jakob says, "I'll take mine in vanilla"

I've been seeing a few
posts lately that claim that Nielson is against Web 2.0. I don't really think that's the case... I think he's against most everything when used frivolously (and in his definition, the threshold between frivolous and necessary is reached very quickly).

From his site:

This is not to say that there's no role for new technology. We're currently working with a company that's placing an extremely complicated application online. They can't do this with good usability unless they use several "rich UI" tricks. But that's an application, and a big one to boot. For 90% of websites, it's more important to focus on communicating clearly, whether they're e-commerce sites, corporate sites, government sites, or non-profit sites.

And that's the rub. So many sites are just done so poorly, that slapping some community features in them isn't going to save them or make them places people want to visit.

User first. Bells and whistles later.

Ethics, Connections, and Power to the People

I just spent 3 days in an MBA seminar designed to teach us things we should know in our future careers but weren't important to appear in the regular class curriculum. Guess what one of those classes was? No come on, don't read ahead. Guess. You got it, right up there with "Executive Wellness" - we had a fluffy seminar on business ethics.

You get a B!

It quickly became clear that many of my classmates don't spend a lot of time either thinking about or pondering ethics. This may be because they don't encounter ethically challenging issues very often. Or, it may be that their religion gives them a code to live by. Whatever it is, the time we had clearly wasn't enough - as one classmate shouted out the spine chilling proclamation, "well if it's legal, then it must be ethical." That's pretty par for the course in business today. Well actually - it's more like "it's ethical if you don't get caught and you can rationalize it to the people that need to know what you're up to." "Legal" is just a technicality.

Ok, watch this. Now I'm going to connect this to Web 2.0. No really, I can do it. Hang tight!

In a world where horrific ethical breaches barely make your stock price waver (HP) and you can clearly get away with a lot for a long time and get very rich doing so (WorldComm, Enron), and just about everyCorp is under investigation for accounting creativity of some sort or another... it PAYS not to get too connected to people. It pays to only see the numbers. Creativity in the books means someone is getting more while someone is getting less. As long as you can keep it "us" and "them" and you don't see the people you're screwing around as people with lives and their own financial pressures (I'm seeing those Enron people walking to their cars holding their boxes of possessions), then well, you can do whatever you want to to "maximize shareholder value." But it's the connections that really are the rub.

And the Web 2.0 world allows us to bring those connections to bear in some important ways.

1. It's no longer just the companies that have a voice on the internet. We all do. The presses are in the hands of the people! If you screw me over, or I think you're doing something you shouldn't, I might blog about it. I might comment on someone else's blog about it. And then people will know. And we'll all talk about it. And the media will know... and then you'll be asked some hard questions... and then....

2. Because everyone has a voice, and they talk about what happened inside their companies, we can identify cues that something bad might be happening to us.

3. Because we all have a voice, companies hear us. The marketplace hears us.

Whether companies choose to connect with "us" or not, Web 2.0 has allowed "us" to connect with each other. And that's made us stronger. A blogger onslaught can have the strength of a financially mild yet immediate and VERY public class action suit. And that hurts companies where they feel it most.

Connections = power. Connections in business = good. Connections make it easier to get things done.

Tune in tomorrow, when I talk about Burning Man again.

i've got too, much, time on my hands.....

Please sing blog post title to the appropriate tune to get into the mood to view...

This! Venn diagram madness! You can click on the image to see the whole thing on the Valleywag site.




It's actually pretty clever, but really, umm, who'd take the time to do that? I do have to say, I love Valleywag.

Amazon.com at the Forefront of Web 2.0

Amazon.com has been integrating AJAX, tags, blogs, and wikis to their e-commerce website. As with their product reviews, recommendations, and lists, these tools give consumers the ability to add their knowledge and opinions to products. This post on The New Face of Amazon speaks favorably of these innovations, even if Wall St. disagrees.