Slide Show Pro is a component for Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8 that helps you display pictures on your web site. With over 60 customizable options, SlideShowPro works how you want it to, and can easily be styled and resized to match your existing site design — all with a simple point and click user interface.

It's German and it's good. Well done use of interactive video much in the same vane as the bar.

Making the invisable visable. Awesome.

Omnicom Group Inc. closed Tuesday on its acquisition of St. Louis based Rodgers Townsend Advertising, after approaching the local advertising agency in March. Read More.

An all too common practice in corporate America is decision by committee. Countless meetings are held each week where people stare at each other across conference room tables and decide not to decide – productivity at it finest. This tradition is especially painful when applied to creative decision making. Advertising, marketing, branding and even web design is incredibly complex and subjective.

Because of the variety of skills and knowledge of its members, the committee is viewed by management as an entity with built in checks and balances thus lessening the risk of a bad decision. This is a fallacy; plenty of bad decisions come from committees. The possibility of a good design getting approved by a committee is slim. The result is what the committee considers safe, and safe is usually not good. With creativity, without risk there’s little reward.

In order to communicate visually, like with graphic design, a certain amount of responsibility is placed on the viewer. When viewers have different backgrounds, educations and experiences their level of understanding varies greatly. Even after several hours of explanation and justification by the creator, the decision makers often don’t comprehend and perceive what they’re seeing similarly.

Ever experience a group of people in a committee deciding what to order for lunch? Pizza seems to be popular, but if you followed each person to lunch individually, I bet none eat pizza. Why do people choose something as a group they would not choose themselves? Some people think “what would they think rather than what do I think.” People that may not be qualified to make a sound decision as individuals are able to influence others in a committee. People that avoid conflict go with the flow increasing the majority. These phenomena are termed ‘group think’ and lead to bad results in committees.

How can this unfortunate situation be avoided? As creators and experts, it’s our job to persuade our clients against this creative decision making approach. Ask your client to choose a qualified stakeholder with the knowledge, experience and ability to make the definitive decision. He/she may choose, or be required to get input from others, and should do so, but the dynamics here are different than with a committee. If they are unwilling to do so because they do not have the right person, their trust must be gained to allow you, as the expert, to make the decision for them. If they won’t do that because it’s not how they do things, be prepared to deal with the tedious task of getting buy in from the majority.

When going into a project ask how decisions are going to be made and if it’s by committee make sure you account for the extra effort required to communicate the design concept and gain sufficient understanding from the group for approval. Carefully planned presentations and one-on-one explanations will be needed. These can quickly consume a lot of unexpected hours from the budget. Also in the proposal detail how you plan to communicate with the group, the revision/approval process, what is in scope and what happens when the process gets excessive.

A little quiz for yourself, or your clients to determine if they/you are up to speed on what’s up with today’s web:

1. What is the fastest growing web programming technology?
2. What does AJAX stand for? Bonus – what company is credited for coining the phrase?
3. What is a mashup?
4. Do you blog, or have you ever commented on a blog?
5. Provide three examples of online communities?
6. What site has the most traffic in the US?
7. What is a Podcast?
8. What is viral marketing.
9. What is the most popular site for watching videos?
10. What is the most popular site for sharing photos?

If you, your agency, or internal people don’t know more than half of these without Googling, you need help with your web presence. Email me, mail [at] jamesbielefeldt [dot] com.

The Ruby on Rails framework will ship on the new OS X, Leopard. Read more.

An interesting one hour podcast by Seth Godin and Joseph Jaffe discussing new trends in marketing on and off line.

ATS #47 - The New Marketing Podcast Celebrity SethMatch

Control what directories web crawlers, or robots can access by having a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site. More info can be found at robotstxt.org

Other than content, inbound links are the most important factor in search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) and should be part of any SEO program. Google’s PageRank system relies on these as well as Technorati’s Popular Blog ranking system. There are a variety of ways to get inbound links: link swapping with other sites, paid link ads, index sites and having other sites just link because of good content. Here’s a couple resources for analysis, tips and tools:

MarketLeap - SEO company site with info and tools
Good tips from TextLinkAds
More SEO Tools  
Alexa – Ranking information
Internet Search Engine Database

NetLingo.com has thousands of definitions about the online world of business, technology & communication from technical terms to text messaging acronyms

I’m always looking for simple and cheap ways to help manage projects. Whether they’re spreadsheets, Post-it Notes or MS Outlook, tools make a difference.

Three core functions of managing web projects are task distribution and notification, tracking the amount of work performed and reporting progress or status. Ideal project management applications do all that and more, but they can be complicated and expensive. Blogs are simple, free and suitable for at least two of the three functions mentioned above.

By setting up categories useful to your situation, blogs can work very well to help manage tasks and issues and log project activity. They can also be a central repository for project information and related documentation. Here’s an example of possible category structure:

Project A
- Active Tasks
- Completed Tasks
- Active Issues
- Solved Issues
- Red Flag
- Status Reports
- Files

The Project Manager creates posts and team members use comments to communicate. Everything is ordered by date. When a post’s status changes, the PM simply edits it and moves it to another category. If your blog has RSS feeds they can be used for notification as tasks, issues and comments get posted. Some blog software products allow for membership so categories and posts can be hidden to certain users. Clients can even be folded into the mix.

Recursion and Illusion. This is weird, but I like it.

WhenWeRollWeRollBig

An outstanding article on the history of Wikipedia via Kottke.

After spending some time searching the web for definitive answers on web page length and scrolling versus paging content and clicking, I concluded there weren’t any; content and users dictate best practices. Here are a few generalizations from “rules” I read:

1. Don’t split up related content un-logically. Related content should be kept together on the same page for uninterrupted flow. Arbitrary division of related content disorients people more than the act of clicking or scrolling.

2. File size and page load times should dictate how much stuff gets put on one page. Page content should facilitate quick load times. Recommended maximum page file size seems to be 50k.

3. If a web is well designed with visual clues, prudent use of space, subheads and good typography, and is structured into logical parts with not too much content, a page can be quit long and usable. Design plays an important role.

4. The hard and fast, old-school rules of lengths and click amounts have been proven inaccurate as usability data has been compiled over the past five years.

5. The key to getting users to scroll is how content is presented “above the fold”, in the visible part of the page, when it loads. Once they understand content lies below, they will follow.

6. If one is looking for a recommended web page length, 3-4 screen lengths was commonly cited as a maximum length.

7. Anchor tags (links jumping to a position on the same page), however useful, are often confusing to users since they can’t see the jump and loose all visual clues. If used, these should be denoted as such.

8. Horizontal scrolling is bad.

9. Proportional scrollbars, like a browser’s, help users determine how long the page is and should be used whenever possible.

I just read the essay by Edward R. Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”

As an example of why not to use PowerPoint for technical reporting and presentations, he details its use by NASA in the analysis of the causes of the space shuttle Columbia disaster. His conclusion, and that of others, is NASA’s use of PowerPoint with its presentation limitations to communicate the data on the takeoff damage, while the spacecraft was still safe in space, grossly affected how it was interpreted by NASA management and thus resulted in the deaths of the Columbia astronauts. Powerful stuff.

Other examples of PPT’s inadequacies include showing statistical data in table format displayed as PPT slides (they are completely incomprehensible), the Gettysburg Address as a PPT presentation (pretty funny) and several references to business presentations of various purposes.

Several factors contribute to the skewing of information when using PowerPoint: limited space for meaningful test, segmentation of the message with slides, bulleted lists, hierarchical display of text, and useless phluff. Mr. Tufte continues to make the case that PowerPoint has a high signal to noise ratio, an extremely low transfer of information rate, dilution of information, and absurd style sheets, templates and effects. I can’t agree more. I hate PPT presentations and don’t use them myself. He favors text documents with paragraphs, sentences, diagrams and space to completely tell the story. I agree and by distributing handouts for meetings, people have something tangible to take away.

Put some creativity and effectiveness in your next presentation. Don’t use PowerPoint. I recommend this booklet for anyone needing some good reasons not to use the ubiquitous and dubious software – ever.