evan meagher

What is Truth on the Internet?

April 8, 2008 at 4:32 pm

This afternoon, The Next Web posted a compelling documentary that premiered on Friday at The Next Web Conference entitled The Truth According To Wikipedia. It’s discusses the importance and trustworthiness of Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 zeitgeist as a whole. It features interview segments with Wikipedia founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, and the firm anti-Web 2.0 rhetoric of Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, among others.

The idea of truth on the internet fascinates me. Many of my instructors in school have tended to have a serious anti-Wikipedia bent. The majority of my peers fall on the other side of the issue. Can’t say whether this is because of an ingrained technologically progressive idealism or laziness with regard to citation, but the fact of the matter is that the age of collaboration, social-software and other buzzword worthy technologies is upon us. The real questions are how they’re affecting the idea of Truth, how we’re going to deal with them, and what the future holds.

In my opinion, a middle ground must be found. I’m all for the democratization of media to a point, as long as there are enough checks and balances in the system to maintain some semblance of credibility and reason.

Services like StumbleUpon, WordPress, and the sea of social networking websites are great, but the critics of Web 2.0 have a point. At the end of the day, the majority of media in a truly democratic system is noise. For every news-worthy article submitted to digg, there are 40 spam links, 20 dupes, and 10 links to Angelina Jolie photo archives.

If the ideas I’m talking about interest you in the least, definitely check out the documentary. The post on The Next Web features another documentary which I have not yet watched by the same director, IJsbrand van Veelen, about Google. If you happen to watch either, please comment with your thoughts. I’m always interested in what others think about stuff like this.

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fadtastic’s insight on home page design

April 1, 2008 at 12:45 am

fadtastic posted a good article on home pages and initial-load experience. Here’s a taste:

Normally, what you want your home page to do is give is [sic] a balance between showing the user what they expect to see and attracting them to areas of your site they might not have known about but that you want them to be tempted by.
fadtastic: The New Shop Window / Home Page’s That Sell

The metaphor of a website’s home page as a storefront is a great one. Just as a shopper’s split-second glance in a store window helps determine whether they’ll soon part with their money, a user’s initial experience with a page determines its effectiveness, be it in terms of sales, influence, or branding.

The article mentions the importance of keeping the message simple, which I couldn’t agree with more. Present the necessary information in an obvious and intuitive fashion and then get out of the user’s way. The examples of Apple and Skype are very good. Both companies have always excelled at pragmatically delivering marketing dialogue.

Remember The Milk does it pretty well, too. It’s all about clearly presenting your message (what your product does, what your service can offer, what you want people to know) and leaving the fluff out.

I don’t totally agree with the inclusion of eBay as an example, though. It’s much better than it has been in the past, but still much more nervous and unintuitive than Apple or Skype. I’d be interested to see how the site would fair if they went for the Google search-box-and-button approach. That can be saved for another day and post, though.

The fadtastic article’s definitely worth checking out. There’s a bunch of other useful articles at the end of it too, for even further reading.

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