Howells.

I’m very excited to see that Rik Lomas’ new start-up—Steer—has launched. Their goal is to set up high-quality courses in web design and development. Some of their courses are aimed at people pursing a new career, whether it be creating their own web startup or wanting to become a designer or developer, and other courses are aimed at giving people in the industry extra skills to improve their craft.

Some of their courses are long form multiple day courses, for instance, they have a course called “Learn to make websites” coming up in April that’s Monday to Friday, 10am until 6pm every day for 10 days. Another interesting product is a series of courses called Slow Code: sessions every fortnight for people who want to learn more casually or just don’t have the time to commit to an intensive course. They’re launching with Ruby on Rails and jQuery Slow Code courses.

Their long term goal is to create a platform for learning during and after the courses so that their students can always get help solving problems. There are a few education startups that help do this, but importantly Steer are providing the educational infrastructure than will underpin the platform; tailoring it precisely to their students’ needs.

The staff at Steer—who, incidentally all code themselves—know the pain of learning how to program, so in parallel with the main platform they’re building web apps to make creating websites easier. Their first app, Teepee is for people looking to get static sites online easily. They say, “Think of it as a cross between Geocities and a super simple web host. We’re working with Code Club on this so it has to be simple enough for a 9 year old to use which in itself is a big but fun user experience challenge for us.”

Finally, Steer are donating money from each course to Code Club, to help their programme that helps kids learn to code. For instance, every ticket bought for their 2 week learn to make websites course will fund 12 children to code for a year. “We love Code Club and it’s amazing to see how much enjoyment children get out of creating their own inventions. That sense of fun and achievement is something that we want to replicate with Steer.”

Given the woeful state of design and development education in the UK and the US, I’m excited about Steer, and genuinely believe that it will be startups like this that will carry the mantle: I haven’t seen any innovation by traditional educational institutions and can’t envisage a future with them playing a significant role in educating the next generation of talent in our industry.

☛

I recently enjoyed this article by Alice Rawsthorn in the New York Times. As an industry we seldom get a mention in the mainstream media, so I welcomed commentary.

Here’s a pithy summary:

• A huge number of websites—particularly those of major art galleries like Tate and Centre Pompidou—are incredibly confusing to find even the most simple information.
• She levies the fault of this at the web designer’s feet: “Shoddy Web site design is a curse of modern life. The more dependent we have become on the Internet for information, the likelier we are to suffer from its design deficiencies.”
• A well designed site is “fulfilling its intended function efficiently and engagingly”, but “dispiritingly few sites manage to achieve it. A common mistake is to prioritize style over substance.”
• The principal problem with many Web sites is that, “their designers were neither rigorous nor imaginative enough in planning the way we will navigate them”
• She uses the example of Quo Vardis as an example of a well designed site that fulfils its function
• Then, she uses the Milwaukee Police News website of a site designed to convey the complex and time-sensitive nature of its content well.

I agree with almost everything she says, but it’s everything that is unsaid that is missing, and which makes me uncomfortable with the piece. Of course it’s tricky to get into the minuatae of a website’s failings in a mainstream publication, but at the very least I want to explain why the web designer shouldn’t be blamed.

Let’s take a typical art gallery site as an example. I might not particularly like the site in its entirety, but I could love its design. In the context of the article, that could seem like a contradiction. It assumes that the site is a failure because it has been designed badly, and in many people’s minds design equates to style. In fact, there so many pieces of the website machine that can fail, which can have a devastating effect on the overall experience.

Firstly, it’s no secret that the last organisations to enjoy the cutting-edge in content management systems (CMSs) are those in the arts. Either there is no funding available, or they are locked into multi-million dollar government contracts with behemoth IT companies whose systems are held together with string and sticky-tape. Designing for antique systems is a challenge that I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone. Your beautifully crafted designs—and even code—can get mulched into a hideous mess when mangled by such systems.

Then, because the CMSs aren’t a pleasure to use, the people who are responsible for updating it have a hard time adding content. If it’s hard to add content, missing connections start to creep in and the whole experience is ruined. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed browsing the V&A site without stumbling into a 404 error page, for instance. Because adding content is a miserable experience, why would they even bother creating—or commissioning—joyful, well produced content, if it means a world of pain to publish?

Suddenly there’s a chain of circumstances that lead to website mediocrity, and yet designers only form a small part of it.

I’ve not met a fantastic web designer who also has the ability to structure and model content as well as a fantastic information architect can. Yet I’ve learned of projects where there has been little input from someone who can see the broader picture and goal of a complex site. In these cases the web designer is working from briefs that usually haven’t been validated by some solid architectural thinking. By the same token, bad structural thinking can only lead to messy design; but that’s hardly the fault of the designer.

Underpinning all this is the technical infrastructure. Sites have to feel punchy and quick for a great experience, and so many either don’t have the resources to achieve this, or their hosting team isn’t up to the job. Tate themselves felt this sorely with the Kraftwerk fiasco, a few weeks ago.

So, let’s take a look at what’s happened with all the cogs in the machine so far: the design agency who created the site is upset because their designs have been mangled beyond recognition. They could also be upset because they’ve worked from client briefs without any solid architectural plans in place. The content team are frustrated and demotivated because their CMS is little more use than a typewriter. The hosting team are frustrated they don’t have the money (or the will) to make things faster.

And yet it’s the web designer who’s suffering the blame.

Finally, I’d like to question Rawsthorn’s use of the Milwaukee Police News as an example of a great site. Absolutely, it’s a technical feat and compelling. But to me, it looks like a promo for a new cop drama starring Damian Lewis. And—while I haven’t tried; I’m only assuming here—I’d like to see how it works on Internet Explorer 6.0, which is exactly the sort of browser that someone using “older, cheaper machines with slower Internet connections” she refers to earlier in the article have at their disposal. The drama of the site will soon be lost.

To genuinely appreciate design for function, I would have liked Rawsthorn to reference the work of the Gov.uk team. They have done a lot of thinking around how the many millions of users in the UK need to access content, on any machine, and in any way possible. This is only successful due to the close-knit team of designers, developers, information architects, user experience professionals, and technologists, that have come together to make a speedy, simple, clear message, using design as it is intended: to make the site effective and functional.

Ultimately, a well designed website is the sum of its parts. The parts tend to be invisible to its visitors other than the visuals that are the end result of a long and complex process. The outcome is that the designer often gets the blame, and that’s a sad message to read in the mainstream media.

I’m a voracious consumer of written content. Nothing on the web makes me happier than filling my Instapaper bucket with shiny pebbles. It doesn’t matter that I might not end up reading them all, but I will try.

Finding the pebbles is a hard thing that has been made astonishingly easy—too easy, for reasons I’ll explore—with the recent rise in aggregators that span the automatic to light-touch. The services I use regularly to help navigate content are the following.

• News.me
• Summify, or Twitter Discover
• Summly
• Digg

There are many more services that pop up with every other Techcrunch post, all attempting to snare morsels of rarefied attention in trying to solve the problem of delivering the most compelling content to you on an Internet that is unfathomably overcrowded with stuff.

Here I’ve deliberately ordered the services in terms of how transparent they are in sourcing the content that they feel is most relevant to you.

News.me replaced the excellent Summify for me, which disappeared once it was bought by Twitter, and which powers their new Discovery features. Taking your Twitter friends as its source, it attempts to digest all the most relevant links, and sends a daily email telling you what to read. Each link is suffixed by the faces of your Twitter friends who shared the piece of content.

By the same team behind News.me is the new Digg uses metrics that are far outside of your control to determine what to show. It doesn’t take into account who you follow on Twitter or who you are connected to on Facebook; it aggregates general consensus. This is an important distinction between it and the old Digg. In the old Digg, you invest time in trusting the community to vote up relevant articles, yet new Digg assumes you to trust the entire internet’s social community in determining what is good (which, as Twitter makes very transparent, is something you shouldn’t assume).

It now turns out that News.me is due to be superseded by Digg: personalised aggregation to be replaced by automation.

The part that is missing in these services is the why. The act of sharing a link in itself is stripped of nuance. Someone might have shared a link because it was the most extraordinarily wonderful piece of writing, as much as because it was the most despicable, bigoted piece of writing ever committed to a blog. Yet this nuance is lost, and it’s the nuance that I miss.

This loss was addressed in The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser: an excellent book if you like pop socio-/psych-/techn-ology books. This passage resonated with me:

David Gelernter, a Yale professor and early supercomputing visionary, believes that computers will only serve us well when they can incorporate dream logic. “One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add ‘drift’ to the net,” he writes, “so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you’re tired) into places you hadn’t planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.”

In an era of computational aggregation, how do we re-introduce human touch?

An exciting new services that helps bring back verbosity and nuance is Reading.am. It offers you content that your friends are reading right now. It doesn’t matter whether the piece was good or bad, or whether it makes you appear cool or dull. While it demands that your friends use the bookmarklet to mark what they are reading, the output is a very comprehensive set of articles that are likely to interest you, since you’re interested in your friends.

I don’t use Reading.am it in the way it has been designed. I read all my content offline on Instapaper, and so I can’t share what I am reading easily. And while it has a commenting system baked-in, since I rarely read on screen I’m not compelled to enter into the conversation. I consume the content it outputs yet I’m very aware that the content behind it is being shared by just a handful of people I respect.

Reading.am is a step towards what I consider the future of curation and aggregation. No amount of natural language analysis or computation can analyse deeply personal taste, quality, nor provide context or meaningful links between content (at least not yet) and so, we need to build platforms and services that are high-touch. So—perhaps paradoxically—we will increasingly rely on editors to help us navigate the web.

I keep thinking about the ratio 100:9:1. (I can’t remember who coined it or referenced it, so if you know please let me know.) It refers to there being one creator of content, nine people who share/curate/edit, for the one hundred consumers. The internet has helped us build platforms for each segment of this model of consumption: readers have Twitter and countless other ways to consume, and of course creators have extraordinary tools at their disposal. Yet the same develops can be said for the nine editors: tech has made us jump to explore computerised, automated curation, without considering that a more valuable proposition might exist with the piece in the middle which gives people who are considered sharers of good content a democratic editorial platform.

I don’t know what this platform might look like yet, but I’m excited to explore it further to bridge the gap between noisy Twitter and the relative calm of a traditional editor. I’d assert that verbose human/high-touch content discovery is something we should strive towards to help us find fewer but shinier pebbles.

Seth Godin published two excellent blog posts over the holidays: How to make a website: a tactical guide for marketers, which was promptly followed up by True professionals don’t fear amateurs.

The latter produced whining and pitchfork-cries from many designers in the community, though as hard as I tried I failed to uncover any coherent argument as to the problem Godin’s posts posed.

In the first post, Godin recommends to his audience an approach to designing a website that wouldn’t look out of place in any design studio’s own working practices. First, research elements of other sites that they feel work well. Second, create the site entirely on Keynote. Third, don’t do any coding at all. Leave this until last when you should give your developers your prototype to be developed.

Most critics of this approach simply furious that Godin recommends not using a professional to do the job of UX and design, and that it was a job that could only be done by a seasoned professional. In other words, hand-wringing job protection, and fear of the amateur which his diligently knocked into place with his follow-up post, responding to critics on Twitter:

If you’re upset that the hoi polloi are busy doing what you used to do, get better instead of getting angry.

These posts on the reactions made me think more about how our industry can be incredibly self-serving and fearful of advice like this, and how suddenly there are distinct barriers to entry to the industry.

Firstly, consider Seth Godin’s audience. Principally they will not be C-level executives running million-dollar organisations. Nor will they be ambitious start-up leaders brandishing millions of dollars in VC. They are people who are working hard to make their fledging organisations work, who like to cherry pick Godin’s excellent tidbits of inspiration and advice from his vast trove of experience.

These are the people I would advise specifically not to hire an web designer or UX specialist. With limited cash at their disposal, there are myriad of ways that a few dollars can go a long to make a site: using an inexpensive service like Squarespace or Shopify, or a free blogging engine like Tumblr with an off-the-shelf theme can easily deliver an effective commercial site to help launch their businesses.

An amateur site might as easily be brilliant as it is terrible. Luck Scheybeler suggested it was analogous to visiting a charming market stall over a cold Bond Street boutique. Further, David Cole suggested that in fact, “not everything needs A+ UX. Some categories are served fine by okay work”. It’s easy to forget this: we (me included) usually fall into the trap of insisting that every site should be a paragon of UX and artistic merit when in fact, okay is simply okay.

And honestly—as a side note—in my career I’ve seen better, more considered sites created by eager start-up founders in Keynote and Powerpoint than self-proclaimed UX and web design experts.

Many, though, focussed their frustrations at the last paragraph:

Hand the Keynote doc to your developers and go away until it’s finished.

Of course I agree with the critics that the best results comes from collaboration between designers, developers, strategists and UX professionals. You can’t simply hand something off without a feedback loop.

But the criticism here reminded me that the sites I have made of which I am least proud (and I’ll never share them - sorry) were those whose in which I had no involvement with the UX or design. Instead I was handed a bundle of Photoshop documents that had to be recreated in CSS to the pixel, and I wasn’t able to critique or suggest any amendments. The goal was the recreate the design precisely without technical consideration, and thus create a site that was devoid of any vestige good UX.

If you were one of those people who were disgusted by the idea of just “handing off” to developers, reflect and think very carefully about how you work with your own team. You could be doing the same thing, yet consider yourself the professional in the scenario, not the amateur with the Keynote deck.

Ultimately I get dismayed by the arrogance of suggesting that only professional designers can be charged with creating a website. I would encourage any true “hustler” trying to create business to have a go at designing their site if only to understand the process. Sure—the result might suck—but that is okay: it can be changed later once their target market or audience responds. Or it might be fantastic, in which case let’s just embrace that the amateur with a Keynote file has taught us a thing or two.

We should embrace the democratisation that the design and UX community has to offer inherent in its very nature, and should encourage everybody with a vested interest to experiment with whatever tools they have. Only then might we even be able to fix the problem of the woeful lack of talent in our industry.

Update: throughout this post I seem to equate using Keynote with amateurism, which absolutely isn’t the case. It’s an excellent tool for rapid prototyping and has been championed by none other than Edenspiekermann.

I’ve recently enjoyed two excellent articles by two guys (intriguingly both called Allan) celebrating a new era of “flat design”, and ultimately about how—as interactive designers—we should embrace the medium with which we work, and steadily reject the skeumorphic, dropshadow-y hellhole we’ve found ourselves in. While I like a touch of dropshadow as much as the next man, when overdown with leather textures and heavy gradients, they get a little nauseating. These posts are the best I’ve read at offering a reason why.

From Allan Grinshtein of LayerVault’s post, “The Flat Design Era”:

Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong.

…

We interpret recent shots taken at skeumorphism as a sign of the coming of “Honest Design.” Much like we were not too long ago, designers working for the web are getting fed up with the irrational, ugly shortcuts being praised as good design.

…

If your product philosophy is to create small, lean, products why doesn’t your design follow?

…to Svpply’s eBay’s Allan Yu who composed a terrific (and hilarious) response:

I think the use of skeuomorphism definitely helped bridge our connection between the tangible and the intangible. It’s been a huge catalyst in maturing our relationship with the web, however, when I look at that relationship now I find that the majority of people understand the web as the web. We no longer need that analogy to make it tangible. The web has earned its own sense of tangibility especially with the use of smartphones and tablets where we can literally hold the web in our hands. With that being said, skeuomorphism now has lost its purpose and seems more like a cheap trick that masks the true quality of an UI

…

Remember in college where one of the first lessons they teach you is to understand your medium? Well our medium isn’t the “screen” its really…glass.

And because we’re designing on glass, at least for me, designing a button that creates a sense of reflection and depth using reflective properties not only seem redundant since your glass is already reflective, but dishonest. In real life, when a button is pushed, you can feel its give and its bounce, but on a phone or on the screen, there is a lack of that physical feedback. A physicality that your mind knows exists but in skeuomorphic reality it doesn’t. So for me at least, it becomes one of those moments where reality doesn’t meet expectations and that disappoints me.

…

Skeumorphism is as much of an UI as the frosting is as a cupcake. Yes, the frosting is delicious, its the part that says “you should eat this”, but we all know it’s the cake part itself that’s doing all the grunt work. It’s the part that you hold, it’s the part that you actually eat, it’s the part that fills you, and it’s the part where you can slather that copious amount of frosting on. The cupcake is the UI, the frosting is just the bells and whistles, the pointless skeurmorphism that is slathered on top.

This is largely a follow-on from a previous blog post, but also to elucidate a few recent tweets about the fact I’m building my own blogging platform.

It’s a hosted solution somewhere between Svbtle and Medium (or at least in so far as much as I know about them) to make posting and sharing links easier than using ExpressionEngine which as I’ve said before, is a wonderful tool but far too complex for the simple job I want it to perform.

While I’m building it primarily for my own use, I’m baking in multi-user use from the outset so that if anybody expresses an interest in using it, they can. If nobody is interested, it’s no big deal: it’s an interesting exercise either way.

My question to you is: if you currently use a blogging/publishing tool, what do you love and hate about it? And if you don’t blog at all, or have tried but gave up, what functionality would you expect to get from a tool you would want to use?

Obviously I wouldn’t want to, nor be able to, accommodate everyone’s input but I’m keen to hear any great insights and ideas.

In my last post I talked about the problem of communication on the web, and its subsequent fragmentation. All the activity I pertain to in the post suggests the need and want to write to communicate opinions and points of view is stronger than ever, yet the success of these new platforms relies on people using them effectively, and beyond Twitter, I know relative few people who dedicate time to writing and creating medium- to long-form content.

I asked a flippant question on Twitter: for those of you who want to write and keep a blog but don’t, why don’t you? What are the barriers to starting? I don’t think I have ever had as many responses to a single question, which was fascinating, and the responses were full of interesting points of view which I shall attempt to summarise here.

But firstly, what’s the big deal?

Within the design and technology community, the supposed importance of writing has never been discussed more. At the extreme I’ve seen some people beat themselves up over writer’s block, and some full-on arguments between blogging luminaries on the right way to write and post. Personally, I belief is that it’s important to share knowledge, opinion, and points of view that help shape our young and immature industry; we’re in a privileged position to be at the early to help contribute to its future. But writing doesn’t have to be about work: your more than likely going to share interests to those who have chosen the same career paths, and it’s nice to step outside the echo chamber and explore the cross-sections.

It’s more than this though: long form writing can be a sort of catharsis; a way of taking effortful action on something you believe in, that is ultimately more satisfying than writing a tweet.

And of course writing can help raise your profile if you’re self employed, and help new clients and projects find you. I’ve written about a range of things on this blog that have directly led to interesting opportunities. If you work hard enough on your writing, you can become a maven in your chosen fields: John Gruber and Jason Kottke are two of the most well-regarded and visible bloggers in our community who are now well-regarded opinion-leaders on Apple (and tech) and culture, respectively.

So why don’t more people write?

Now to the responses to my question, neatly compartmentalised into four recurring themes:

Time, and lack of it. By far the most common response was a lack of time. This response feels so multi-levelled it’s difficult to know where to start to understand why it’s valid. I’ve always said that if you want something, or want to do something you enjoy, you will always make time for it. You make time to run around the park; you make time to go to the pub. Of course it’s fine to prioritise everything else over writing, but make sure you’re doing that not because of any of the following other reasons…

A fear of failure. This response cropped up often. It takes a little bit of something–let’s call it balls–to make something and let it loose to the public. But as a community (if you’re a designer or developer), we do this all the time. Designers (both beginners and the more experienced) post their work to Dribbble, Behance and Fiftytwo to seek feedback. Developers release their work on Github for all to see and use. The cracks are exposed, yet this somehow Feels Okay. There shouldn’t be any difference with writing. If you want to give it a try, nobody can criticise you for doing it. Apart from the occasional troll, people are going to respond very well. It could help at first to write privately, or at least write without then sharing posts on Twitter. Get into the flow with a few posts, share them with friends whose opinion you trust, and see what happens.

Lack of skill. Writing comes more naturally to some, in the same way sketching and coding comes more naturally to others. But without actually doing anything, it’s impossible to hone and develop any skill. I read well-regarded bloggers’ posts with envy: their brevity, tone of voice, and content are all something I aspire to but I reassure myself that they have been doing this for a decade or two. It would be impossible to match their skill from the outset, so it’s not worth comparing your own writing with that of anyone else. Of course as you feel more confident and proficient, you can always go back and delete old, cringe-worthy posts: I certainly have.

What would I write about? It doesn’t matter. Write for yourself. Scribble your thoughts down that you find interesting. That problematic client you had? Might be painful for you but will be interesting for others to read about and learn from. That amazing burger joint not many people know about? Everyone loves burgers: tell people about it! It only takes a paragraph or two. Share a link that you find interesting, but write more than 140 characters as to why. Reference someone else post and expand on it with your own thoughts.

All these reasons smell very much like those that Matias Corea suggested are the barriers to starting your own business, which I outlined in a recent post.

Finally, a few responses talked about pragmatic technical barriers to blogging: existing hosted platforms are usually far from perfect, and self-hosting solutions usually demand technical nous to get started. In my next post I want to talk about this in more detail.

I’m fascinated by the recent startup activity that seems to addressing the “problem” of communications and discourse on the web. Within a relatively short time, we have seen the launch of Svbtle, Medium, App.net, and Branch. I’m not going to spend any time discussing the pros and cons of each since I’m not a member of any of them yet (I think my invitations are in the post, or something) [Update: I just got my Branch invite and it is very, very nice indeed.] but just say that it’s interesting that each have started to address a nuanced aspect of the “problem” communications on the internet.

That’s the second time I put “problem” in quotes because I’m not actually sure what it is, but here’s my attempt to characterise what it might be:

• Discussion is hard
• Expression is hard
• Discovery is hard

The frustration of trying to have a discussion with n+1 people on Twitter is widely felt, so I’m excited that Branch is a well thought-out, nicely designed product that aims to address this problem. You can take a conversation to Branch, and then publish said branch as a publicly viewable, carefully moderated conversation on a given theme. The use cases for individuals, groups, and even enterprise are obvious.

The second problem is one of expression, but can be sub-divided into two further issues: the medium itself, and on being expressive.

As with texts, the stilted terseness of Tweets mean they can be misconstrued and ineffective, whereas the wide-open limitless spaces of individual blogs can over-egg simple points of view, rendering them unheard and unappreciated. Platforms like Posterous sprouted up to cater for this half-way solution between the tweet and the blog post, but with Posterous having been acquired by Twitter we will have to wait to see what fills the space left in the middle.

The problem with expressiveness is that few platforms can really achieve the wet, spit-laden sort of conversation that is ultimately most effective. Forums are usually bloated and prevent flow; commenting systems feel inadequate, and hyper-threaded community platforms like Reddit and Hacker News feel overwhelming, especially to uninitiated. Branch seems to want to emulate real-time human conversation both in terms of turn-taking and small-group chatter and I’m excited to see how this feels in practice.

The third aspect of the communications problem is discovery of content. I am an extremely voracious reader of posts and articles that I find via Twitter, a small handful of bloggers (I’ll list them in a future post), and directly through subscriptions to my favourite magazines. All these are squirrelled away into my Instapaper account for some late-night reading or sweaty Underground ride, but because there’s usually some time between finding a link and reading it, Instapaper for me feels like discovery through quasi-serendipity. It works nicely for me but a great deal of trash ends up in the pile, and I forget why I saved them: often with context and comment having been stripped from a post, a quarter of its meaning is lost.

Despite having plenty to read I do fall into the trap of feeling I’m missing out. This is now compounded by the rise of Svbtle and Medium. I like them both but already feel overwhelmed by the wealth of material on them both. I need help sifting to find the gems. I’m not sure what mechanic needs to exist to help here. Medium rates articles by “goodness”, and Svbtle’s equivalent is “kudos” (but Dustin Curtis already has a “featured members and posts” section, which helps navigate the network). I’m unconvinced either are good measures of quality. They both fall into the trigger-happy like mentality of the Facebook Like; a mechanic laden with as much meaning as an ironic double-thumbs up. A share, a comment, a curated pick, or re-post by people whose opinion I respect are superior measures.

As a side note, the rise of the “curated link list” is a nice development. Readlists and lists in Kippt are both sources of reading goodness, but both have already exploded with content and the number of lists to work through are too numerable to handle.

Where does this leave us? I’m excited by the prospect of new channels of quality content, but nervous that the sheer volume and disperate fragmentation of platforms will diminish their true value, especially when they start to compete with each other. I’m hoping for competition on quality; not of users and pageviews. This is at odds with the economics of networks so it remains to be seen how the endgame might look.

In my next post I’m going to talk about the barriers people feel they have to writing content.

This is hardly going to save the world but the other day I had a little idea that you can have for free, because it’s something I’d like to use.

Like you–probably–I like drinking wine, and have enjoyed some great bottles in restaurants and bars over the years. But even though I try to remember a given bottle’s name and vintage, I’m almost certain not to follow up and find out where I can buy it.

So here’s something that could help: an app to help you remember and keep track of good wine.

• Whip out your iPhone and take a photo of the bottle you’re enjoying. Choose to tag where you are too, to jog your memory. (Yes, this is basically Instagram.)
• The photo gets uploaded to a service which is passed to an Amazon Mechanical Turk queue, where somebody will key in the relevant information about the bottle against a normalised database. (There are tonnes of apps that allow you to record wine information, but you have to key in the information manually.)
• You’ll then have a record of the wine you enjoyed and where, for future reference, searchable and browsable on a web-app. The usual sharing and discovery options will be there for you to share your favourites and recommendations with friends.
• The obvious monetising opportunity is to have large wine merchants suggest to you the best deals for the wines you have enjoyed. Berry Brothers and Rudd might offer you a mixed 12 bottle case for a bargain price, or Majestic might undercut them and offer you 6 bottles of a particular favourites for far less.

If you make it, please let me know.

UPDATE: and as if by magic, Jeff Heuer notes in the comments below that the app does indeed exist, and looks pretty good: http://www.vivino.com/

I heard about Smallknot on Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs, but didn’t follow up by taking a look at their website until now. I’ll let them explain what they do:

Smallknot lets you invest in the small businesses in your community in exchange for goods, services, special perks and benefits. We work exclusively with local businesses that are looking to expand and grow but need a little extra capital to get there. Maybe your favorite coffee shop wants to build a new back patio, or your favorite pizza place needs a new oven. For a lot of local businesses, even very successful ones, projects like these get put on hold or never happen because of a lack of access to capital. Banks don’t lend to the smallest businesses in your neighborhood, and credit cards are costly and expensive. With Smallknot, you can help fund a project in your neighborhood and get back real value paid back in kind and at a premium.

What I love about this idea over, say, contributing to Kickstarter campaigns is that my investment is an actual alternative investment: in return I would get effectively 100%+ of my money back in the form of goods and services provided by them, and the intangible return of feeling good about supporting a favourite, already-established, local business.

The platform is serving Williamsburg and Greenville right now, and from what I can see has only served a handful of local businesses which is a Good Thing. I hope they stay small for as long as is practical, since it’s the connection each business has with its community that makes it so special.