Ruminations...

A few topics are going around that I just wanted to share ...

Accessibility is obviously a concern as Javascript and the world moves to an oh-so-visual world...If anyone is sitting around wondering what niche to move into to make their first million - it has to be readers and how you make a valuable experience. Also had an interesting conversation last night about how do you design for the cognitively impaired.....not just those with physical contraints.

Wikis...I got chatting to the main man from Socialtext last night and I'm getting more into them.....mainly because he said most companies are keeping Wiki's private. They do a nice little version comparison but its not really a track changes type approach...but it is good for notes and adding in a trail...so passing annotations on legal docs back and forth is apparently very common. I said I'd hunt him down today and get more info about his legal clients. They're an itty bitty company at the moment but about to blow out of control (and they need major help on their UI - adaptive path were supposed to sort it out but seems they're a bit busy...).

Blogs - I'm still out on Blogs too.... eileen quenin will tell you the positive effects of them...she actually managed to do more to salavage one guys' reputation in a week and half just by placing the right type of message on blogs than the big-wig PR agency he'd hired could do in a month and a half. But then again blogs are screwwing up search engines.... they're getting the way of peopel getting directly and easily to the main site - especially if the company's got some hiatus going on and all the blogs are chatting about it.... Nice for this stuff though.

And then Folksonomy...and I may be misquoting the name here but here's something to chew over.....part of this participatory enthusiasm (and note most people I'm talking to are as cynical as me about this stuff - most people recognise that Adaptive Path are getting on a band wagon) is that users start tagging their data and they help build your taxonomy. So flikr you can check out similar tags being added and if access is granted you can check out the category "Birthday" across everything....suffice to say this and the metadata stuff had me running to the hills (bar?) and left it to the librarians to ponder.... eh, James? Still; this business of users doing all this stuff and we relinquish control.... but I still think users are fundamentally lazy and are not up for the level of proactive behaviour these guys are predicting....

And on to Day 3 - its all about user research....