Revision tracking

Track who changed what and when with the revision history found at the bottom of the edit screen. It’s a handy feature for multi-author blogs, but it’s also a godsend for solo bloggers. If you’ve ever made a change and then changed your mind about the change, you know what I mean.

SSL support for /wp-admin/

You can now blog from public WiFi spots without fear. WordPress 2.6 now supports SSL for both the administration panel and for logins. Without SSL encryption, your user name and password are sent to the server in clear text. That’s a security disaster waiting to happen if someone is sniffing traffic on the same network. But with WordPress 2.6, you can use SSL to log in as an administrator, and even force all logins to use SSL.

Better plugin update notification

If new versions of your plugins are available, you’ll see a notification bubble over the Plugins link (upper-right corner) indicating how many of your plugins have new versions available.

Introduction of Gears

Also notable — though only for what it could mean for future versions of WordPress — is support for Gears. This version of WordPress only saves CSS and JavaScript files locally, which speeds up load times for the administration panel. I suspect future versions of WordPress will also support offline editing and storage for blog posts.

Upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6 should be easy and painless. But because this version makes changes to your database, make a back up first.

David Weinberger seems to think so. He doesn’t like hierarchies, taxonomies or narrow instrumental classifications. His latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous, is devoted to drawing out just how inadequate these structures are when applied to the distributed, messy heap of content on the web. This isn’t a particularly new observation. Clay Shirky has been speaking to this point for years now. The basic idea is that the classificatory structures that we use to deal with the very real constraints of the physical world lend an artificial “essentialist” necessity to our task-based classificatory practices online. Ordering and making sense of the welter of stuff that populates our closets and sciences is necessary given the limitations of the physical world. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “true” in some big, extra-systemic sense, however. The need for strict, pre-determined structure is mitigated online because computers are really good at creating ad hoc order out of an undifferentiated mess. Online, not everything needs one and only one place. Acting and designing as if it did at best limits the democratic/utopianist promise of the web and at worst imposes or perpetuates illegitimate power structures. My interest is in what this does to the practice of web design.

First of all, I agree with most of what Weinberger and Shirky say about the changed face of order on the web. The majority of content falls into a miscellany. It’s just a mess of digital artifacts awaiting order. Anyone can throw stuff out there and it doesn’t really matter where it resides. If it has metadata on it or we can read its content, we can find it again and probably even put it to some use for which it was never intended. Its the potential for order that’s important. Designers have been working out the implications of these ideas for years now. Apparently, Weinberger’s book is intended for the decision makers near the top that may not have worked out the implications of ideas like tagging.

A key target of Weinberger and Shirky’s ire are ontologies or data structures intended to explicate the concepts in some domain of knowledge. Ontologies, in the information sciences sense, are the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. Shirky uses the term more broadly, thinking of it in philosophical terms as the sorts of things countenanced by some system, the sorts of things that some domain recognizes as constituents. The claim is that ontologies lead to a species of essentialism, or the world view that everything has some set of properties that uniquely identifies it in all possible situations. Both Shirky and Weinberger spend a lot of their time pointing out the fact that most ontologies are arbitrary and conventional, but that they can give the impression of necessity or self-evidence. For them, different ontologies are just competing webs of more or less useful concepts. In holding this view we can refer to them as nominalists.

My problem with most influential nominalists on this and other points is that, if not read or followed carefully, they can give the impression that there’s no place for local, designed order online at all. In other words, sometimes their fervent tone gives the impression that there’s absolutely no room or reason for islands of structure built from the welter of free form content. In their desire to rout “ontologizing” hierarchies simply on principle, they obscure the fact that a task-based local structure doesn’t automatically engender a totalizing, absolutism. The local structures on most sites are about sense-making and communication, not world-making and dictation. For instance, Flickr, Weinberger’s favorite example isn’t really the free-wheeling heap of free-range content he casts it as. Content enters Flickr neatly, if minimally, categorized (“category” isn’t coextensive with “hierarchy”) by user, camera type, etc. One could almost say that the user provides a loose ontology for Flickr. The user, a sort of default set, is the center of gravity that holds Flickr together; it’s the initial structuring principle that gives the content its potential for further order and defines possible transformations. It’s a wonderfully loose binding, but without this initial act of minimal categorization, the potential for further arbitrary re-ordering is lost. Though Weinberger and Shirky clearly know this, they should probably state it more explicitly as their management level audience may not be in the trenches enough to cut through the polemic and hyperbole.

There’s no such thing as order ex nihilo. Computers are really good at aggregating if they’ve access to some sort of potential ordering mechanism (tags, official metadata, etc.). If it’s text, this could be pure content. If not, we need to attach something, thus Flickr’s initial, user determined set. If we’ve no handle by which to grab the content, it might as well not be there (particularly with images and video). This is not to say that there’s no emergent order, which is a separate issue entirely.

As we’ve been stating for years, Information Architecture in the old fashioned tree-structure sense does seem pretty irrelevant. Definitely so for IA in the grand, Peter Morville sense, in which all sites are trees, everything has one and only one spot and there’s very little cross-linking of paths. Still any structure that gives sense a la Flickr’s implicit categorization is a form of architecture. It’s an ordering principle that somehow sensibly aggregates content on a local scale. So we’ve no longer Information Architecture in which all structures are made from custom built materials. Rather it’s more of an information shanty town in which personal structures are built from the miscellaneous heap of common materials. But the important point is that it’s still architecture, and still reproduces common elements like doors, windows, etc (to stretch the metaphor a little thin). We need pools of order with understandable principles of manipulation that briefly and locally coordinate elements from the miscellany. This point is often obscured in Weinberger’s book and we, as designers, will have to pay the price once it starts to circulate within marketing departments.

And though Weinberger (at least) seems to frown upon instrumental concerns on the web, we tend to have to design sites that people use to do things. At an abstract level, the nature of the miscellaneous mess of content means that it becomes more useful the more content there is and the more it’s tagged. For example, the more people upload and interact with content on Flickr, the better your chance of finding photos tagged “fruitcake” that are actually pictures of fruitcakes. Tagging after all is often more about the tagger than the tagged. Once enough people are doing it, however, the tags start to become useful content locators; at high volumes, idiosyncrasies and bad tags tend to filter out. Unfortunately, this suggests that loose structures, based entirely on tags tend to have an instrumental usefulness that varies with content volume and interaction. The moral: if you’re working on a project with
a smallish expected volume that needs to be useful out of the gate, you may still need to impose a strict categorization scheme in order to meet you goal. This, to Weinberger, is a sin, or at least a backwards looking crime against the essence of the web. At least that’s the impression one gets reading the book. (Shirky takes a more nuanced, “domain of discourse” based approached)

On the ground, designers realize that these quicksilver, local categorizations are the fundamental means by which we define our sites and some of our only means of communication online. They’re a part of the language of the web through which we communicate our clients’ messages. Without these structures, there would be no sites per se, just a grey fog of rootless content awaiting individual requests for order. This can’t be what Weinberger has in mind. Yes, Google is hugely popular. But it’s also a high-level general ordering mechanism and a liminal space intended to get people through it, not to it. The success of Google at what it does does not mean that we should all follow that example. Unless all we want to build from here on out are search engines.

So, we all agree that, in general, top down hierarchies are less and less relevant to a distributed, open access dumping ground like the web. And, of course, nobody really thinks that there’s only one relevant ontology. Ontologies are domain specific and the attributes assumed within them are never intended to be intrinsic to the content. Still, the need for order comes from two directions: the client and the user. Sites are doors into the mass of content, zones of order that communicate in part through the principles they impose on the miscellany. Users don’t yet want to get down to the level of the miscellany. Google, is the closest we like to get: a presentation of an ostensibly ordered set bound together by some minimal user-defined “intension.” The lower level domain-specific sites we generally concern ourselves with usually require a tighter sense of order than something high-level like Google. In general, as domain specificity increases so too the appropriate ordering principles (conventional content breaks, vocabulary, etc.). Users want a certain decrease in uncertainty as they become more specific in their searching behavior, but I agree that they never want its elimination. This is what the new ordering principles are all about. Allowing local order without stripping away the global properties of the miscellany.

Never fake a blog touting your brand.

That seems like an obvious rule to me, but in the light of recent attempts at faking blogs, it’s worth clearly articulating. I’m not talking about “blogs” clearly associated with a (usually humorous) online marketing push. Rather, it’s those clunky, ad copy interpretations of typical blog style masquerading as an enthusiastic consumer’s heartfelt ramblings that are the problem here. Invariably, when a fraudulent blog (frog) is exposed, it generates a heated backlash and negative press. Of course, that is exactly the opposite of its intended, brand-furthering purpose. Worse still, it deepens bloggers’ already deep mistrust of marketing.

Why do marketers continue to shoot themselves in the foot this way? Well, one reason seems to be that blogs are a genre. Like most genres, they have easy to mimic tropes and stylistic peculiarities that we all recognize and that collectively say “blog”. Apparently, in the light of all the hype about the blogosphere’s brand-messaging potential, faking it proves way too tempting for some marketers.

What they’ve failed to notice, however, is that beyond style, blogs also have intentional conditions on their identity. That is, a site’s being a blog is partially determined by the author’s intent. Just mimicking the genre’s style is not enough to make your fake blog acceptable. Blogs are a genre founded on the slippery notion of “authenticity”; and authenticity is particularly important if your blog is supposed to be of the “personal blog” sub-genre.

So, when a marketer attempts to sell something by mimicking a genre founded on the idea of authentic, personal communication, the impression given is fraud and deception, not just witty, post-modern appropriation of a popular genre. It’s just this sort of perceived deception that led to mistrust of all forms of marketing in the first place. Obviously, a solution is to avoid deceptive practices, to utilize a means of marketing in which you don’t have to hide your real commercial ends. Be above board and think a little, please, for your own good.

Blogs have made this particularly apparent. Sure, word of mouth is as old as language, and people have discussed products as long as there have been products (such discussion is probably the “brand primordial soup” after all). But never before have individuals been able to attack or praise your product and potentially have their opinions heard by so many. Of course, the vast majority of blogs never get read, and the vast majority of blog readers read only a handful of blogs. So, the rhetoric of blogging as a liberating means of getting your singular voice heard like never before is more or less ridiculous. What’s so powerful about blogging is the potential for the mass audience, THE consumer, to assail your offering with a collective voice much louder than the individual voice.

So it’s not so much that some individual is the medium and if we find and convert that one, well-connected dude the digital agora will be ours. Rather, there’s a constant buzz of conversation and referencing going on in the blogosphere. Linking and forwarding from one blog to the next drives messages, gripes or goofy content from the scarcely read periphery to the closely followed center overnight. Your brand message, or angry accounts of your brand’s failure, can be amplified by this medium, or it can be drowned out. You will be successful only if you provide consumers with a genuinely relevant, memorable and differentiated set of ideas or experiences. After all, this medium, the collective consumer, is two-way. You’ve got to listen, address and please the medium to get your message spread. It’s our job to figure out how…

Effectively, it means that the brand – the collection of sentiments, concepts, ideas, myths, whatever, surrounding your product or commercial offering – is beholden to the needs, desires and tastes of consumers. Your brand had better be able to adjust or it becomes irrelevant.

Let me unpack these ideas a little bit. A huge part of what makes a successful brand is the relevance of both the actual, physical offering, or product, and the manner in which that offering is presented to consumers. Having a relevant offering obviously is a necessary part of being successful. However, branding is fundamentally a struggle against commoditization, against the classically conceived market’s natural tendency to defeat premiums and reduce all competition to mere pricing. A considerable part of that mysterious quantity called “the brand” is how relevant the message communicating your product’s relevance is. In other words, if you don’t speak your target’s language, if you don’t surround your offering with ideas, concepts, stories, etc. particularly resonant with your target, then you’ve just got another more or less useful product. It will sell if it compares relatively well with others like it, but only if it’s lower priced.

Getting back to brand interactivity, what your target consumers consider a relevant message is even more shifty and unstable than what they consider a relevant product. That is, people’s taste in jokes or sentiments or aesthetics, etc. tends to change faster than their taste in products. Coke has been largely the same sugary stuff for years, but the manner of speaking about that stuff’s place in people’s lives has changed dramatically throughout that time. Your brand, the message transmitting or communicating your product’s worth or value in people’s lives, is naturally unstable. In one day and out the next.

So what, right? How are brands interactive? Well, they’re interactive in the sense that the web in general, and blogs in particular, are making the feedback loop between consumers and marketers incredibly tight. But the only thing new about the situation is its immediacy; the loop has shrunk from a traffic circle to a wedding ring. The “brand stewardship” model of marketing, in which the brand is dictated to the consumer and only grudgingly changes course under threat of absolute ruin, has always been wrong-headed. You can’t completely and totally manage, control and broadcast your brand or its perception. Immediate feedback and reactionary blogging have only amplified what has always been the case. Brands are creatures of relevance and relevance is incredibly unstable. If a brand can’t intelligently react to maintain relevance (in a way consistent with its history) then it will fail.

It’s our job to look ahead, determining relevance and the appropriate means of communication for our clients. But first we must understand that it’s interaction, not broadcast.

Hellooo?

In today’s NYTimes, Nat Ives gives an unofficial shout out to some agencies who get it. Take a look. I submit that this list is puny, but then again, Madison Avenue’s embrace of industry change traditionally has also been that: weak. These examples aren’t poignant, assertive or in many cases, all that relevant. They are terrifyingly safe. Ives points out that agencies think blogs are risky – imparting too much freedom from the controlled message. To agencies with creative types that really have something to offer, I say get off your high-horse and get down to the business of relating to your tech-savvy, razor-sharp audience before they no longer relate to you.

Link (from the NYTimes, requires log-in)

P.S. Somehow, this feels related and it’s from gapingvoid.com, one of my favorite advertising-related blogs:   “How to be Creative”