Jackson Fox

Jackson Fox on ClaimID

The Robot Co-op has re-launched the Lists of Bests and All Consuming sites with new designs and all sorts of cross-site integration. You can now add lists to your, well, list of lists on Lists of Bests and as you check off items they are marked as consumed in All Consuming. So I went in and added the Academy Award Best Pictures list and started checking off the movies we’ve seen for the Great Oscar Project. As I marked each item it was added to my lists of consumed movies on All Consuming, and I could give each a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If I wanted to, I could go back over to All Consuming and add the dates when I finished each movie or a comment about each movie. I can also add All Consuming to my site with a piece of javascript.

However, even though I find the sites a lot of fun to use, I doubt I’ll make a habit of it. In my mind any site that allows me to rate and review media has to meet the Netflix test — Is the site as addictive and easy to use as Netflix’s friends features? The answer here is no. I can only give yes/no ratings to movies, I can’t easily share my lists, comments and ratings with friends. Other people are interesting, but I really want to share things with people that I know (and see what they’re up to as well).

Taking photos of whiteboards and emailing them to myself at work.

SES day 2 wasn’t quite as interesting as day 1, but it had its moments. We met a Lulu fan, though how she knew we were from Lulu I don’t know (the conference badges had your affiliation printed rather annoyingly small) — I don’t meet a lot of people who know about Lulu, so when you meet someone who not only knows about us, but loves the site, it’s amazingly gratifying. Also, she found my conference photos on Flickr. The internet works.

The sessions weren’t quite as interesting, mostly good web design practices as applied to search engine optimization. Still, there was a lot of helpful info about testing landing ramps using A/B and multivariate testing.

Some other points of interest:

• Don’t forget that people won’t always come throught the homepage (I think I heard this once stated as “every page is a landing ramp”)
• Accessibility and search engine optimization have a lot in common
• It may not be a real shocker, but the panelists liked to pimp their tools/services

Oh, and we got a chance after the last session to visit Central Park and see the Trump zamboni.

So I would say my first day of the conference went well. The sessions were pretty good, particularly a lunchtime Q&A with three Google engineers and an afternoon session on search behavior (including eye tracking studies from Enquiro).

We celebrated with a fantastic meal at Mesa Grill.

I missed the Ask.com Code Red party (ok, I’m sure I could have gone, but it was late), but while catching up on my daily feed reading I found out that Robert Scoble was in my hotel and looking to go out for a late night snack! So I called him on his conveniently posted cell phone number and off we went to the Roxy Deli in Times Square.

While we were there Scoble got a call from Matt Cutts from Google, so headed over to the Hilton to chat. After running a gauntlet of SEOs (interesting crowd those SEOs) we sat down sans alcohol (the bar closed just as we walked in).

Just as the hour was getting late, who would walk by and join us but Danny Sullivan.

Sadly the hour grew even later and thus it was time to part ways, but it was a pretty good first day.

update: I forgot to give Danny Sullivan a hard time for talking trash about web developers during the Search Engine Basics session

I am attending Search Engine Strategies 2006 in New York City this week (actually, just Monday and Tuesday).

• Rick Cecil (Motricity): President
• Abe Crystal (SILS): Vice President
• Janey Barnes (user-view): Treasurer
• Gershom Rogers (Cisco/SILS): Secretary

Notes from the meeting which I was sadly unable to attend.

I don’t think the FeedLounge guys ever sleep. Every comment I’ve made about the site (on this site or in the FeedLounge forums) has been answered with amazing speed. Sadly, I think FeedLounge just isn’t for me. It sounds like pagination isn’t going away and that marking all items as read on viewing isn’t coming anytime soon. I never liked mutt or vim, so it might not come as a suprise that I’m not a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. I’ll play around with FeedLounge some more and see if it grows on me, but Bloglines just seems to fit my reading habits better.

Update 2/5/06: My new goal is to use FeedLoung for one week (starting now) in place of Bloglines.

Update 2/24/06: Well, things didn’t work out between FeedLounge and I. It’s nice enough, but it took me a lot longer to wade through my feed items than it normally takes me with Bloglines. I’ll check back in a little while and see how things have shaped up.

Dave Winer:

Hello. Earth to developers. You’re not supposed to take features out. Products are supposed to bloat, not disappear.

I think the world would be a better place if more developers would start taking features out of their software. I recently abandoned my experiments with the Eclipse editor because it has too many features. The damn thing has a search engine in the settings dialog so you can find the feature you want. I still don’t know how to turn on line numbers (and have them stay on).

I just posted a comment on Designing for the Sandbox about lab usability versus remote testing on the web, and I wanted to expound a little more.

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