I’m moving my blog to http://adamkempler.com
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A recurring pattern I encounter frequently when developing community oriented sites is whether to make certain user-contributed content public or private. Often the end-user has the option of making their content public or private and the system defaults to one or other.

The client almost always votes for private as the default, but Ari Paparo tells a cautionary tale in his post about why his bookmarking company Blink.com failed and del.icio.us succeeded.

Ari lists multiple reasons, but the one I identify with as a web developer is the issue of public versus private content. This comes up time and again, and as Ari states, it’s not just the ability to make something private or public, but which should be the default. In his case, making ‘private’ the default was a deciding factor in the failure of his site, whereas del.icio.us defaulted to ‘public’ for the very same content (bookmarks).
So the next time I’m wrestling discussing with a client whether or not user-generated content should be public or private I will refer them to Ari’s post.

[tags]Marketing, Patterns, Content, Content Management[/tags]

I was setting up a new Wordpress blog and was trying to decide what format to use for my urls (permalinks). I opted for a format like:
http://www.mysite.com/blog/archives/123
I thought that this would be easier on the eyes than having the post title in the url:
http://www.mysite.com/blog/archives/some-post-by-me

However, I was just found a post on the importance of a good post slug. I really hadn’t thought about the importance of relevant content in the url for search engines and ad serving via Adsense.

I’ve usesd a lot of project management software and the key ingredient missing from all of them is a way to document and identify best practices for each of the projects. Clay Shirky says: The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and
tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

When starting a new project there are always lessons that were learned in previous projects that could be applied. However, these are usually relearned each time. Especially if there are different teams working on each of the projects.

I’ve always found doing a “Lessons Learned” after each project to be helpful in capturing some of the best practices. This can be a simple process involving just typing up some basic questions and answers such as:

• Description of the project
• What were three things that went wrong during the project and why did they go wrong?
• How could they be prevented in the future?
• What were three things that went right during the project and why?
• How can they be replicated on future projects?

It’s important to ask these questions both internally and with the client. Often what went wrong and what went right are very different based on who you ask.

Martin Leith has an extensive list of idea generation methods at www.ideagenerationmethods.com. Each method links to a page with additional information. Looks pretty interesting.

I think this site would benefit tremendously if it were in a Wiki format. Users could provide additional information on each of the methods such as examples of usage, case histories, and positive and negative feedback about each method. Additionally users would be able to add additional methods to the list.

I caught this snippet on Robert Scoble’s blog and it made me stop and think. Scoble: I’ve seen this behavior before…

As a web developer and marketer building web sites for clients one of the golden rules had always been “Make it sticky”. Content, functionality, and navigation were always designed to keep the user on the site for as long as possible.

This brings up a good point which is another golden rule that I’d forgotten - Sometimes the rules change! New technologies lead to new user mindsets which ultimately change the way users expect to interact with an online presence.

I think all of us web developers should put our “golden” rules up on the wall each time we develop a web site and ask ourselves if any of those rules have changed. I know I will for now on.

10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company is a nice reminder of some important points to keep in mind when developing and running a Web company.

#10 made me go back and revisit all the competition for my own soon to be released product. I fell prey to too easily dismissing many of the competitive sites as “no competition.”

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts lately about how some big name companies just don’t get blogging and bloggers. Companies such as Dell and Apple have had their share of grief at the hands of bloggers.

Yesterday I came across a company that does get it. I blogged about Google Talk and mentioned that I also was trying other messaging and communication software including SightSpeed. Within an hour, someone from SightSpeed had commented on my post and offered to set me up with an account to give it a try.

This is amazing. I was truly floored. This shows the power, immediacy, and viral capabilities of blogging from a marketing standpoint that most companies are missing out on.

If SightSpeed had just sent me an email saying, hey try out our new software, I would have instantly deleted it. I wouldn’t have seen it, and neither would anyone else.

But when someone blogs about a product, service or company, they are in some ways, extending an invitation to that company to respond. Now the company has been invited to talk to the user, and their discussion (and marketing message) takes place in front of everyone that reads that post.

I’ve been working with the marketing departments of companies for a long time and this is something that I will be using as an example of “what to do” with all my clients. So many companies don’t even monitor what is being said about them in the blogosphere. Here it is proactively being taken a step further.

I’m going to install the new version of SightSpeed today and I’ll post about my experiences with it here.

Social Networking Introduction by Rob Cross provides an introduction to organization of human resources and the social and business implications.

Record every conversation. If you are like me, you’ve had the same situation happen over and over again. You go to a client meeting and a few days later, having never gotten around to writing up the meeting notes, you try and remember everything that was discussed, futilely trying to make heads or tails of your chicken scratch notes. And that is the best case scenario. At worst, (and just as frequent), you are back at another client meeting and the client says something which is completely the opposite of what they said or asked for about three months ago at an earlier meeting. Your chicken scratch notes are long gone, and even if they weren’t you probably figured what your client was saying at the time wasn’t important enough to write down. So now all you can do is mumble, “but you said…”.

Trust me. Record it. And use a digital recorder. This way you can archive all of your conversations on your computer with convenient titles and timestamps.