Last weekend, we here at DLB decided that we're going to decrease our post frequency to fewer days per week.  Don't worry, we're still committed to quality slogging, but at the moment, we're all over-committed in other areas, too.

We felt like it was only fair to you, readers, to be as transparent as possible, and to make sure you don't suspect us of fizzling out like so many blogs do. It starts with less frequent posting, followed inevitably by a post with the obligatory "sorry I haven't posted in a while" opening (which Cory Arcangel collects at his "Sorry I Haven't Posted" re-blog). Rarely do blog authors have the foresight of Momus, who, prior to writing his final "This is my last entry" post, posted several weeks worth of re-visits to his musical projects for future visitors to stumble upon.

(Looking at last posts also reminded me how awkward first posts are, too. I re-admired  the collection of first posts Paul collected in our first post.)

Collier's project, found on McSweeney's, gets at one of my favorite things about the internet: the accumulation of small instances of comments over time allows a reader to construct a persona of a commenter through their interactions on the web. Check out the entire collection at McSweeney's. Here's one of my favorites (admittedly, it might be my favorite simply because I find Yahoo Answers to be so amusing).

EPG Mr. Justin MD.

Username: EPG Mr. Justin MD
Site: Yahoo! Answers
Gender: Male
Location: Omaha, Nebraska
Age: 18 at first comment, 21 now
Favorite Disney movies: The Aristocats, Fox and the Hound, The Rescuers, The Rescuers Down Under

Sample questions he has posted to all Yahoo! Answers Users, In Chronological Order:

"How Do You Get On A Jet Ski?"

"How Old Can Horses get Before They Die Any Kind Of Horse?

"Can Cats and Dogs Get Headaches? It May Be A Random Question But Is It Possible That Cats And Dogs Get Headaches?"

"Asking For A date? There Is This Girl That I've Known For A Long Time Since 1st Grade To Be Specific Anyway I Want To Ask Her If She Wants To Go Out Sometime But I Dont Know What To Say"

Sample answers:

Answer to "[My dog] does good most of the time, but he tends to bark at people on bikes and motorcycles. He'll also sometimes just bark at everything. Any suggestions?"
"If He Is Barking At Bikes Then He Was Probably Hurt By A Bike Or Hes Just Never Seen One Before"

Answer to "How do you hide the smell of smoke on your clothes/hair?"
"What I Would Do Is Get Some High Endurance Or Some Kind Of Body Spray And Spray That On Before You Get Home"
Answer to "Can i have and example of a palindrome sentence?"
"A Palindrome Is Anything That Can Be Spelled Backwards (Example) Nebraska-Aksarben"

A few years (and blogs) ago, I met a guy at a blogger's meetup who introduced himself as John. I asked him what his blog was, and he said "I blog on Mark's blog."  Mark was a friend with a blog about local politics, and John regularly commented on the posts on Mark's blog. The way John talked about it suggested that he thought commenting on others' blog posts was the same as blog-ing. I thought that was a little strange, but now it actually makes more and more sense, as projects like Collier's or applications like Facebook aggregate more and more of our online interactions. These collections of comments, lumped together and taken out of context, make me feel a little awkward about the random streams of reviews, comments, tweets, and such that are splayed across the internet with my username(s) attached. The internet can seem like a very fleeting place, but it remembers more than we would like. If I knew all of my output were to be grouped together in the style of Collier's project, would I interact on the internet as if I were blogging all the time?

Thanks to Mariah for the original link.

1. The Revelation

We've been thinking recently about our business practices here at Design Less Better, so this recent speech by John Thackara really hit home for me.

It meanders a bit, but excluding the environmental stuff early on, I can appreciate at least three points he made about the business of being a thinker:

1. There is a need for deep thinking Folks will pay for strategy, futurism, ethical frameworks, etc. because most of them don't have time to come up with it themselves. It's a simple assertion, but creative types might take it for granted. We tend to think other people are like us.
2. A lot of well-known designers and thinkers don't have it as great as it might look. Like you, most of them have boring work they have to do to keep the lights on, but it's not the kind of thing that makes for a good lecture.
3. The monetary rewards of those "good" jobs you see in the lecture are also less than one might expect. Thackara claims that he only gets paid for about 25% of the hours he works. The other 75% of his time is writing, thinking, and hustling so he can land those paid hours.

This is not at all the point of Thackara's speech, but it's something I appreciate nonetheless as an insight into the process of how such a person works and an indicator of how important passion is in being successful at it.

2. Meet Mr. W

Love this wonderful German (yet English-speaking?) ad. Clever!

3. Dropbox – The Power of a “Value Based” Startup

We're huge fans of Dropbox, so this writeup on the company's strategy was of interest.

Essentially, it boils down to design less better.

Rather than follow the mantra of "release early, release often", the Dropbox team focused on a set of limited, but useful features that worked beautifully out of the gate. This high level of polish for a free product helped retain and gratify users who then went on to market the software to their friends.

Speaking as a user, that's exactly what happened to me. Dropbox is limited compared to the many other file-sharing sites out there, but this also makes it simple to use. And Dropbox does it so well that I can't help but recommend it.

4. This is not content

A recent post from 37 signals had this nugget, which is not an original observation, but bears repeating nonetheless:

[People don't want "content"] What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a by-product from actually doing stuff.

One might rephrase this as: make things, not content.

Time to follow that advice...

Rough Type alerted us to a new Pew study which indicates that blogging "has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006."

Here are the highlights of the study:

• 14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006.
• This decline is also reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.
• By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

Not to be too glib about this, but, *obviously*. Blogging is a lot of work. You have to construct and type sentences, often simultaneously. You have to think of something to write about. You have to develop that thought across multiple sentences. You have to make inferences, sometimes even explicitly.

In sum, blogging is a royal pain in the ass, especially when compared to now-available social media technologies (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) which have none of the above requirements.

So, should we be surprised that these average young Americans don't choose to do more work? No. Not at all. After all, it doesn't surprise us that MUD-playing and fiction-reading are down significantly among teens, and that MMORPG playing and television-watching are way up.

It takes a special kind of masochist to write a blog, and I think that masochism can only be born of experience. The less people are forced to read and write, the less of them will learn to enjoy it, hence, the less of them will do it. Consider, for example, that instead of this post, I could have just tweeted:

Blogs are over: http://bit.ly/aj1ZfT.

And you could have been on your way five minutes ago.

1. Two Twitter case studies (that have nothing to do with Iran)

If I only had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a person can do with Twitter…

Well, here are two good examples:

Tim O'Reilly spoke recently about how he uses Twitter as a publisher to build a community. Not to amplify his own status, but to support things and people that he wants to see more of in the world. "Create more value than you capture", he says. It's the same philosophy that made his media company successful and it continues to work for him on Twitter.

Not to be outdone, Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls used Twitter to make $19,000 in 10 hours using auctions and by organizing impromptu donation-funded gigs.

2. Design Tips for Crowdsourcing Applications

There's a nice piece from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab about how the UK's Guardian newspaper used crowdsourcing to quickly catch up to a rival newspaper's scoop, creating a website where readers helped filter through thousands of pages of government expense reports in a matter of hours.

A few quick UI tips I gathered from the article:

1. Keep the choices limited. The Guardian didn't ask people to write a report or notes for the pages, just click one of four buttons to rate it. This made it accessible to more people and helped them move through many pages quickly.
2. Make it a video game. Graphing progress and posting it on leaderboards helped motivate readers with a sense of accomplishment and competition. (similar to my.barackobama.com)
3. Pretty bird. Analytics showed people looked through more pages when they were accompanied by a picture of the person in the report. In their words, it turned a boring .pdf into a detective story.

3. FTC to Patrol Blog Swag

Aside from the occasional lawsuit, product reviews on blogs are unregulated. The Federal Trade Commission plans to change that soon.

It seems many companies gift bloggers with money or free product for a review and many writers do not disclose this in their articles. Although the companies don't tell the bloggers what to write, it's certainly a conflict of interest. So marketers and bloggers beware: if you don't follow ethical practices, the FTC may come knocking.

4. How do you design a package for a product that (technically) doesn't exist?

The Book Design Review asks an interesting question: who makes those fake book covers for books that aren't released yet?

Danger Mouse had a similar problem with his new album Dark Night of the Soul, when his record label refused to release it due to contract disputes. Unable to legally sell his music, instead he sold an "album" containing a custom-printed blank CD-R , encouraging his fans to download a leaked copy and burn it themselves.

It's an interesting design type to consider in this age of digital downloads. Without a physical package, what does the "cover" or "box" look like for a bunch of bits? Maybe that's an emerging design specialization....

If you haven't read Jared Spool's superb analysis of how Amazon made $2,700,000,000 in new revenue just by asking, "Was this review helpful to you?" you really should. In fact, if you are in any way part of the business of user interface design, his blog, Brainsparks, is quite regularly an amazing resource.

I myself am in the user interface business from time to time, and regularly enjoy his posts, although I rarely find occasion to blog about them. I tend concern myself in my writing with a slightly different aspect of user experience.

When I read the post in question, I wondered -- as I sometimes do -- whether or not I could add anything to it on BlogLESS. As often enough happens, I decided that my commentary would be superfluous. But then I started thinking about a little throw-away parenthetical in Spool's article, and had a (*erm*) brain spark. Here's what Jared says about the problems of chronologically ordering reviews at Amazon:

For small numbers, chronology works just fine. However, it quickly becomes unmanageable. (For example, anyone who discovers an established blog may feel they've come in at the middle of a conversation, since only the most recent topics are presented first. It seems as if the writer assumed the readers had read everything from the beginning.)

Detail of Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

I thought to myself: that's a really good point. I do think that bloggers need to come up with persistent ways to summarize the key arguments or threads made so far on their blogs. I imagine that this would really help anyone potentially interested in reading BlogLESS, and I know it would really help me as a potential reader of other blogs of substantive content.

Any thoughts on a sensible way to do this from any of our UI friends will be appreciated.

Imagine that a small startup exists, and that they provide off-site customer service infrastructure for companies that make software, web apps, etc. Pretty good idea, right? Many companies don't provide this service, or don't provide it well.

Now imagine that they create pages on their site for thousands of companies without their consent. They use the companies' logos, look and feel, etc. to make their page look like an sanctioned location to get official support for these products. The only indication on the page that you're not at an official support site is a badge that tells users that the company in question is "not yet committed to an open conversation." They also sell ads to competitors' websites on your page, unless you buy a plan for $100 a month. Pretty bad ideas, right? In fact, they sound downright malicious, and if they're not, they're horribly negligent design decisions.

Now imagine you're an a-list blogger, that your company provides great (famous) customer service and support, and that you find out about your page on this off-site help resource. You're obviously pretty upset. You write a blog post lambasting the company for their obviously shady practices, which ends up effecting change in the product. (Many of you will be aware by this point that this is a true story - it happened at the end of March.) Pretty good idea, right? I'm not so sure.

Titian, David and Goliath, 1540s

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Last week, the Financial Times reported that the FTC planned to adopt legislation which would regulate some forms of social or word of mouth marketing. Specifically, the new laws would "hold companies liable for untruthful statements made by bloggers and users of social networking sites who receive samples of their products".

Raphael's The Three Graces (1501-5)

We've touched on this idea before when discussing WOMMA, when we agreed that it is unethical for marketers to hide their identity or to manipulate consumer's opinions through coercion (bribes, in this case).

The FTC has additional concerns. Since they are not officially advertisers, bloggers can make any claims about a product that they want. Without regulation, some of these claims might be harmful to the public (e.g. this product is safe for babies, cures cancer, etc.).

While the legislation does not shut down bloggers and their opinions, it attempts to draw a line between real and manufactured word of mouth. If a company tries to induce a statement from a blogger by giving them free product or other compensation, then that person is considered a marketer. Under the new laws, it's not just the companies that are on the hook: bloggers who receive compensation would be liable for any statements they make about products.

The problem is: how can you tell who is getting paid and who isn't? What if someone receives a legitimate free sample and decides to write about it? Are we questioning the intent of all samples, now? Enforcing the law could be very messy.

Regardless, I agree that the laws regarding advertising have to try to catch up to technology. Hopefully these new laws will have a chilling effect on the most overt attempts to manipulate word of mouth and companies will refocus their efforts on the best way to turn customers into cheerleaders: make great products.