1. The 50 dollar logo experiment

Should professional designers be worried about crowdsourced spec design sites? Jim Walls spent $50 to find out.

His verdict: professionals have nothing to fear.

The "designers" he hired a.) failed to take into account his obvious pun (or perhaps did not speak English), and b.) never finished the job. You get what you pay for, I guess.

2. Pointing fingers at Wired

If for some reason you have not caught wind of this article on the possible demise of Wired magazine, you might want to check it out. The irony is thick: how could a magazine about the future fail to predict or respond to the impact of the Internet on its business?

The comments are the real meat of the piece. Past and present Wired editors, bloggers, print writers, ad buyers, and lookers-on debate what went wrong and what might save the day. Highly recommended if you're interested in the future of journalism and hearing the many, many sides of the story from informed parties.

3. "Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want"

Garrett Murray believes that Apple's long and opaque approval process for iPhone application support hurts both users and developers. The ratings interface makes it difficult for developers to respond directly to complaints through the Apps Store. Furthermore, they have no idea when or if fixes will be approved. Murray says angry users are more likely to rate software than satisfied ones, resulting in lower overall ratings which can hurt sales.

As a user, I have found it hard to shop the Apps Store for this very reason. It's interesting to consider whether Apple's attempts to control quality may have in fact broken the user experience on another level.

4. Changing search trends say: invest in brands

Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at Digg, offers this analysis of recent marketing data:

What's happening? "Total traffic going to websites via paid search ads is decreasing relative to traffic via unpaid, organic search listings."

The explanation? As users have gained experience searching, queries are getting longer, thus undermining the effectiveness of most ad buys which use only a few words.

What to do? “As we claw our way up from the bottom, expect that the recovery in online advertising will be driven by faster growth in brand-building activities over cost-per-click and other direct-response programs.”

For those who can't make out the French, they're advertising their paint recycling policy.

RONA capitalizes on a design trope in a billboard for the iPod nano.

I'm not sure this is intentional, but this ad can also serve the purpose as a funny and subtle jab at Apple's well-known less-than-green design practices.

There is an anecdote that I once read in my childhood, for which I have long since lost the reference, which I'd like to relate today. No doubt I will get the names wrong, but you'll have to forgive me that (meanwhile, if anyone has a reference for this story, I'd be glad to have it). Anyway, here it is, in all its mangled glory:

The Lady X, upon returning from a formal event for the first Derby government, was asked by her friends to recount the experience of meeting the many famed diplomats and politicians. She said: "First I met the Lord Palmerston, and in talking to him I was captivated. I was certain that he was the smartest man in England. But then I spoke to Chancellor Disraeli, and forgot all about the Lord Palmerston, as I became convinced I was the smartest woman in England.

Here's something to ponder: Is your brand Palmerston or Disraeli? Both can work, I think (with my respective examples being Google and Apple), but only one of the requires you to not be the smartest person in the room.

The right honorable Benjamin Disraeli

(If you have joined us recently, you may not know that Weekend Ponderables are our way of throwing our various concerns about open problems in advertising and branding out into the Internet soup, hopefully to engage a bit of thought and discussion.)

Today's ponderable really bothers me. It concerns a variety of products, but I'm going to pick on Apple.

Apple advertises to you that if you have Apple products you will live in a cool, modern world of bright flat color and expensive furniture. More often than not, this turns out to be true, because so many of the people who buy Apple products go out and paint their world with bright flat colors, and buy expensive furniture on installment plans. This phenomenon literally boggles my mind. When I think about it, I reel.

So, this weekend, let's all take a moment to think about the self-fulfilling prophecy in advertising. Let's ask ourselves: If we advertise a world that's desirable enough, can we actually get consumers to go out and make it? If so, this seems to gesture towards a rather mind-blowing imperative from a design ethics standpoint.

On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.

This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.

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Dear Apple,

Thanks for iTunes. And thanks also for the handy automatic software updater. It is both wicked chromed-out and also it gets the job done. Finally, thanks for keeping iTunes so up-to-date. Every month or so, sure as sugar, there's something that needs to be fixed or improved, and without fail, you do it. So thanks for all that.

But listen: Quit recreating my iTunes and Quicktime Start Menu items. I move them on purpose.

How hard can it be?

With admiration and irritation,
Fondly,
Paul

Microsoft Research just published a paper revealing a new type of web search ranking — BrowseRank [pdf] — as revealed at last week's SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference. (Thanks for the heads-up James).

The gist of the proposal is that search results are ranked by how long users tend to stay on a single page vs. the amount of incoming links a page has (i.e. PageRank).

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As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

This means that some 1 million people – within two days – took advantage of Apple's swell offer, which was, and I quote: "Twice as fast. Half the price."

Now, way back when Nick was Not Keen on Kindle, he diagnosed what he thought was a developing trend in the release strategies of the lifestyle technology market. Namely, that the companies that manufacture these devices – the Kindle, the Nintendo Gameboy DS, and, I'm going to add, the iPhone – "lead with a subpar, feature-crippled design only to follow it with the design they should of come up with in the first place..."

I'm asking now: Can anybody out there give me any reason that the first-generation iPhone should ever have been mass produced? I mean, aside from the obvious fact that a handful or two million Apple fanboys and gadget-lifestyle types are going to buy whatever Apple comes out with? (Not that this isn't a good reason, from Apple's perspective.)

The first-gen iPhone was not only plagued by activation problems – which would by itself seem to indicate a premature release, at least in some sense – it has been alleged that "something like one in ten of the initial iPhones bought was defective," (and if you don't strictly believe that number, you can still get the point by browsing the comments on that last post).

So here's my question: Short of the first-gen iPhone being defective by design, what changed so much this year as to allow Apple to come up with such a substantially better phone, so much cheaper?

And here's what I'm concerned is the answer: Nothing.