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More on Ziki

After posting about Ziki a couple of days ago I got this email (Severine, I hope you don’t mind me posting this):

Hi Iain

I’m Severine from Ziki. Just wanted to thank you for signing up!

Thanks also for your post about Ziki :-) I didn’t know your blog and went through a few of your posts and must say found it interesting and enjoyed the read!

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to help. And don’t hesitate to send me some feedback, let me know what you like or don’t like as well as what you expect from the service!

Cheers
Severine
http://ziki.com/people/severine

Even if it is a cut ‘n’ paste job I just thought this was a really nice touch. I know the volumes that they’re dealing with at the moment are small (1500 members or so). But this kind of personal attention really makes me warm to them. It’s always nice when the people behind a website stick their heads out from over their digital wall.

Animated Gifs

I love animated gifs. They’re wonderful things. 10 years ago you couldn’t really have animation on the web without them. So I was glad to read on we make money not art, that someone’s put together a show in SF that celebrates the art of the animated gif.

Then I clicked on the link to find out more, and realised that animated gifs can be used as a force for evil as well as good. www.myspace.com/gifshow

Ugly Design Works

This is an interesting debate. I think I might not share it with some of my colleagues for fear of inciting a mini-riot Ugly Design Worksâ€¦ Most Web Designers Miss the Point. I do think there’s some truth in it though (eBay anyone?).

It reminds me of a quote from Tim Berners Lee about how “the Internet will always be a little bit broken” as reported by David Weinberger (I think I first heard it in his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined). In essence, because much of the web is made by real people it’s always going to have flaws. The argument then continues if you try to make a website too polished it feels like it’s trying to overpersuade people and they react against it.
The tricky bit for me is how you deal with corporate websites, yes they’re made by real people. But then so are TV commercials, and you don’t expect errors in those. Or, perhaps, if the rest of the TV environment was made up of public access channels you would?!?

And what about websites that need me to feel safe and secure? I’m not sure I want my bank website to feel as if it’s “a little bit broken”. Hmmm. I’ll have to ponder on that one. Feels like another chapter of my Emotional Architecture piece that I’m still promising to write.

Ziki – Social Networking Plus

I think this is an interesting new service. But I’m still not 100% sure. They describe themselves like this:

Ziki connects people, businesses and groups based on who they are, what theyâ€™re interested in and what theyâ€™re looking for.

Your Ziki is your place on the web to tell about you, piece together your online content, keep in touch with the people you know and make new connections.

Basically you create a profile, with interest tags, then give it URLs to RSS feeds of all the content that you create. It then creates a neat profile page that pulls together all of your online content in one place and starts to do matching stuff to help you find other people who are interested in, and create, similar kinds of content.

It only launched last week, so time will tell how the social matching bit works (and they’re looking to add group and company stuff which might be interesting). But it’s interesting to be able to pull an aggregated feed of all of someone’s digital content in one fell swoop. It is very 2.0 though.

One to watch, tentatively.

Flickr Mashups

I’m pretty sure I’m way behind the curve on these (as per usual). But here’s a couple of amazing uses of the Flickr API (if you don’t know what an API is, this might help. Or then again, it might leave you baffled).

Tagnautica – A really lovely way of navigating related tags in ‘FlickrSpace’. It’s just one of those interfaces that is so simple and just really really nice to use. You just need one search to start to explore the world of photo tags. Love it.

Flapr – A flash based interface for Flickr. Don’t get me wrong. I really like the normal Flickr interface, I think it’s great. But these guys have done a really nice flash alternative. It feels snappy and responsive, and just, well…different. Try it, you might like it.

FlickrFling – An online application that converts an RSS feed into images pulled from Flickr. I can’t really see the use for it, but once I started playing with it I was strangely compelled. Read more about it.

Taken from Wired’s Top 10 Flickr Mashups – there’s a few other sweet ones in there, but these three were new to me.

Feedburner – RSS + nice touches

I’m now going to attempt a cunning blog maneuver, I’m going to try and join two recent posts together (admittedly in a bit of a clumsy way).
Feedburner is a really cool service for bloggers or web site owners. It allows you to make your RSS feeds much more manageable and measurable. It helps end-users to subscribe to your feeds by creating a page that is accessible to almost any web browser, and then gives you a choice of how you’d like to subscribe to a feed. It handles this in a dynamic fashion: if your browser can deal with feeds it doesn’t get in the way, if it can’t, Feedburner steps in and helps.

Anyway, in my quest to make more sense of RSS feeds I was browsing through my Feedburner pages, and I chanced upon this:

I thought this was another really nice example of a charming (if very US-centric) dialogue box. Rather than saying ‘you must be registered to view this page’ and not letting me see anything. It dims out the underlying content (see main image) thereby teasing me in, as well as up-selling in an approachable human way.

I liked it anyway.

RSS what?

According to a report from Marketing Sherpa:

Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.

I don’t find this at all hard to believe. I use RSS all the time, lots of people I know use RSS, but without knowing what RSS actually is or how it works. Before trying to write a definition of RSS I did about 10 minutes of fruitless searching, attempting to find a definition that you didn’t have to be a techie to understand. I couldn’t. I’m sure that there are simple definitions out there. But all the ones I found tended to stray off into scary things like XML definitions.

Having tried (and in most instances failed) to tell clients about RSS feeds the most useful description of RSS I’ve found is something like this:

“Using RSS you can make your website content very portable. It takes the most important information: titles, text, links and images. And makes it easy for you, or other people to display it in the way they choose. An RSS feed enables people to view your site content on their phone, on their computer, on other websites (MyYahoo, Google personal home page, etc.). It gives you extra distribution channels for your content with almost no extra effort.”

That’s the fundamentals (as I see them). Of course there’s loads more you can do with RSS, but as a basic description this sort of works for me. If my dummies definition misses lots of important things please let me know.

Smart Error Page – Odeo

You know those pages that come up when a web page has moved, or you’ve typed the address in wrong? (For the technically minded they’re called 404 errors, but you don’t really need to know that unless you’re in the business). You don’t see as many of them as you used to, but they’re still around.

This is one of the best ones I’ve ever seen, from Odeo. Why do I like it? Well it’s not the copy, it doesn’t even read proper to me. It’s the fact that they’ve got a cute little tickbox that allows me to say that I’m not happy about the page being missing. From what I can tell it doesn’t actually do anything (maybe it gives them some reporting behind the scenes, but it’s invisible to the user).

But that’s not the point. It lets me get the frustration of ‘the machine’ not working off my chest.

I’m halfway through writing a piece on ’emotional architecture’; how you can create emotionally positive results by doing simple things with your website. And how this should be built into your site planning process. I may never finish it, but this is a good example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Diablogue: Life takes….

Diablogue (a new find on the blog trail; thanks Russell) pointed me in the direction of a new online Visa campaign produced by AKQA. Life Takes Visa

As the Diablogue guys say there’s some sweet moments in there. But I can’t help but feel that this is just a load of nice little ads glued together into a website.

For the money that was spent on this piece of interactive advertising, I’d have thought they might have taken the opportunity to do something, well… ‘interactive’? Instead it’s just a load of nicely produced FakeReal scenarios, which support the offline advertising brilliantly. It’s a really nice piece of ‘online advertising’ in that sense. But it left me wanting more.

The thing that really puzzled me though was the copyright notice at the bottom of the page:

How come an advertising website is copyright Microsoft?

I did a bit of digging around and found that there’s a version of the site that you can get to via http://lifetakesvisa.msn.com/visa.asp which has an MSN frame at the top. Not sure how ‘exclusive’ the deal is, and how it came about.

From where I’m sitting I see a lot of the big online media owners trying to get closer to ‘creative agencies’ so that they can deliver richer, more extensive, online advertising that’s exclusive to their network. It’s almost like good online advertising could be considered content. Imagine that ;-)

Google Image Hoo Ha

BBC news reports on this rather odd story from the US. A judge in the States has ruled that Google have violated the copyright of Perfect 10 magazine (a high end ‘adult’ title). The violation results from the fact that Google shows thumbnails from the magazine on their image search site.

The only upside for Google in the whole thing is:

The judge said the search company did not gain financially from the thumbnails.

Instead the websites hosting the pirated images were at fault, meaning that a damages claim against Google was unlikely to succeed.

To my mind the whole case should have been built around this. The whole point of Google is to index stuff online. To expect them to be able to filter out anything that may have a copyright infringement is absolutely insane. If you look closely almost every single website in the world will have some form of copyright infringement somewhere.

Just look at the image above. I haven’t got permission from Google for that screenshot. And even more worryingly I’ve got no permission from Perfect 10 (those scaled down thumbnails are images from their magazine). I guess that makes me guilty too…