The Haystack

Jon Tan and Jon Gibbons recently launched a website for Denna Jones. It’s a great-looking site, and it makes no use of a (single, local) content management system. Rather, the content is pulled from several web services, such as Flickr and Magnolia.

This is an interesting idea, but I’m on the fence about the approach. While the site is a coherent whole, it’s an automatically generated coherent whole; the author herself may not even be aware of the state of her site at any given moment in time. In effect, it seems to me to be a very well-designed, well thought-out feed aggregator. A fan of Jeremy Keith’s approach, I’ve always tended to see these services as extras, at most supplemental bits of not-necessarily-related content.

On the other hand, this isn’t a bad thing. If the aggregated web services are often used by the author, then it’s most likely no chore for her to log in to four or five sites instead of one CMS: one to add photos, one to add bookmarks, another to blog, etc. While I’m so busy doing other things that I don’t have time to attend to this site [I haven't even really designed the thing yet], Denna is creating bits of microcontent which are combined into something bigger, perhaps more meaningful in surprising ways. Her site is updated as she tweets. That seems quite effortless.

Perhaps I need to get over the fear of the fragility of web services, the idea that they can and sometimes do hiccup, burp, vomit or completely self-destruct. The dependency on these sites. Maybe it’s a matter of choosing the services owned by the big players, just to play it safe. But wait! We want control. Our own favorite content management system, tweaked just so. Argh.

Web 2.0 is about reusing information, and Web 3.0 will be about making information more meaningful by defining and discovering relationships between all these bits of information. The Jons are onto something with Denna’s site. There’s a transition here. And now others will follow.

It’s such a logical, natural approach. It’s the gorilla on the table. I like it. I think.

Remember the Swoosh logos of Web 1.0? And the shiny-drop-shadow-reflection-gradient-badge-icon shit we’re still digesting today? Well, get ready for Network Graph logos for Web 3.0. At least, that’s my prediction.

Assuming that Web 3.0 involves the emergence of practical Semantic Web applications, we can expect to see plenty of logos based on a visualization of graphs depicting nodes within a network. Ehm, like this:

Don’t underestimate the highly creative use of the dot on the lowercase letter i as a node within the network. Real cutting-edge designers will possibly use the letter o. Oh, and for goodness’ sake, use orange and blue in the logo, okay? Dare to be different.

If you want to really turn Web 3.0 on it’s head, join me in designing square, tree-hierarchical logos for semantic web applications. In Microsoft Word. No, make that Powerpoint. No, Paint. No, ASCII. Just to keep these people on their toes.

[On a serious note, I'm testing the Twine beta and find it an awesome concept. These types of apps will change how we as end users approach information. To their credit, they are also one of the first apps in this space to utilize the network-graph-logo-with-the-dot-on-the-i-as-a-network-node design meme.]

I recently became a father (for the third time), and I’ve been so busy with that and work that I’ve had to mark thousands of feeds as read more than a few times. Now, on a relatively quiet evening, I’ve got my shit together enough to actually be able to read my feeds, and post a few noteworthy ones here. There is no particular order. Enjoy!

• Joseph Sullivan’s favorite book covers of 2007. There are some gems here. I especially like One Red Paperclip and Chip Kidd’s design for After Dark.
• Seems that November 26 will be Blue Beanie Day. Holy shit. I love Zeldman, but people, we just barely recovered from everybody talking like a f*cking pirate. Besides, I don’t have a blue beanie. Photoshop.
• Feel a little more intellectual the next time you decide to throw a sheep at your Facebook buddies. Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison dive into the history of social network sites.
• While everyone else is spewing fire about frameworks and such, Andy Clarke ponders instant cake mixes. Come on, Andy, get with the program. This just proves you’re a nut.
• Joe Clark coins Clark’s Law, which is in part why I love open source. Not to be confused with the other, less important Clark’s Law.