visits to the site became numerous enough to require a list server, majordomo, which required a name. Craig wanted to call the site ‘sf-events,’ but was persuaded by friends to call it ‘craigslist.’ The site was built on conventional open source LAMP architecture, and has changed little graphically since it’s inception, which even by 1996 standards is very basic, with the last visual upgrade completed in 2001. The idea behind ‘craigslist’ is that everyone is included…”the net is everyone’s printing press.” Because the volunteer managed list was user generated, people started listing for sale or help wanted ads. This started to become chaotic and Craig stepped in changed this from being a hobby to being a real company. By 1999 the site had been incorporated and Craig hired Jim Buckmaster to be the ‘dude.’ Craig is a believer in providing the list as a service to ‘a centerlized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements.’ The idea of free classifieds has affected newspaper and news organizations by repurposing classified advertising that was a main source of print medias’ revenue stream. With the move of news, information and advertising to online media, newspaper have diminished power to influence or control consumer choice.

Amazon and eBay

As 1999 came to an end, ecommerce was being celebrated as the engine that would drive the economic boom of the new millenium. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was named Time Magazine Person of the Year. He was 35 years old and as a result of the recent IPO was now worth $10 Billion. Not bad for a former Wall Street techie. In 1994 Jeff quit his day job, and drove across country stopping here and there to write his initial business plan, then launched a new retail business model out of his garage in Seattle. His vision of cyber commerce wasn’t singular, in fact it was a vision also held by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, founding Auction Web in 1995, soon after rebranded as eBay. These were revolutionary times in the world of retail. Not since the 1890’s when Sears & Roebuck started as a mail order company and then grew into the largest retailer in the US by the mid-20th century had retail seen so much innovation. A tipping point towards a new channel, a new paradigm had been initiated. The entry and success of both Amazon and eBay gave credence to the ecommerce channel with consumers, and Amazon’s investment in Virtual Vineyards/Wine.com help to create an awareness of wine ecommerce with both wineries and consumers.

The Cloud

Prior to 1993 the only way to navigate the web was limited to FTP, Usenet and Gopher, excluding the technologically challenged. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina who as University of Illinois undergrads were funded by the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to write the script for Mosaic, the web browser that made the web relevant to the public. It was the first killer application that took the web from a niche technical arena to mass market appeal. Mosaic made the web accessible to the general, non-scientific public for the first time. Although Mosaic was not the first browser for windows, that was Tom Bruce’s Cello, future additions of Internet Explorer were based on Mosaic code. The release of Mosaic resulted in a dramatic increase in the growth of web usage in a short period of time, expanding within the general populace and outside the closed corridors of academia and research institutions. By 1994 Marc Andreessen left NCSA and with Jim Clark the founder of Silicon Graphics founded Mosaic Communications which was rebranded as Netscape Communications. Just 4 years later in November of 1998, AOL initiated the purchase of Netscape for $4.2 Billion. In September of 1999 Andreessen and three associates from Netscape founded Loudcloud. By utilizing Opsware, Loudcloud introduced the idea to clients the idea of cloud computing. The term ‘cloud computing’ was first coined and defined by Emory University Goizueta Business School professor Ramnath Chellappa. In the jargon rich world of the computer industry the term cloud computing has become a phrase to describe information stored and processed in the ‘cloud’ world of the Internet. Cloud computing refers to remote scalable virtualized data or software programs available to authorized users over a computer connection, but for the most part it is a simplification of a complex infrastructure. Basically it’s information stored and processed on remote servers and delivered back to your computer screen through your web browser. As a user of cloud computing you don’t have to own the servers or grid functioning as host to your software programs. Cloud computing utilization billing usually follows the public utility model, pay for what you consume. This helped to change the idea of software from Software as a Product (SaaP) to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS), as first experienced by most business in 1999 with the launch of the cloud based SalesForce.com CRM. Cloud computing rationalized the cost of entry for any company wanting to launch an ecommerce web site.

Blogger

Blogging started in a very basic form, dating back to CERN when Tim Berners-Lee began listing sites as they came online. Most digital communities in the early days of the internet took the form of user moderated newsgroups. The first single user moderated group was mod.ber. Netscape followed this practice by running the ‘What’s New’ list of sites in June of 1993. The first modern version of a widely read blog was by Swarthmore College student Justin Hall. Although the site was highly personal, it was primarily a list of links that Justin found to be cool. His site was called ‘Links from the Underground.’ Dave Winer launched ‘Scripting News’ in April 1997, another frequently updated links list. Blogs were still lists developed by nerds for nerds, and for the most part out of the mainsteam of public awareness. A prime example is ‘Slashdot, news for Nerds, launched in September of 1997. Jorn Barger in his December 1997 ‘robot wisdom weblog’ site coins the term weblog. The first open community of bloggers were diarist posting on Open Diary which was launched in October of 1998. Peter Merholz coined the term blog in early 1999, shortening the term weblog which he called ‘we blog,’ then shortened to blog. At about the same time Brigitte Eaton started the first portal devoted to blogs. Brad Fitzpatrick launched the first open source blogging site Live Journal. And in July Metafilter provided the earliest blog archives. Also that July, Pitas.com launched the first free build your own blog web tool. But what we in the wine world view as blogging started with the release of Ev Williams scripted Blogger, a product that like Mosaic opened the internet to less than tech savvy consumers by blurring the lines between web diaries and weblogs, a distinction only important to the cognoscenti. Blogger was launched in August 1999, with an upgrade released in November 1999. Blogger was an overnight success, putting stress on the frequently crashing Pyra Labs Blogger server. But the cat was out of the bag. This was the beginning of the democratization of information, and the real start of user generated content, lessening over time the influence of traditional wine print media. The first wine bloggers that came to my attention were Alder Yarrow of Vinography and Tom Wark of Fermentation. It should come as no surprise that these are two individuals with tech backgrounds. In fact many of today’s wine bloggers have a tech backgrounds. Wine blogs have and will continue to change how consumers receive and access information.

Glass Half-Full

The path to wine ecommerce development is closely tied to the historical path of technology. Most of the development was done initially by educational or research institutions, but then fleshed out by entrepeneurs. People who could grasp the implication of the large and small steps. Going all the way back to Thomas Watson of IBM who bet his Father’s office machine company on the future of computers; or, Marc Andreessen who based on the work at CERN by Breners-Lee predated by the hypertext theorist, developed the first contemporary web browser that featured a consumer friendly graphical user interface. Or perhaps Jeff Bezos who gazing on a server bank visualized Amazon. Or a disparate team of Larry Page and Sergy Brin who saw a better way to map search engine technology. When a piece of new technology is released with a particular intent, i.e., the internet as a research communications tool, it can never be fully utilized until one of these visionary bootstrappers has the opportunity to put another brick in the wall of progress. Build it and they will come. To have your own vision of the future as a wine ecommerce manager, study the past to discover a better path to the present.

Peter Merholz

Whenever I see a business magazine glow about design thinking, as BusinessWeek has done recently with this special report, and which Harvard Business Review did last year it gets my dander up. Not because I don’t see the value of design (I started a company dedicated to experience design), but because the discussion in such articles is inevitably so fetishistic, and sadly limited.

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

* * *

Those who wish to read the complete article and check out dozens of others can do so by visiting dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org where they can also sign up for a free subscription to Daily Alerts.

* * *

Peter Merholz is a founding partner and president of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm. He has worked with a wide variety of clients from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups. With Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, and David Verba, he co-authored Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, published by O’Reilly Media. Peter’s thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term “blog” in 1999 when it was a nascent genre.

Review Say Everything. How blogging began, what it’s becoming and why it matters by Scott Rosenberg. (Crown, 404 pages $26)

I have never been that interested in blogging, reading nor writing; consequently I don’t know much about the blogging practice. I began Rosenberg’s book hoping to find out “what blogs are all about”. Why should I blog? Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, gave himself the difficult task of recounting the history of blogging and – as the subtitle indicates – providing an idea of what’s to come and ‘why it matters.’ I’m not sure if I got my answer after reading this book, but it gave me a peek into the origins of blogging and the strange world that’s ensued.

In the first part Rosenberg recounts the origins of the medium, ticking off a selection of several 90s-era tech pioneers of Silicon Valley who each in their own way contributed to blogs’ development. There’s the story, for instance of Justin Hall who repurposed the Web as a traditional tool for scholarship by scaling it down to a more intimate size and then blasting his confessions and intimacies out to the whole world. Hall turned the Web into ‘an arena for youthful self-exposure’. Rosenberg also points out where the origin of the word ‘blog’ can be found. Jorn Barger introduced the term “WebLog” as a substitute for the “news page” label in 1997. He specifically put in the capital L because he found the syllable blog “hideous”. In 1999 Peter Merholz, as a joke, decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee-blog. Or blog for short.

Blogs exploded in 1999 with Blogger and Blogspot, user-friendly software that allowed anyone to start their own page and spawned a multitude of new styles. In part two, Rosenberg elaborates on the types of blogs found on the web today, from mommy blogs (Dooce) to gossip blogs (Gawker) and professional blogs that struggle to monetize their output. Political blogs (“Talking Points Memo”) and warblogs (“Little Green Footballs”) feed the public’s suspicion that mainstream media aren’t performing their jobs well enough. In all instances, blogs provide a platform for anyone to discard their reliance on mainstream media, conduct their own research, and post their thoughts to a public.

Rosenberg’s fragmented sketches give rise to a colourful history of why people blog and what blogging means to them, their stories sharpened with technical detail. Rosenberg points out how blogging in someway answered the dream of the Web’s first inventors: ‘that their creation would welcome contributions from every corner of the globe and open a floodgate of human creativity.’

Throughout his summary of blogging’s past and present incarnations, Rosenberg himself is not very clear about where his own opinions on the medium. He complements his somewhat dry summary of developments, wrapped in ‘funny’ anecdotes, with the book’s third section. Here he deals with more critical points of blogging, asking ‘what/who are bloggers?’ ‘Is blogging journalism?’ ‘what defines a journalist?’ He deals with the overload of blogs. ‘How is blogging changing us’. ‘Is it all crap’? Technorati’s report on the blogosphere from September 2008 reports 133 million total blogs indexed by the service since 2002. As Rosenberg points out not all of these blogs are active but even then the numbers are staggering.

This is where I got excited – and I have the feeling Rosenberg himself enjoys playing the role of the critic, even if his position is modest. He’s more energized than cynical about the possibilities. “Sneering at all these creations remains a tempting option – one that is even warranted on occasion. Thoughtful scepticism always has its place. But the Web’s outpouring of human expression deserves an exuberant response, too. It should delight us.” You can question blogging, how it’s used and how it changes us, but you can’t dismiss its effect on our lives.

Rosenberg’s history is comprehensive, going over all the terms, every pro and con, and situating blogging context within the wider story of the Internet. But as a result his writings are too benign, too generously balanced, lacking the strong, personal point of view that Rosenberg himself points out as critical to blogs’ success. He does employ the fragmented writing style so typical of blogs, using short sketches of the various characters to build a larger, more complete picture. The last, critical chapters only somewhat mitigate this lack of strong opinion.

Much of what the book summarizes is already out there. I would’ve liked to see a new view or opinion on the matter and a more elaborate treatment of the microblog Twitter and Social Network Sites like Facebook. I think this was a missed opportunity to offer new insights on where blogging is going. Say everything is an extensive overview of how blogging began and its significance today. But it did not give an answer to what it’s becoming and what its evolution will mean for us in the future.

texto escrito originalmente em junho de 2007

Atualmente, além de “consumir”, quem usa a internet pode “produzir” informação. Hoje, qualquer pessoa com acesso à rede mundial de computadores, e um certo manejo, pode expressar livremente suas idéias e opiniões num blog.

Pode-se conceituar um blog como um site cujo conteúdo é gerado por um(a) internauta e cujas atualizaçõesdispostas em ordem cronológica. Essa definição, contudo, não dá conta da relevância contemporânea desse meio de comunicação específico.

Em 1997, com o The Robot Wisdom pages, surgiu o termo weblog, para se referir ao endereço virtual (web) em que o autor registraria (log) os endereços de outras páginas pessoais que achava serem do interesse de seus poucos leitores. Um ano e meio depois, em 1998, surgiu a forma curta blog, decorrente da popularização do trocadilho jocoso We Blog (“nós blogamos”), postado por Peter Merholz, na barra lateral do seu blog. Juntamente veio o verbo “blogar” (to blog). Assim, já na gênese do nome, verifica-se um componente de autoprodução comunicativa, em que os próprios blogs se batizaram.

Nos anos seguintes esse tipo de site se popularizou cada vez mais. O site Technorati, uma ferramenta de busca especializada em sites de conteúdo gerado por usuários, contabiliza 100.000 novos blogs por dia, e apurou que o número total tem dobrado a cada oito meses, ultrapassando 57 milhões novembro de 2006. Por fim, o que evidencia de forma cabal a intensa atividade desse tipo de sites é o número diário de entradas (os chamados posts): 1,3 milhões.

Especificamente quanto à blogosfera brasileira, as estatísticas ainda são incipientes. A Pesquisa Blogosfera Brasil, realizada pelo site Verbeat, embora tenha sido muito bem estruturada, conseguiu apenas 600 usuários.

A par do que possam dizer os números, no plano qualitativo, os caminhos literários, sintáticos e gramaticais de um blog podem ser traçados livremente por quem detém o domínio, da mesma forma que o assunto de cada post. Apesar da forma comum, o conteúdo do blog é livre.

Em conclusão, muito mais do que um diário de anotações pessoais, um blog pode ser o quê quer que quem bloga queira que ele seja.

The Tour de France just ended and the Pan Mass Challenge, a huge event where people raise money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute by biking across Massachusetts, was held this past weekend. So biking is in the air.

That’s probably why an email from Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path,  caught my eye. He sent me a link to a blog post about work that his firm is doing with a bike store in San Francisco. It turns out that Mission Bicycle Company was selling fixed gear bikes online, but decided to open a retail store where customers could easily assemble their own custom bikes.

But “easily” is not something that’s easy to accomplish — especially when Adaptive Path had less than 2 weeks to design the in-store experience.

Despite a HEAVILY time-constrained project, Adaptive Path followed a user-centric approach:

• Interviewing cyclists to understand their needs and expectations of a custom bike retail experience
• Clearly articulating the Mission Bikes process in a way that aligned with cyclists’ needs and expectations
• Sketching and generating experience concepts quickly
• Prototyping the experience design concepts in their studio

The final store design (which is very cool) was based on 4 components: Instructions, Wall Mount Displays, Table Displays, and Build Kits. 

Here’s what Zack Rosen, CEO of Mission Bicycle Company, told me about his new bicycle shop:

The visceral experience of being in our store surrounded by beautiful bicycles and parts laid out like artwork was what made the sales system and process work. If our customers are excited by the prospects of designing a custom bicycle they will happily go through the process Adaptive Path careful designed.

It’s worth taking a look at the case study they pulled together on the effort. It shows the evolution from sketches, to designs, to implementations. For example, this is how the Table Display evolved:

The bottom line: There’s always time for good user-centric design

Innovation can have roughly 3 purposes: technological progress, monetary profits and creating something useful or engaging for people. To me, the people-centric view has always been the most important in my perception of design and new technologies. Still, design and  marketing often feel as though they are enveloped in their own little realms. Their innovation focuses too much on the first two of the 3 purposes, in other words on the product or service itself rather than how it can be useful or engaging to users. The end connection with people is crucial for any service or product, otherwise it may as well not exist or will simply die by natural death of being outsmarted competitors. Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path presents ‘Experience is the product’ that shows how technology and feature development are merely the first 2 steps to success:

Artist: Samuel Zuder http://samuelzuder-photography.com/

Having a firm belief that it is the customer who determines value I was (am) an adapt of Customer Experience Management. But when I look at the visual presentation in this post, I wonder if anyone, anywhere at any time at reasonable will be capable to achieve CEM-goals. And this even applies more in a world dominated by loosely coupled relations, one-time encounters and commodity services and goods

Source: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/merholz/2009/06/a-framework-for-building-custo.html

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/merholz/2009/06/a-framework-for-building-custo.html

Artist: Samuel Zuder http://samuelzuder-photography.com/

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Artist: Samuel Zuder http://samuelzuder-photography.com/

Os conhecidos blogs nos dão facilidade e qualidade para que a barreira entre leitores e escritores praticamente desapareça. Mas, de onde surgiram os blogs?

No começo da década de 90, os blogs como conhecemos hoje, ainda não existiam, mas davam seus primeiros passos nos softwares de fóruns de discussão como o WebEX e em comunidades digitais como a UseNet.

Jorn Barger - Considerado o primeiro blogueiro da história

Em Dezembro de 1997 o termo ‘weblog’ (diário de rede) foi utilizado pela primeira vez pelo americano Jorn Barger em seu site Robot Wisdom, que estava ativo até o ano passado, servindo de museu para a blogosfera contendo apenas pequenos comentários e era dividido em várias seções.

Mais tarde, em 1999, o também americano Peter Merholz já antes conhecido por gostar de ‘brincar’ com as palavras, divulgou em seu site sua mais nova brincadeira: ‘we blog’ (nós blogamos), e a palavra contraída ‘blog’ começou a ser utilizada entre sua rede de amizades.

Apenas 4 meses depois, a empresa Pyra Labs ajudou não só a consolidação da expressão, como da prática de criar blogs dos mais diversos assuntos, lançando um sistema de publicação de weblogs chamado Blogger, que teve rápida expansão e aceitação por ter hospedagem gratuita.

Nessa época existia pouco mais de 50 blogueiros, atualmente, segundo o estudo State of Blogosphere, já são mais de 112 milhões e cerca de 120 mil são criados diariamente, sendo intimamente conhecidos pelos internautas e utilizados para diferentes fins, desde material de pesquisa até diários pessoais completos.

Olívia Domingues

This image was shown during Peter Moville’s talk about IA 3.0. What is interesting about it is how he linked this to Christopher Alexander’s text about design in architecture and also Peter Merholz’s essay Metadata for the Masses. In which he highlights ‘desire lines’ how paving is built once you see the paths that people tread.

If we look at online behaviour, user paths give us a solid idea of routes to content, where they return to and where they tend to go next. Human behaviour tends to follow patterns, see this article about mobile phone usage for an example of how predictable we tend to be.

Engagement is Conversation

This pattern of behaviour is something that good web analytics managers can see by interrogating their data. Alec Cochrane and I recently presented on the subject of building and measuring engagement and he summarises our talk here.

Metrics can tell you the most popular paths to frequently visited pages and we can change the interface accordingly. This can help us formulate our persuasion architecture but of course there are other things to consider…

No place like home

The homepage on a site suffers in a different way as it’s a starting place, a returning place and contains areas created as a diversion (meant for conversion) by many different stakeholders.

Add to this the fact that many users from search, email or RSS may never see it and it is an area that seems to be in a state of struggle. Serving the purpose of communicating a message from the site owners as well as serving the user.

Of course the more routes you have to your content the better the overall measure of the engagement your site has with your community of users.

Elements of engagement

A concept model can describe elements of engagement that need further exploration

But if we look at this in another way and think of the home as a place that should react to user’s wishes regularly, then it would be far easier to create an engaging experience.

Personas can help here but going back to the concept model would bring the greatest clarity about what needs to be presented. The concept model describes the whole site but also captures the key elements of engagement, and the parts that need representation on a homepage.

Taking this into account a typical homepage needs to offer;

1. Fresh content that is regularly updated with visible changes aided by the use of images. (Users check back frequently for news)
2. The use of themed areas and a cluster of stories around a subject area
3. If Jobs are offered they need a better promotion with an idea of the amount of job types displayed to the user
4. A consistent placement of sign-up areas throughout the site, this will enable conversions to occur and conversations to begin between you and your users.
5. An improvement of the graphics and images used on the site needs to be made to convey quality and of being a trusted authority. (Maximise promotional areas and do not give too much emphasis to ‘most popular’ widgets. These regions can take up large amounts of screen area and though they drive some traffic, without accurate measurement we can never be sure of the effectiveness of these devices)
6. Research material (white papers or case studies) need to be placed in an obvious position with more ‘evergreen’ content in the form of useful research that is graphically promoted.
7. Use blog content in a way that enriches themes or offers other angles on an existing story (also helps in changing of content on homepage). Opinion pieces also help in conveying authority and tone at the place where some users are visiting for the first time and also engage with returning users looking for an opportunities to converse.

Context, placement and pathways

The points above are based on news sites that offer different elements and in turn different modes of user engagement. Obviously looking for a job is not the same as researching and looking for case studies. So context is always the major factor when we think of what elements to display.

Put together the user’s path through the site, the context of where they have come from and what they are interested in and you have the ingredients to build the best engaging experience. The tricky part is to have an adaptive interface that will allow you flexibility.

By being aware of context, placement of content to reflect interests and user’s paths it will give a road map for engagement success.

Here are the answers to the ORK -1 Quiz that was published on 13th of November.

1) The people in the picture from top left in clockwise direction are,

    (i) John Barger – He coined the term “WEBLOG”. He also writes extensively on James Joyce and AI.

       (ii) Peter Merholz - He is credited with coining of the term BLOG. He may have unwittingly shortened the word WEBLOG to WE BLOG from which the word BLOG evolved.

       (iii) Evan Williams – One of the co-founders of Pyra Labs which created Blogger (Now owned by Google ofcourse.)

    (iv) Brad Fitzpatrick – He is the creator of LiveJournal. Currently works for Google. He is also considered one of the earliest bloggers.

    (v) Meg Hourihan – Co-founded Pyra Labs (Blogger) with Evan Williams.

    (vi) David Sifry – Founder of Technorati (A search Engine for blogs.)

                          The connect is the term “BLOG”. Weblog and Blogging are equally acceptable.

2) The connect to all the terms mentioned is “WORDPRESS” (and not Jazz artistes as many people answered. Google did throw up Jazz artistes, even if not all of the names in the list. Who knows WordPress guys may even have been inspired by the Jazz artistes.)

All the words in that list are code names of various versions of WordPress.

3) Kibo, (James Parry). His nickname is assumed to be the short form of King Body which he used as an undergraduate from RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) . He has received amazing publicity including cover story of Wired magazine and mentions in Time and even Playboy

Scores:

• Of the people who answered, many gave answers to the second question as Jazz Bands or Artistes.

• Some people were even outright frustrated (disgusted ?) and gave answers like “all are same”, “boren”

• Vinod seemes to think the answer to 2nd question was “All are short” Nice one really.

• Sundar was the only one who came close to answering a question. The 1st one. I can give him points for that i guess.

So the scores :

1) Anyone who bothered to answer through gchat, gmail, yahoo messenger : 1 point

simply because you took the trouble of answering.

2) Sundar: 2 1/2 points

because he’s the only one who mailed me the answers and actually got one almost right.

* All scores on 5 1 point for attempting and 1 more for mailing me.

*No one gets the 1 rupee as no one got all three answers right. However if people feel that Sundar should be declared winner, then by majority consensus we could give him 1 Rupee I think

eter Merholz from Adaptive Path says “Don’t focus on technology and features. Heck, don’t focus on the “product.” Focus on the experience you want to create, and build a system that gets you there.”

In this recorded presentation from the dConstruct2007 conference, Peter points out that “Experience is the Product.”

Peter Merholz is President of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm based in San Francisco. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker and leader in the field of designing for user experience (UX). Peter is perhaps best known for his blog, published since 1998, where he writes about design, business, and technology. In fact, Peter was the person who coined the term ‘blog’ in the first place.