engaging experience

On The Medium

Since the beginning of the year, National Public Radio has been running an experimental blog, Mixed Signals. It features a different NPR blogger each week, and the voice is always authentic, quirky, almost irreverent. Not quite what you'd expect from most major media outlets.

Today, NPR announced it is taking MS down. No, it's not that the experiment failed. JJ Sutherland, a frequent blog host, writes, "After eight months, thousands of posts and more bloggers than we can count, NPR has decided that yes, this blogging thing might have some legs. So we're going to do more blogs." And they're still figuring out what, exactly, "more blogs" might look like, so they're inviting their audience to tell them what they should do.

I applaud NPR's efforts to move beyond the R in their name. NPR is more than its medium, more than just radio—it's content, content that can be delivered in many channels. NPR won Webby and People's Voice Awards in multiple categories last year, so they clearly view themselves as more than airwaves. Which is definitely a good long-term strategy. Because after all, where do you think radio will be in 5 years?

Making Sense v.2.0

Pew Internet's Mary Madden and Susannah Fox today released the backgrounder "Riding the Waves of 'Web 2.0,'" which provides the sanest and most succinct definition of this term's evolution and use I've read. They write,

That the term has enjoyed such a constant morphing of meaning and interpretation is, in many ways, the clearest sign of its usefulness. This is the nature of the conceptual beast in the digital age, and one of the most telling examples of what Web 2.0 applications do: They replace the authoritative heft of traditional institutions with the surging wisdom of crowds.

I'm with them, here, but I'm not so sure about the "surging wisdom" part. All user-contributed content isn't all good all the time. But it is true that even if only some of it is good, the system works. YouTube users upload 65,000 videos a day, so even if 95% of it is junk, there are still 3,250 videos that are probably worth watching.

Andy Warhol famously quipped, "In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Now with user-generated content, the new maxim, perpetrated by David Weinberger and others, is "In the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 people."

The Web is About Now

It's not about under construction, or coming soon. Don't ask visitors to check back later (they won't). The web is about now. And next.

So, what's next?

Visualizing Document Structure

Websites As Graphs offers a tool to create a visual map of a website's structural components. Colors represent tags, or, more accurately, a document's main structural elements. Blue for links, red for tables, green for divs, etc. The image above represents a snippet of the weblog you're reading now.

You can get a sense of the variety of structures possible by perusing the Flickr tag websitesasgraphs.

Quote of the Day

"The world is now a global place."

— Panelist at UVCIA presentation, 22 March 2006

Two Naughts

I just "claimed" this blog on Technorati. I declared myself the author, applied appropriate tags, and added it to the ping queue. The confirmation page declared:

engaging experience
Rank: 1,137,748 (0 links from 0 sites)

Which is interesting, because Technorati indexes 30.7 million blogs (that's today's number, anyway). So maybe just "claiming" the blog moved it from virtually invisible to #1,137,748.

A process of engaging, and revealing, and claiming, is rewarded. Those two naughts are just a start.