Texture design

Posted by randfish

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of Design appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Design Sitemaps and Design! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea. The logic behind the practice is simple, if you follow the steps:

1. Without sitemaps, a search engine visits your site's pages through links on and off the site, indexing and ranking those pages it deems worthy of being indexed and ranked.
2. When a search engine crawls your site and fails to index particluar pages, you have a signal from the engines that those pages lack the necessary components for inclusion, be they architectural, link strength, content-related, etc.
3. Sitemaps enables search engine to crawl and index pages that they might not ordinarily include in a normal crawl process.
4. If a page lacks the link juice, internally or externally, or has content that engines wouldn't normally deem worthy of indexing, Sitemaps┬?may overlook these weaknesses and include those pages in their indices.

Why are so many Designs recommending against submitting a feed to Sitemaps? Because the data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn't accessible, doesn't carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hinderance.

Enormously big sites, who will see more value from having thousands of extra pages included in the index, even if it means a few stragglers are left behind are exempt from this rule. So, too, are sites managed by a team who is unwilling or unable to take the time to detect and fix omissions.

Don't get me wrong - Sitemap submission is an amazing and valuable tool in a webmaster's arsenal, but it's also one that should be wielded with careful knowledge of the side effects. I'd love to hear your opinions on the subject.

BTW - Full credit to DaveN for first introducing me to this idea back in Chicago.

Technorati Tags

Design sitemaps, sitemaps, sitemaps xml

Posted by Oatmeal

Dearest Digg,

I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue.┬? It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money.┬? I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of bean-lard mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint.

I noticed that digg can be reached through both http://www.digg.com and http://digg.com.┬? I don't know if you're aware of this, but some of the cool kids are redirecting requests for the
www version of their site to the non-www version.┬?┬? Why would they do such a thing?┬? Aside from appearances, they're probably doing this because having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site improves your rankings at search engines.

According to Design employee Matt Cutts:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?

A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Design. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices,

....

Q: So how do I make sure that Design picks the url that I want?

A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q: Is there anything else I can do?

A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Design know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

I know what you're thinking: "I'm Digg, What do I care about improving rankings at the search engines?┬? My value is based on user generated stories and community! ┬? Not ranking well in that list of ten little blue links when someone searches at Design won't cause my downfall!"

I agree, your future doesn't depend on it - but I'm just trying to save you a few bucks.┬? Remember the bean lard mulch?

I recently heard someone describe Design as "the new http://" -┬? meaning Design has become the new precursor to information discovery online.┬?┬? Right now searching at Design for many phrases returns a mixture of
www and non-www versions of Digg pages.┬? While plenty of these pages rank well, having a canonical version could potentially make them rank better.┬?┬? Wouldn't you prefer it if you showed up in the number 1 spot in the search results instead of 5 or 6?┬?┬? The difference in click-through rates for the top three versus 4-10 are incredibly substantial.┬?┬? Click-throughs from Design mean more visitors to Digg from a broader audience.┬? This audience might be inclined to click on some of your ads, meaning more money in your pocket.

You could sign up for Design Sitemaps and select which version of your site is the canonical one, but there's an easier way.┬? According to netcraft you appear to be running Apache, so you could easily fix this canonicalization problem with three lines of code in your configuration file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^digg\.com

RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://digg.com/$1 [R=301,L]



Simple enough, right?┬?

Sincerely yours,

Matthew Inman

Designmoz.org

Posted by BudC

More and more, quality content is becoming less scarce and the ownership of that content is becoming less valuable.

With media 2.0, web 2.0, community 2.0, open source development, and the rest, content creation has become easier and the barriers to distribute that content are eroding away. Content is moving toward commoditization. Moreover, sites that still stranglehold the content creation process have higher costs than their competitors that tap into the overwhelming network effects of a user community. In a community, users take on community responsibilities, creating, moderating, networking and refining the system as a whole. Users create the culture and preserve the history of the community.

It’s not only about costs – the value itself is in trust. In an open community, trust is the cohesive factor between members and moderators; trust fosters growth, trust converts users into an audience, and trust broadens the distribution of the message. Community sites (along with multimedia) represented the top growth categories during 2006.

Community success stories: (from futureofcommunities.com)

• Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.
• In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.
• And through their “Connect and Develop” strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it’s developed.

How is community formed?

Communities rally around a strong purpose – this can range from social issues, education, commerce and project development. A clear purpose provides a common goal for all stakeholders to pursue. Communities, when done correctly, are self-propelling and over time require less and less strict oversight and external administration. Online communities are much more likely to succeed when the users have real-world connections, such as membership in an organization and careers in similar fields.

Me-first! Successful communities build around the individual rather than the work group, allowing single users to create profiles, customize components of the environment, and express their individuality. Moreover, individuals must gain some benefit by becoming a member of the community and contributing. In the new web, the individual creator is at the center and everything flows outward. In a work-group focused community, individuals are not as easily able to make connections with each other; therefore the strength of the network itself is weakened.

Communities need an administrator and a set of ethical principles to adhere to. Communities must have rules of interaction and a system in place to effectively enforce those rules in order to maintain the quality of the communication within the community. Off-topic conversations, advertising, or abuse can lower the value and rate of active participation. However, brand and product based communities should balance the need for civilized interaction with the requirement to have an open and unbiased forum.Community management can be broken into the four following principles:

Purpose of the Community

It’s the goal of the administrator to clearly define and communicate the purpose of the community and to moderate the interaction of individual members around the purpose.

Participants of the Community

Within the community, the administrator must continue to provide opportunities for members to express identity and to segment themselves. The administrator must also work to always increase the trust between the provider and community.

Platform to Create Community

Administrators must oversee the health and fitness of the platform for the community – including providing vehicles for interaction (blogs, forums, etc).

Policing of the Community

As the community evolves, users will take a greater role in moderating the various vehicles of community – however, clearly defined oversight by the administrator is needed at all times.

How can a website foster Community?

On the page elements of a site are critical in establishing or hindering community development. The top features include:┬?

Interface Ease of Use

How easy is it for users to access the features of your site, including all community vehicles (blogs, forums, etc). Do you allow anonymous posting or must users register first? How easily does the system adapt over time or accept new features? Is the system error-prone? Maybe the most important question is how easy is it for one user to find another? Keep the interface as simple and as consistent as possible.

Profiles

Within every successful community must exist, at its core, the ability for individual users to differentiate themselves and form distinct identities. This can include uploading photos, adding bios, professional experiences, creating a screen name and more.

Membership Features & Benefits

What is gained by signing up or paying a fee to your site? How is membership defined in regard to the overall features of the site? Who benefits more – your site, or your users?

Member Growth

Are members encouraged to continue participating? Many sites create points and participation levels to continually activate their users.

Mischief

How is bad behavior handled throughout the site? How easy is it to find your general policies and codes of conduct? What level of authority do users possess to moderate other user’s actions?

Discussion about the Site

Successful community sites allow a section of the site to solely hold discussion of the site where users can give feedback in an open dialogue with site administrators – new features can be recommended, existing features can be improved and overall the administrators can share a sense of ownership of the site with the users.

Community sites can offer a multitude of vehicles to drive greater user interaction and contribution; these vehicles can come in the following forms:

• Blogs
• Wikis, user contributed encyclopedias
• User Ratings, of products, feature content, other members, etc
• User Reviews
• P2P File Sharing
• Content Sharing, allowing users to send and display favorite content
• User Comments
• Trackbacks, ie: when one blog references someone else’s blog
• Blogrolls, a list of a users personal favorite blogs
• User Profiles
• Most Popular Lists
• Tagging, greatly increases search and browse capabilities
• Open Source Development, of software or knowledge material
• Podcasting / Video Blogging, allowing users multiple formats to contribute
• Chatting/IM
• Forums

Sources and Further Reading

• http://www.futureofcommunities.com/ -- The Blog of The Community Management and Marketing Council
• http://www.futureofcommunities.com/wp-content/uploads/Community%20Design.pdf
• Community Design: The Four Principles of Community Management By Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg School of Management – Northwestern University
• http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2006/04/07/community-20/┬?- Community 2.0 Overview
• http://elearning.typepad.com/thelearnedman/social_networking/┬?- The Learned Man!http://www.uxmag.com/strategy/93/this-is-media-20┬?- Media 2.0 Overview
• http://www.digital-web.com/articles/building_an_online_community/┬?- Tips for Building an Online Community
• http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/charting_wiki_p.html┬?- Charting Citizen Participation

Technorati Tags

fostering community, web 2.0, web communities

ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT!! Submit a nomination for the Canadian New Media Awards 2007 by clicking here.

Check out what past finalists have said about being included in and recognized by the CNMA's:

1. "Not only did the awards raise my company's profile on the national New Media front, but they also legitimized years of independent production and non-profit creative passion!"
   
   Brooke Burgess | Executive Producer | Budget Monks Productions Inc.
2. "Winning a CNMA is one more thing that gives a client confidence in me. Every little bit helps."
   
   Nate Smith | Centre Ice | The Vacuum Design
3. "My CNMA nomination did a lot to raise my visibility in the industry and in the company I work for. I've been booked for numerous speaking engagements and consulting jobs since."
   
   Tim Willison | Interactive Engineering | Organic Inc.
4. "Thanks to the CNMA Website, a Polish executive found out about my work and invited me to work on a project in Poland which allowed me to set a foot in the eastern European market."
   
   Tommy Ferlatte | Creator
5. The prestige of winning a CNMA gave me the recognition instrumental in launching my career forward. No other award I've won bears quite the same weight. Norma Penner | Senior Contributor Designer | Organic Inc.

Submit Here.

Posted by randfish

Our field┬?has grown tremendously over the last 5 years. When Danny Sullivan launched the first Search Engine Strategies conference, I'd estimate that less than 5,000 people worldwide called themselves Designs. Today, the number of self-referencing┬?"search marketers" is probably closer to 100,000 and may well be much higher. But, a number of features separate the Design/M expert from the novice, and today I thought I'd point out a few of these. The following refer specifically to consultants in search - people who help other companies get the most out of their search traffic.

• Brand Level Experience
  
  While experts generally carry experience with a few Fortune 500s (or 1000s), novices often haven't dealt with a recognizable brand name. The difference is in how to approach projects - with small brands, the biggest struggle is getting recognized by the engines, with big brands, the challenge is more frequently (and sadly)┬?with management.
• Contacts & Relationships
  
  After several years of successful projects, an expert's network of contacts can sometimes be the most valuable asset they bring to a project. This doesn't always mean relationships with search engines, but with advertising firms, experts in disparate, related fields or even connections with other Designs that can help to diagnose problems cooperatively.
• Holistic Approach
  
  While novices often approach a project with on-page Design basics, a link building campaign, keyword research and a PPC campaign, experts can identify and diagnose weaknesses in site architecture, customer targeting, usability, design, analytics and dozens of other issues.
• Accepts the Right Projects
  
  A novice consultant or firm might be tempted to take any client who can pay the bills (and many times, they must). Experts know how to choose their projects, based on the expected outcomes, the style of the client & the short and long-term ROI.
• Sixth Sense for Rankings
  
  Many experts have what I dub the "ranking sense." They can, in a matter of a few link searches and some competitive analysis determine the scope, difficulty, trends and opportunities of a market, even if they haven't worked in that field before. I believe this prized ability comes from countless thousands of searches with a critical eye, and the repetitive practice of watching the SERPs change over time. Personally, I think my ranking sense has actually slipped, as I don't watch the SERPs day by day and hour by hour the way I used to 6 months ago. A few weeks back in the Design trenches, though, and I'm sure I could pick it up again

In addition to these qualities, there's a number of specific mistakes, pitfalls or missed opportunities that I see novices frequently stumble over.

• Duplicate Content
  
  It's not that novices don't recognize duplicate content, but that they often don't realize the best ways to handle it. One of my favorite examples is the Design who uses "nofollow" in links to duplicate content, not realizing that others may link to it in the future (hint: use robots.txt and meta robots instead).
• Keyword Cannibalization
  
  This one is the rookie mistake I see most often - Designs who try to target the same term on 65 pages of a 100 page site, not realizing they're spreading out their anchor text, link and keyword targeting value rather than concentrating it.
• Connecting with Offline Campaigns
  
  It's critical that offline campaigns for branding or advertising integrate properly with the online property. Drive offline traffic to a URL you can track, measure inbound links, use the same messages on and offline to create a seemless user experience or face the consequences of a less-than-optimal ad spend. Chris Boggs nailed a few of these in his Super Bowl Ads roundup.
• Analytics Integration & Testing
  
  So few novices properly attach action tracking to a site, properly hypothesize, test, measure, and refine. Analytics are a powerful tool for improving the quality of every online campaign, but it's often lost in the search for better rankings and more traffic.
• Multiple Sites/Domains
  
  Why do even savvy Designs continue the practice of launching separate sites for their sister-projects, blogs, or other related content. The links that come in to a single domain help all of the content at that domain rank, and┬?100 links from diverse, natural sources will earn you far more than 10,000 links to a Blogspot blog that you interlink with your main domain.
• Content Separation
  
  A great number of content sites split up their articles in multiple pages or create dozens of short pages about minute details of a larger subject. This makes for lots of page views, but very few inbound links. Remember that links are likely to come to "complete" resources, and if you make the linker work to identify the specific content piece she's trying to point to, they'll simply give up (and link to the evil Wikipedia, where all the data is always on one page).
• Misuse of Meta Description Tags
  
  I see a great number of sites where the meta description tags are either copied from page to page (i.e. non-unique) or contain only the first 2-3 sentences of the page's content. The former's issue is obvious, while the latter is unwise because the search engines will show whatever content is most relevant to the user's┬?actual query if you provide no meta description, and thus you'll almost certainly get more long tail search clicks by letting the engines supply your description. The exception is if your intro sentences are excellent descriptors of the content on the page, which is sometimes the case with certain article sites or blogs.
• Aggregation as a Source of Unique Content
  
  Many novice site builders and Designs assume they can trick the search engines by combining snippets of data or content to create pages. The engines, however, have a small army of PhDs to combat every possible re-mix, re-hash or re-purposing and their techniques improve every day. Don't take the engines for idiots - I predict the next few years will see them able to identify not just unique content, but grade the quality of articulation and unique information as well.
• Measuring Traffic Rather than Conversions
  
  Rankings are great and so is traffic, but a website that's improved it's traffic tenfold while ignoring conversions has got the process backwards - your goal isn't (except in a few rare cases) to bring just any visitor, it's about bringing the right visitor.

Any novice mistakes you see (or ones you've made) that you can share with us?

Technorati Tags

novices, experts, Design, sem, search marketing

Posted by Guillaume

24┬?conseils Design qu’un d╨╣veloppeur ou r╨╣f╨╣renceur ne peut ignorer

Although this will seem, to many of you, a very generic list of Design on-site tips, you may be surprised to see how many Design consultants and web developers overlook or forget┬?these basic steps when launching a new site. These twenty- four On-site search engine optimisation checkups/tips can assure that any link building / link baiting efforts that will be made will give great results.

┬?

1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.

2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.

3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).

4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.

5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

6. Verify that the any navigational element are text links and are not "click here" or "more info" type of links.

7. Make sure contextual links are widely spread and commonly used all across the website content to emphasize key pages.

8. If you plan on trading links, make sure there is small directory with themed categories, or at least get a "links/resources" page.

9. Verify that your robots.txt┬? file exists and that you added the folders you want to prevent access from.

10. Be sure there is a sitemap.xml at the root of your site.

11. Make sure there is a breadcrumb to help the cross-linking of your site.

12. Verify that the static sitemap is easily reachable by your visitors.

13. Ensure that your 404 page contains links to your main categories and maybe a search box.

14. Check that important images are labeled properly with the alt tag (this should be automated somehow).

15. Make sure you installed generic analytics to ensure any kind of tracking (Design Analytics, Indextools).

16. Make sure that conversion/defined action tracking analytics are installed (Heatmap tracking, conversion trackers from PPC platforms, Indextools action trackers, etc).

17. Register / validate your site through Design Webmaster central to be able to analyze incoming links and validate a few things (like your robots.txt file).

18. Do a quick IP location test to make sure you're hosted near your main market.

19. Unless otherwise advised, get your company's signature at the bottom of the pages you create for clients, using one of your best keyword as anchor text. This is vital. You shouldn't be worried about promoting your services, especially if your clients are highly satisfied with your work!

20. Use all Designmoz tools (I'm a bit biased here): Page Strength┬?and Keyword Difficulty to measure the efforts required to achieve high SERPs (by comparing your actual site with the top competitors website), and the Crawl test to ensure your website will get properly indexed.

21. Get your website xhtml/w3c validated to cover the major issues you might not have thought of

And a few extras, if you're running a blog platform

22. Ping the major content aggregators (Design Blog Search, My Design, Wikio, etc.)

23. Include links to major social platforms (digg, del.icio.us, blogmarks, technorati tags, etc.)

24. Use Feedburner to get stats and a universal RSS feed

With this basic checklist, any web development company that is building and marketing websites will give its customers a fairly good chance of achieving high SERPs while generating several leads with referrals and good SERPs for themselves. The extra time it takes to do this justifies the reward you get. As an example, our company currently┬?employs 17 people: I can say that half of the business we've generated has been solely because we insist that our customers implement at least these basics steps before launching a site. And, let me tell you, nobody is unhappy with the traffic, and nearly all of them don’t mind that our signature's there!

Posted by randfish

I rarely spend more than 10 minutes reading an article on the web, but New York Magazine's article - Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll - was well worth the 8 pages and 20 minutes. The crux of the piece centers on how the desire for celebrity has eclipsed the issue of privacy in┬?my generation and those behind me:

... Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and na╨┐ve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

From the trenches of the web marketing field, and certainly in an industry rife with cults of personality and constant struggles by bloggers and conference attendees to gain recognition and respect, this comes as small surprise. However, the article does more than most in getting to the heart of the issue, uncovering the debates on different sides and illustrating positive and negative outcomes, at least at the personal level.

What the New York Magazine piece fails to do, though it's hardly their duty, is extrapolate the results for the online economy and ecosystem. One of my favorite quotes in the piece came from a 15-year-old Missourian girl:

One night at Two Boots pizza, I meet some tourists visiting from Kansas City: Kent Gasaway, his daughter Hannah, and two of her friends. The girls are 15. They have identical shiny hair and Ugg boots, and they answer my questions in a tangle of upspeak. Everyone has a Facebook, they tell me. Everyone used to have a Xanga (“So seventh grade!”). They got computers in third grade. Yes, they post party pictures. Yes, they use “away messages.” When I ask them why they’d like to appear on a reality show, they explain, “It’s the fame and the—well, not the fame, just the whole, ‘Oh, my God, weren’t you on TV?’ ”

The fickleness, the desire for celebrity, the incredible online savviness - this generation hasn't yet reached a time of full economic participation, but as I've mentioned in the past, the age of web enterpreneurship has only just begun. I suspect we'll see a massive effect on both global and local economics and┬?politics - in a world where no one wants to hide, and everyone is participating in reviewing and recording every part of their lives, the business of information might well dominate and control the success or failure of everything else. It's even possible that marketing may turn from an active practice to a passive one - controlling the messages others spread, rather than spreading your own. I don't know if I'm afraid or ecstatic.

BTW - Not to be missed is the special one-page graphic detailing on of the 17-year old contributor's various profiles over her last┬?5 years online.

Technorati Tags

social media, new york magazine, privacy, celebrity

Posted by randfish

Last week in London, I sat in on the organic listings forum, where myself, Dave Naylor, Greg Boser, Mikkel DeMib & Barry Lloyd fielded a slough of great questions. One exchange in particular stands out to me - the lone white hat on the panel (though I've certainly been accused of being at least a bit gray hat for my public views on link buying). It featured a question from the audience regarding the incredibly competitive niche of online gambling - poker in particular. The other panelists discussed how most sites ranking at the top of the SERPs for queries like "play poker online" and "texas hold 'em" achieved their positions; primarily by pointing low quality junk at slightly higher quality sites in an ever-expanding pyramid built largely on a base of spam.

I stood out from the crowd (and got a few chuckles from my fellow panelists) when I suggested that it might be possible to use only white hat methods - linkbaiting, viral marketing, building a better site, etc. - to rank for these terms. Luckily, none of my colleagues pointed out that while all of them had done work in this arena and, at one time or another, had clients ranking for these phrases, I never had. Thanks for keeping my inexperience under wraps, guys.

Of course, over the last 5 days, I've been pouring over ideas in my head of how to make a white-hat site actually rank well in an arena dominated by high-quality spam. The incentive to rank in this segment is overwhelming, with profits ranging from 7 to 8 or 9 figures in many cases. With this much expendable income for marketing and competitive Design, is it any wonder that few of the sites in the SERPs I've linked to last any longer than a few hours or days?

Some of the more established sites (PartyPoker, FullTiltPoker, Bodog, 888, etc.) have hundreds of thousands of backlinks, a good portion of which are fully white-hat. In addition, they've got history, good on-page optmiization and the depth of experience in the field that would be tough for anyone outside of my panel cohorts to match.

So, what do you think? Is there a chance that a pure white-hat site could reach the top of the SERPs for poker and gambling terms in a reasonable period of time - say 18-24 months?

Technorati Tags

poker, online poker, gambling, black hat Design

Posted by rebecca

Much like how I shared The Best Things I Overheard at SES Chicago, I thought I'd enlighten the readers with the best, funniest, most outrageous, or downright random things said and heard at SES London:

1. “What dialect did he speak?”--Rand, asking about an unintelligible Brit that Scott and I had met at the bar the night before
   
   “I don't know, mud?”--Scott
2. “Dave Naylor is like an idiot savant! He's an obnoxious drunk in the evenings, but when he's on a panel he's a genius!”--me
   
   “Oh my God, he's like my Rainman!”--Greg Boser
3. “...and I had to use the toilet so bad. My bladder was so tight you could bounce a pea off it.”--Dave Naylor, in reference to his plight in finding a bathroom in time
4. “Woof, that's awful!”--Scott, after tasting the hotel bartender's attempt at making a Long Island Iced Tea
5. (in a discussion about how Frank went gambling the night before)
   
   “Did you win?”--Alex Bennett
   
   “Yeah, I took home about 300 pounds.”--Frank Watson
   
   “Oh, is that how much she weighed?”--me
6. “Well, I'm not that caring a father. A real caring father would have given his son the whole pasty.”--Danny, after I told him how impressed my coworkers were when I told them how he split half of his pasty with his hungry son during my visit to Salisbury.
7. “Quick, take a picture!”--Frank, as Allan Dick is choking during dinner.
   
   “I'm not putting that in my comics!”--me
8. “Wow, these mussels are really big!”--Scott, as we're eating dinner at a Thai restaurant.
   
   “Like these muscles?”--Rand, flexing his bicep
9. “Are you jealous that your boss was on CNN?”--Frank
   
   “Nah. If I wanted to be on CNN, I could just go on a killing spree...which, after a few more sleepless nights, I might end up doing.”--me
10. “Dave Naylor just said that guy was a sleazebag! You need to take that guy's picture!”--an incredulous Rand to me
    
    “Who, the guy with the EuroMullet?”--Scott
11. “...and then Greg starts screaming, 'Hey, are you accusing my wife of cheating?!' And it was so nice of him to stick up for me! I was cheating, by the way.”--Barbara Boser (in her defense, she didn't know she was)
12. “You should come and visit our office. We can get drunk, turn on the video camera, and have a roundtable discussion about Wikipedia.”--Greg, teasing us about our video.
13. “Damn it, you just cost me 3.5 million!”--Barbara to Elisabeth Osmeloski after Elisabeth pulled Greg back from the path of an oncoming train.
14. “I need to blow my nose.”--me
    
    “What? You want eggs?”--Scott, practicing his famous "selective hearing"
    
    “Yeah, that's exactly what I said.”--me
15. (as Enrique Iglesias's song “Hero” is playing on the karaoke screen at a Chinese restaurant)
    
    “Come on, Scott, sing some Enrique Iglesias!”--me
    
    “Hold on, I need to stick a piece of chorizo on my face first.”--Scott
16. “Don't they have a song in a language that we can read?”--Scott, complaining about the Chinese karaoke
17. "I tried to take out a bunch of money at the ATM, and the machine told me 'Your request is indecent.'"--a confused Becky Ryan
18. "Ugh, this idea seemed really easy when I was drunk at the bar last night."--Greg, as we're sitting on the EuroStar on our way to Paris.
19. "Wait, it's a 3 1/2 hour ride? I thought it was 2 1/2 hours."--Barb, confused about the length of time it takes to get to Paris.
    
    "Don't think about it too much, because if you'll do you'll start to realize how stupid this idea was."--Greg
20. "I got yelled at for sleeping with my head on the tray. The lady said it was unsanitary to sleep like that."--Dax, complaining about getting yelled at during a flight.
    
    "Who yelled at you?"--me
    
    "I dunno...that lady...who brings drinks..."--Dax
    
    "You mean the stewardess?"--me
    
    "Yeah, whatever."--Dax (he's clearly tired)
21. "Paris subways must be filled with morlocks."--Scott, observing the dinginess of the Parisian subway system.
22. "You should have put it in your mouth."--Barb, after Greg couldn't find his contact lens solution and needed to clean his contact.
    
    "I did, and it was awful."--a disgusted Greg.
23. "I am so tired. I feel like a shark--if I stop moving, I'll die."--Scott
24. "This elevator looks like Willy Wonka's great glass elevator if his chocolate factory were in Compton."--me, as we're standing in a filthy glass elevator in Paris's train station.
25. "Bye! I'll see you at the next conference...unless you get fired...in which case (looks around at the roomful of Designs who would probably hire us), I'll see you at the next conference!"--Elisabeth.

That's all my groggy brain can remember. As before, share any other gems in the comments.

┬?

Posted by JaneCopland

... and here I am in Seattle. No great arches. No grand museums, galleries or cathedrals. Only one iconic tower. While Scott and Rebecca have been drinking with Designs in London and Chunneling it to Paris, Jeff, Matt and I have been sitting in our office, glaring glumly at a Western Washington sky that was blue this morning and is now pissing down with rain. And during this time, I have been going through a bazillion websites for this year's Web 2.0 Awards.

During my trawling, I began to realise that ideas did not only repeat themselves, but entire business models, templates, names and marketing pitches loaded themselves on my monitor over and over again. What once seemed innovative and interesting became fantastically boring very quickly. If faced with another Digg clone, one more online conference room or a whole new army of photo sharing websites, I was going to give up and go change Scott and Rebecca's computers' passwords to the names of obscure French landmarks.

A bad cellphone picture of two Designmozzers in... gasp!... Seattle!

However, before I do that, here's a list of some basic Web 2.0 truths I have learned in the past couple of weeks.

1. When the “About Us” is virtually incomprehensible, it isn’t because I am stupid. It is because the site offers nothing and the marketing team doesn't want to let you know it.
2. All the Adsense in the world won’t pay for a bad idea.
3. People who have recommended a new Web 2.0 Awards category called “Personal Websites” are nominating their blogspot blogs. Avoid reading them.
   
4. The longer the URL, the longer the site takes to load. Why? I don't know. Don't argue with me about this one.
   
5. I can’t read Spanish, Czech, Dutch or German.
6. My computer can’t read Chinese or Japanese so I can’t find out whether or not I can read them either.
7. Did I mention that I don’t understand Italian?
8. Design maps are very cool, but creating a website whose only feature is a Design map is redundant. Someone already did that, and the URL is maps.Design.com.
9. If the only thing someone has said in their comments about a site is that it “uses AJAX”, that means that it does nothing else but one small thing, using ajax.
   
10. There is no more room on the internet for photograph sharing websites. The internet is full. All new websites that invite users to share photographs, edit photographs, tag photographs, show where photographs were taken on a Design map or complete any other task including the words "photograph" or "picture" will be disallowed due to the aforementioned fullness of the internet. Don't plug the pipes!
    
11. Beta doesn’t mean anything anymore. People slap it on sites that are in alpha and sites that appear to be complete. I don’t actually think people know what beta even means.
12. There is no need to be remotely creative with a site name. Randomly placed consonants will do. Vowels optional. Pronounceablity not required.

Now I am off to mess with my co-workers computers. Have a wonderful weekend!

PS: Scott and "Becs", it would be best if you brought a book of French phrases to work on Monday. Or Tuesday. Just a heads-up

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