After posting my thoughts on Google Docs versus Word, I got caught up wondering how many other players were in the game.

Richard MacManus put together a great rundown that shows there is more to the world of document creation than Google and Microsoft. Digging through his article and following some of links, I found that some folks are liking specific apps from some of the lesser-known players more than the comprehensive suite offered by Google. Right there is power of brand, eh?

Clearly I aligned myself with the Google tribe, and by doing so went straight to their offerings in whole. So I’m basically no different than the folks I chided for aligning with Word simply because it’s the biggest and most familiar—also brand power. Well, what’s different is that my brand of choice happens to be innovating in ways that appear more forward-thinking.

The website best-practices watchdogs at A List Apart published an interesting article on the improvements of HTML 5, discussing new controls, structure, and a host of other changes. As explained by author Lachlan Hunt:

“To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics.”

But really, this is just a description of a draft. Work on HTML 5 actually began about three years ago, and even though it may start being used within the next few years, it probably won’t be complete for another 15 years! That’s right—a decade and a half. That’s an absolute eternity for an “upgrade,” especially in an industry that is basically in a constant state of accelerated evolution.

Work on HTML 5 is being carried out as a joint effort from many key players, the W3C HTML WG, the WHATWG, and representatives from the four major browser vendors: Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and Microsoft.

I’m all for advancements in HTML, but I can’t help but think there are bigger problems that this high-powered group could be tackling. Instead of giving us new markup for structuring, such as header and footer tags, how about focusing on standards compliance, rendering differences, and overall cross-browser incompatibilities? Truth is, Web developers aren’t being held back by HTML 4. They are being held back because of Internet Explorer; Microsoft doesn’t follow any rules and renders differently from all other browsers.

Even though we’ve seen many improvements in IE7, IE6 is still the browser of choice by over 60% of the population, including all major federal agencies. Like the article states, Web developers “seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers.”

These problems, however, are not in the structuring and layout of the HTML code. They’re on scripting and styling (JavaScript and CSS), and the incompatibility of old and new browsers.

If this group really wants to produce something new that will “give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications,” they should throw out this draft, force Microsoft to play by the rules, and figure out how to get users up-to-speed on what’s current.

Why is it that folks simply don’t know about Google Docs?

Last night my wife was grinding away at a school project, specifically a collaboratively written 37-page paper. Sounds like a blast, eh? As the deadline loomed she and her two collaborators were taking turns frantically making edits and then emailing the doc to the others for their turns in order. So while one person was working, the other two sat idle. In other words, at any given time, roughly 36 of the 37 pages were not being touched, and two-thirds of the brain power were checking their email every 30 seconds. That’s crazy talk! Enter Google Docs. It might still technically be in beta, but Wes dug up some sweet stats on its soaring popularity.

Money quotes from blogger Becky Blitzenhofer:

Lately, I seem to be getting more invites to view a Google document (rather than a Word document). I guess I’m not surprised though. It has been just over a year since Google Docs and Spreadsheets was officially released, and it has been just under a year since Microsoft released Office 2007. As many know, Office 2007 includes a whole new interface that is unfamiliar, and potentially frustrating, to the veteran Office user.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets are free and easy to use. In addition, they offer online sharing and collaboration, which is becoming a complete necessity in today’s workplace. The more people share links to their documents, the more people will be exposed to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google doesn’t have to do much, as Docs and Spreadsheets are viral by nature and should continue to spread. Google can move on to saving the world (such as with this project), while users continue to spread the news about a possible alternative to Office 2007.

Check the charts. There were roughly 200,000 unique visitors in October 2006 and over 1.4 million a year later. Nice jump indeed, but compared to computer users overall (or even just Microsoft Office users), that number isn’t much.

Google Docs is to documents what content management systems are to websites. What? That analogy isn’t razor sharp and crystal clear? I just like to insert “content management system” into everything I write these days.

What I mean is that in the old days of 2005, most organizations had to shepherd any and all website changes through the almighty webmaster. If two revisions showed up at once, one request sat idle while the first revision was made. Now we have content management system websites that allow multiple layperson contributors to edit multiple pages at will.

Further that, the editing takes place on a Web server, so you’re never without your latest content or development tools, like Dreamweaver. If you can hit the website, you can edit the content. That’s how Google Docs works. The documents live on a Google Web server, so if you have Internet access you can get your doc. No more, “Oh crap, I left the Fitzbergensimmons report on my C drive!”

AND here’s the kicker: multiple users can access and edit the same doc in real time. And all edits are tracked and recorded, so if some bossy wanker deletes your brilliant phrase, you can bring it right back. In short, once you use, and collaborate on, a web-based doc, the limits of desktop applications will simply glare into your eyeballs like those annoying halogen headlights.

So we’re back to the question of why don’t folks know about Google Docs? It’s been around, in one form or another, since the summer of 2005. This free, web-based, collaborative word processor has been available for over two years, and three well-educated graduate students had no inclination to use it, and at least one had never heard of it. Why not? I don’t know if it’s lack of promotion or lack of understanding, or if it’s simply because the large majority of computer users are Microsoft lemmings. We don’t know what we’re not missing, right?

Well now my wonderful wife knows what she was missing, and I hope she gets her teammates on board. I know I won’t miss the late-night panic attacks she’s been suffering.

Monday evening, Gmail announced the latest evolution of their Gmail labeling system: color coding. The prior labeling system was just a black font with whatever label you came up with. The problem was that since the label went right next to the subject, it got lost when scanning through the inbox.

I’ve craved something to help organize the crush of emails—personal, professional, list-serve, automated calendar reminders (courtesy of Google Calendar), etc.—that flood my inbox. Help has arrived in the form two types of labels: colored text and colored boxes. To the hyper-organized, Google has taken the weakest Gmail feature and converted it into its best! I’ll be using the the Red-Yellow-Green method, with red being time-sensitive and green being “get-to-later” with a mix of various one-word labels. Dave Cohen, Google software engineer, has a much more exotic approach:

I get so much mail from my lists, I filter and archive most of it right away but I add labels just in case I need to find it again later. Those labels are my chameleons draped in subtle tones of green and blue. They’re there doing their job, but I barely notice them. Every once in a while I get mail that’s really important. These emails get my monarch butterfly labels, sporting bright red and yellow.

Dave Cohen summed up why this is now the most important Gmail feature: “Thanks to colored labels, it’s easy to scan my inbox and immediately find all the emails that are really important to me.”

No doubt the increasingly dominant Internet impulse.

I recently read in a health magazine that the carambola, or star fruit, has one of the highest concentrations of vitamin C. With the winter season fast upon us, I grabbed a handful of them at my local grocer and confidently paid for my exotic cure for winter maladies.

However, when it came time to enjoy the star fruit, I was at a loss on how to consume it. Do I eat the skin? How should I cut it?

I turned to the Internet, and About.com had the answers I sought—plus pictures for all 5 steps. In a matter of minutes I was enjoying my new star fruit.

After the star fruit was finished, I reflected on the path I chose.

I had two chances to ask for advice from another person. The first was at the grocery store where I could have asked a clerk. The second was to call my aunt, who served us star fruit on her Thanksgiving salad, for advice. Yet I opted for immediate feedback via the cold, indifferent Internet.

Is that wrong? Is the Internet truly replacing the verbal passing of knowledge from generation to generation? In this case, I doubt it. I doubt the produce clerk, or any clerk at my grocery, was familiar with preparing a star fruit. Since my aunt was at work, the question would have to wait until the evening when she returned home. And I wanted my star fruit now.

So what if I was influenced by a lifeless publication and sought the advice of the soulless Internet—at least I ate something healthy.

Amazon recently announced that, for the holiday season, they are going to serve up videos to accompany the listings of 450 top toys. So what qualifies a toy for the top? Sales, reviews, or maybe payola from the manufacturer. Speaking of manufacturers, according the Publish World Update, an e-newsletter from Publish.com, where I read the news:

“It’s unclear whether the videos were produced by Amazon or the manufacturers of the products—although the guess is that it’s the manufacturers, to start. But the power of this video effort from Amazon will depend on the content as well as the continuing volume. Will these videos mostly be commercials, demos or candid reviews? Based on the initial few videos on the site—and not all links worked—they’re commercials, and not especially informative ones at that.”

Here’s what I found…commercial indeed.

Amazon, what are you thinking? You guys were one of the first big guns to offer customer reviews, and that social networking aspect of your super store is a big hit with me. Based on how many reviews I see when I visit, it’s big with others, too. Why not stick to that approach?

Rather than slap up commercials, how about letting visitors submit video reviews? You do? Oh.

So, I’m writing this post and I scroll WAY down the Spidey page to see if they offer written reviews to counter the commercial. Damn if I don’t see:

New feature! Amazon now allows customers to upload product video reviews. Use a webcam or video camera to record and upload reviews to Amazon.

OK, then that’s cool. Now all we’re talking about is real estate. So the Spidey commercial gets sweet placement on the page, but at least savvy Amazoners know to scroll WAY down, where they’ll find video reviews. Nice. Sing it, Spidey!

I love how Amazon artfully walks the line to appease manufacturers and consumers alike. They may be offering support for certain “top toys” via manufacturer-produced commercials, but they’re continuing to elevate the way in which consumers can voice their opinions. Manufacturers just better hope their “top toy” is indeed top in the eyes of the consumer, because glossy commercials just don’t win the game these days.

The mission statement of our blog notes that one of our objectives is to cut through the increasingly chaotic din of contemporary communications. This is no mean feat. Thanks to infinite outlets and myriad voices, we live in history’s most cacophonous culture. To stand out, to be heard, we advocate a well-crafted combination of intelligence, eloquence, and—above all—clarity.

You can take another tack, however: outright volume.

Today pundits put forth screeds at such ear-splitting volume that an audience scarcely has time to call on their critical thinking skills. Of course, that’s the idea. When your point is weak and your logic is flawed, being able to bluster, bloviate, and bellow is an unfortunately persuasive substitute for substance. What’s worse is that those messages have no staying power. Like an annoying advertising jingle that sticks in your head long after the product is forgotten, volume-driven communications works in all the wrong ways. We don’t remember the message; we remember the messenger.

Short story writer and essayist George Saunders describes the inception and aftermath of this trend in his latest book, The Braindead Megaphone. In an Amazon blog post, he encapsulates the idea driving the title essay:

Our cultural discourse is being dumbed-down by mass-media prose that is written too quickly, and therefore fails to due justice to the complexity of the world. On the other hand, prose that is revised and that the writer lives with awhile can go deeper and deeper and become more nuanced and truthful.

I’m a huge fan of Saunders’ surreal fiction, and his essays have redoubled my admiration. They succeed as provocative cultural commentary, and perhaps as an optimistic indication that today’s overwhelmed audiences are regaining their sentience. Here’s hoping we’re rediscovering the importance of evaluating messages based on value, not volume.

Click here to check out a two-minute Braindead video breakdown.

I am one of those people who loves to research my family’s history. And while the Internet has been a boon to genealogy—you can find nearly anything you want—the genealogical data available online is hard to verify. So while the Internet is a great place to start for genealogy, it’s not yet the place to finish if you’re doing more in-depth research into your family history.

Living in the DC area, I do have several local spots that will give me good info. The National Archives has all the census data. The Library of Congress has a huge genealogy section. The National Genealogical Society is also good. Best of all is the Daughters of the American Revolution Library, which has a plethora of self-published books.

But for really good concrete evidence I’d have to spend a ton of money, fly out to Salt Lake City, and spend time at the Latter Day Saints (LDS) library. Unless someone out there wants to donate some cash…I ain’t going.

I could go to a local LDS Family Research Center and order microfilm and microfiche from Salt Lake City. But like a lot of people, I have fallen under the Internet age’s spell of instant gratification when it comes to finding information. A week or more of waiting: not gonna do it. And while the LDS is working on getting everything they have online, there’s only so much time in the day, and they can’t scan everything at once.

But soon there will be another way to get reliable genealogical evidence over the Web. Sorenson Companies (of video compression fame) is launching a new website called GeneTree. GeneTree is designed to help you to perform one of the most difficult genealogical tasks, which is to find other living members of your family tree (difficult because privacy considerations mean that often records on living relatives are not available—online or offline).

And how are they going to match family members? By, among other things, DNA.

Of course, this raises even more questions when it comes to privacy. Will anyone be willing to store DNA information online, where it could be hacked? The banking industry still has problems keeping our financial information away from prying eyes.

I am all for complete openess on the Internet…but is there a line everyone agrees shouldn’t be crossed? How far is too far when it comes to putting our lives online?

Did you ever stop to think about what we are leaving behind in the way of tangible communication? Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform on ancient clay tablets, the Rosetta Stone, and even Paleolithic cave paintings preserved information from past eons thanks to their rocky media. Today, however, we bombard each other with PowerPoint presentations, emails, text messages, and vlogs that live only in the electronic ether.

It seems only our past is worthy of imprinting on long-lasting material like monument stones. Why aren’t people chiseling Snoop Dogg lyrics onto bricks or blasting the word “McLovin” on the side of a quarry face?

If they knew about Harold Innis, they may start doing just that. Harold was a well-respected political economist from Toronto via the University of Chicago, who in the later, more cynical years of his life took a stab at mass media analysis. He probably hung around with people like Marshall McLuhan, drinking Latrobes, soul searching at Wrigley Field, and dreaming up fun titles for their dry books like The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Nevertheless, Harold made an interesting assumption: When communication is conveyed using durable materials like tablets of stone, they will be preserved over time and disseminated through an intimate if not respectful community that has access to view the information first hand. This is “time-biased” or “time-binding” media. Paper and electronic media, conversely, are light and fast, meant to be distributed over a larger community more quickly; this gives way to the theory of “space-biased” or “space-binding” media.

Harold went on to propose that space-biased media is the media that builds empires because the institutions of politics, religion, and commerce are influenced by the organization and vast distribution of information and hence create a social bias of the time-space continuum. In other galactic terms, time=no space, space-time=power, and power=a two-dollar hot dog at Wrigley Field.

What does this mean? I am not sure, but I think when something is written in stone, we trust it’s wiser than the moment in which it lives. We think it needs to be preserved in hard media, but it’s really only a sign for the times. Today, we let the legion electronic personal devices convey and capture every scrap of information so that everyone knows everything about anything. This numbs us to the authorities and institutions that bind us to their will. Depressed yet? Just wait…realize tombstones are a time-binding media, and make sure your epitaph inspires anyone who comes to visit. Oh, and don’t worry about launching empires.

Yesterday Smashing magazine dropped a long post titled 30 Usability Issues to Be Aware Of. It seemed to go on and on, honestly, but there were a couple terms that jumped out at me. Here they are with their definitions:

User-centered design (UCD)
User-centered design is a design philosophy in which users, their needs, interests and behavior define the foundation of web-site in terms of site structure, navigation and obtaining the information. UCD is considered as a standard approach for modern web-applications, particularly due to the rise of user generated content. In Web 2.0 visitors have to be motivated to participate and therefore need conditions optimized for their needs.

Walk-Up-And-Use Design
A Walk-up-and-use design is self-explanatory and intuitive, so that first-time or one-time users can use it effectively without any prior introduction or training.

Is it just me, or shouldn’t those two definitions simply fall under the heading “website design”? Why must those ideas be singled out like alternatives or options? Why not have an entry called Crap Design? Crap Design is creating a site without regarding site visitors intent on accomplishing something. Try to avoid crap design. The site you’re creating is not for you, it’s for your users. Build it for them.

Here’s a usability challenge for you:

Build a site for an audience who can’t read. My five-year-old can recognize just a few words, but damn if she can’t find her way around a couple of kid game sites (noggin and pbskids) with little to no difficulty! It’s amazing to me. No directions, no instructions, just intuitive design. Sometimes I just sit and watch her and try to learn from the site layouts.

They got it right for sure. She showed up to play games and they made it easy for her. We could learn some lesson there, eh? No matter what you call it.