Intro Interactive – ICM501a

Someone asked last night (Vivian?) and I mistakenly said all was left on the project was to start moving toward your pitch at the end of the semester. I forgot that I’m asking you to address any legal issues.

For many of you, this will be fairly easy: you need to think about where your site assets are coming from (few sites are built completely from scratch, though yours may be!), and how you will secure and document permissions and licenses for that material. For some, things get more complex. Will you have people uploading materials, and does that mean you need to make use of the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Will you be collecting private information about people and how will you protect that? Are you going to be providing a way for people to engage in any illegal activity, including things like piracy, libel, etc.? What about arguments? How will you deal with spam, and will that be addressed in your terms of use? Do you require contractors or others? Is there some structure needed to handle payments and does that require some organizational structure (incorporation or DBA for merchant accounts, for example)?

In other words, what is an early look of some of the legal issues you expect to encounter?

Next week I’m asking you to think about your project from the perspective of the users. Obviously, you’ve probably done a little of this when addressing the competitive analysis, but you need to dig a bit deeper here, and figure out what uses and gratifications people are seeking and how you might be able to provide for these with your project.

One way you might do this is by establishing a set of personae for potential users. What are their names, their backgrounds, their attitudes, and how might they encounter and use your site. Providing a bit of life history, understand the contexts in which they use the web (where’s the computer? are they at work? how long do they have? why did they come to use it this time?), and exploring how important it is that you meet their needs.

Once you’ve figured out who these example users are–and they should be a kind of archetype of a user: power users and those who have just happened on your site for example–you need to provide some user scenarios. What are some of the typical ways in which people will use your site and why? What are their goals? How do you meet them effectively?

Most design processes these days make some use of personae. This may be limited to asking the client who a few of their most common types of users are. Or, in some cases, it may mean going as far as cutting out posters for each of the personae and posting them around the office so that you can ask questions of them as you are proceeding with your design.

There seems to be some confusion as to the final pitch assignment. I’ll have more details as we get closer, but I want to emphasize that I am *not* asking you to launch a site for this–I’m asking for a compelling and well thought-out and explained pitch for the creation of a site. To give you a feel, here are a few from the “DC” course (7-week) that recently finished:

Obviously, you don’t have to make a video, since we’ll be presenting in person. That is an advantage and a disadvantage, actually. I expect your in-person presentation to be at least as polished as a video presentation. And I’ll be recording it on video as well.

First, note that this assignment–like the video assignment–has been bumped by a week. It is due this coming Monday.

Actually, this is a bit mis-named. Really, what I’m asking you to do is something akin to competitive analysis or market analysis, though nothing that formal. When people talk about doing competitive analysis, they are usually referring to providing the best search engine placement or driving traffic. This is important (depending on the nature of the site), but here I am more interested in where you think you are likely to find the community who will be interested in your site, and what makes you think they will be able to find it and stay there once they do. In other words, while there are tools that will allow you to get a better handle on a potential competitor’s traffic, and the amount they are receiving from advertising, that is far less of interest to me than some clear idea of how your site fits into a larger ecosystem of content.

More specifically, I want you to:

Identify 3-4 sites

These should be sites that are either competitors or that otherwise draw traffic from a group of similar potential users. Describe the sites and link to them. What makes you think they attract the users you are most interested in? How do they do it?

Describe the users

What are the characteristics of the people who use this site? Is there a loyal following, or do people just find it through a web search and visit once? How old are they? Where do they access the site from? What are their interests?

You might think, at least in very preliminary terms, about what search terms you would expect people to use to find your site–what do they find when they use those now?

Organization

How is it organized? How is it structured? What’s the first thing you see when you arrive? Is there a “members section” or a way to log in? Do they have a subscription for a newsletter or another way to draw you back?

Again, this isn’t an SEO effort, but what have they done to make their site more findable–if you can tell? Who links to them and why?

Credibility

What elements of the site convince you (or fail to convince you) that they are a serious enterprise? How do you know this isn’t something some teenager has cooked up in his basement? What are the markers of credibility?

Design

Describe the design and how it makes you feel. What emotions does it evoke? What themes are they drawing on? What sort of associations are they evoking? This can be a fairly lightweight description at this point. (In 502, you are likely to do this in more depth.)

What they are doing well?

What have they done that you hope to emulate, or that you will have to strive to counter? Is there something that seems to be particularly appropriate or attractive?

What could they be doing better?

Every site can be improved. What do you think each of these sites needs to do in order to improve? Is there something in that which will give you a competitive advantage.

A few notes on this. First of all, even if you are not designing a site with a significant commerce element, every site has competition. As we have seen, there is a limited amount of attention available out on the web, and your aim is to claim some of it. It is important for you to understand that there are others who want to attract users’ attention away from your site and toward their own. So, by understanding who you are vying against, you have a better idea of how to pitch your own site so that it will draw traffic and a supportive community.

You may find this guide helpful.

I’ve gotten some questions on how (and why) to use Delicious. Since we didn’t get to it last class, a quick post. (I was thinking about a screencast, but that seems a bit much for just this.) Several of you have already posted about your experience with the system, so be sure to take a look at some of the blogs while you’re at it.

Delicious is–like Twitter–a very simple tool that has unexpected social outcomes. At the simplest level, Delicious is a way for you to record bookmarks you want to come back to later. I still often will drag a URL to my desktop, and then will end up throwing it out weeks later when I can’t remember why I tried to save it this way. Delicious lets you bookmark something, and then when you need to “re-find” it–when it is just at the edge of your memory but Google isn’t helping you find it–all you have to do is search through your bookmarks.

Rather than storing these bookmarks in folders, you can tag them. That means that if I find a great site on content management systems, I might tag it with “cms” and also with “icm505″ and maybe with “webdev”. Later, when I’m looking for information on any of these topics, including prepping for a class, I’ll be able to easily come up with the sites that I have tagged.

One tag that is often used on Delicious is “inspiration”. When designers–and you are all designers now!–find something they want to emulate or that makes them say “wow” they may add it to their collection of inspiring sites. But even more interesting, you can see what others find inspiring by looking at what everyone has marked as inspiring. More than a half-million examples of things people are being inspired by. Or you can see what just those in your network find to be inspiring. In either case, you’ve created a kind of “accidental” directory.

As with Twitter, you only need to bookmark something once. Now, I should note that I have been away from Delicious for a while, and when I tried to install the Delicious toolbar in my Firefox 3.5 browser, it didn’t work. That’s OK, it’s still up there as an item on the menu, and by hitting CTRL (or APPLE) D, a Delicious window pops up letting me make a quick note and save the site for later.

It’s really that simple. Download the toolbar. Go somewhere cool on the Web. Hit CTRL-D. Fill in the form (and include 501a as one of the tags). Done.

Update: For more information, take a look at this guide.

That’s what I should be saying in the first paragraph of your response paper.

“Response paper” (or post) is a terrible name for these things, but it’s what they are called in every graduate seminar in every school in the world. Nonetheless, I probably have to come up with a new name for the next time I teach it. Maybe “thought mines” or “idea darts.” Or maybe not.

There are some things these shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be a tour of your immediate reaction to the things you read (”And then, after I ate breakfast with Jimmy, I sat down to read Kierkegaard while mowing the back lawn. Man, that guy needed a trip to Disneyland.”) This initial reaction, however, may lead you to something of an original thesis (”Despite the common view that Kierkegaard’s philosophy was influenced heavily by his early family life and his father’s strained piousness, Kierkegaard was probably far more influenced by the weather and architecture of his home city, Copenhagen. By sketching the relationship of climate patterns throughout Europe and the resulting hyper-local philosophical effects, it becomes easy to see familial psychohistory as an absurdly facile explanation for Kierkegaard’s thought.”) The two examples I’ve given are a bit misleading, since they suggest that I’m concerned with tone–I’m not, especially. What I want to see is a clear, original hypothesis or idea that is then teased out in tension with the readings.

Well Comm does a good job of this in his “Let’s call it ‘profit determinism.’” As it happens, I don’t agree with his premise, but I do agree that he has one! And taking the step of being bold in a thesis is a good way to go, because it sets up some tension: can the writer actually convince you of the thesis? Even if they don’t the attempt gets you hooked. When I took ballet, from a fairly accomplished dance instructor, his theory was that people came to ballet performances, in large part, for the same reason they went to auto races: for the crashes. At any moment, a dancer crash to the floor, or snap an ankle. Be reckless in your ambition, and then follow through.

Even if you you are adopting an existing thesis (see, for example, Twunked’s argument that we are all now cyborgs), being very clear about what it is, and then using the readings to help illustrate, exemplify, or argue against in tension, is the way to go. Twunked also draws in evidence from other sources to help support the argument. Ian’s POV also takes a thesis and does a good job of using it to interrogate the other materials.

I should have clarified this in class–and I’ll make sure to schedule time to talk about the assignments in our meetings. Was hoping folks would post about other bloggers on their own blogs. I see a couple of you are worried about how to mark your comments, or have had comments held up in moderation.

But you are the king/queen of your own blog, and the blogosphere is nothing if not networked. If you’ve already done the commenting–no worries, my bad. But you may want to do a quick entry on your own blog linking to it (or via Twitter) so I know where you made your commentary!

The response paper or seminar paper is the mainstay of graduate courses in the humanities and social sciences. It is a bit like a mini-review essay. It asks the participant to critique and reply to a particular reading. Throughout my own graduate career, more than half of the courses I took had periodic response papers due, and they almost never told you what was expected. They sometimes included questions, but more often, they asked you to come up with your own questions to answer. There is method to this ambiguity: response papers represent an opportunity to discover your own voice, draw upon your own intellectual history and reading, and integrate ideas in a unique way. Basically, you are using the readings and materials as a springboard for your own ideas and critiques. I cannot tell you how to write the perfect response paper any more than I can tell you how to paint your own masterpiece.

That said, I can offer some hints and directions, some things that a response paper should and shouldn’t have:

• A response paper should tell a story. When you do the readings and engage in other material, you should absolutely be pulling out observations and otherwise make note of how the reading makes you feel. You should be looking (and copying/highlighting/underlining) passages that you can use as evidence in your response paper. But simply copying those into an unordered list of observations is not enough. Having analyzed the materials, your paper should endeavor to synthesize your observations into a whole. You should choose your most intriguing ideas and weave them into a story; ideally into a story that draws from most or all of the materials, as well as outside sources and personal experiences.
• A response paper should have an argumentative thesis, and this should be stated explicitly. You should be presenting a point of view, and a point of view that you can demonstrate with evidence. If I get to the end of the first paragraph and don’t know what your thesis is, you need to revise that first paragraph.
• While you are arguing for a particular case, it shouldn’t just be opinion. I don’t particularly care if you like or agree (or dislike or disagree) with the readings, unless you can use that opinion toward the readings to form a strong case, backed with clear evidence. In other words “I thought this was dumb,” doesn’t get us very far, but “here’s where the author is wrong, and here’s a better alternative argument,” is good.
• Terrible title “Response paper #3.” Great title “The Remarkable Case of the Missing Breadcrumbs.” Try for interesting titles–followed by interesting responses. I should be able to identify your response papers without too much difficulty because of the content and frequent reference back to the assigned material. If I can’t, that is a problem.
• The very first sentence of your response paper should grab the reader’s attention and refuse to let go. A response paper without a good hook won’t hold the interest of your reader.
• Likewise, each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence. I should be able to say in a few words what the paragraph is attempting to do and why it is important to the rest of the response paper.
• Your response paper should be interesting to a reader not in the class. That doesn’t mean you should recapitulate the readings–you are not writing Cliff’s Notes (or at least not for your response paper). Because you are introducing an innovative and creative idea that you have come up with while engaging the materials, you should be able to convince someone who hasn’t engaged in this stuff to try to.
• Use hyperlinks. We are writing on the web, and hyperlinks strengthen your argument. Likewise, use of images and video, when appropriate, can make your response stronger. One student in a previous class made very nice use of appropriate video clips to provide examples of what she was arguing.
• Use examples. I expect you will be writing responses that are fairly conceptual, which is a good thing, but anchor these in real examples from the real world.
• Use subheadings. The response papers need not be very long, but they will probably be long enough to require subheads. Especially when writing for the web, subheadings increase the scannability of your writing and are strongly recommended. If you go on for three or four paragraphs without a subhead, it becomes more difficult on a screen.
• Double-space between paragraphs, and do not indent. People reading the web expect this as the norm. It also avoids the problems of the “wall of text.”
• Read others’ blogs first. If you are merely repeating their arguments–even unintentionally–your response it redundant. If, on the other hand, they write something similar to your own thinking, and you can link to their entry (to the permalink for their entry), you’ve killed two birds with one stone.
• When you cite the readings, you may use whatever method you most prefer. The ideal is to be able to hyperlink to the appropriate article or book–but don’t hyperlink to sites that require the course password, as this will only be helpful to those who are in the course.
• There are no particular length requirements for the response paper. A response paper is too long when it is longer than necessary to describe your ideas. If it is too long, it is unlikely your peers in the class will give it a careful reading. TL;DR. It is too short when you have failed to say something interesting, or when you have said something interesting, but failed to provide evidence and a compelling argument to go with it.
• You might find this PDF explaining a response paper, and this PDF of an example of one, to be helpful resources.
• The rubric for grading your blogs generally applies also to the response paper. In addition, I will be looking for a demonstration that you have read and understood the readings; that you have formed a strong, well-supported argument; that you have structured your essay well, drawing on possible criticism and deflecting any problems, providing a clear roadmap of what is to come early on in the essay and strong introductions and conclusions; and that you have crafted a clear and well-organized entry, devoid of problems in style, diction, grammar, and spelling.

I know you have questions! Ask them below.

Last year very few new students had actually even heard of Twitter. That’s changed, and now most of you have probably at least heard of Twitter, and many probably have used it.

There are a couple of ways of understanding Twitter. If you understand how blogging works, then you might think of Twitter as a micro-blog: a collection of very short blog posts.

Or maybe it’s like texting, but CCing the world.

Or maybe it’s like the “awareness” function of Facebook and other social networking sites, without all the rest of the junk.

In any case, what is really a very basic tool has become popular–perhaps in part because it is so simple. Signing up is easy, just go to the site and get an account. And actually “tweeting” is easy too: just type in the box. And this is where most users of Twitter stop. Yes, it’s easy, but what’s the point? Without a community of others following you, it seems pretty silly to tweet. (If no one hears your tweet, have you even really tweeted?)

So, you want people to “follow” you; that is, you want them to pay attention to what you have “tweeted.” How do you do that? Well, you could tell people in your Facebook network that you are tweeting. Or you could add it to your signature on emails. Or you could indicate it on the “about” page of your blog. If your on TV, you can tell your listeners. Heck, maybe you can even beat out Ashton Kutcher.

Or you can follow people and hope they might follow you back. These days, that’s less likely, because folks might assume you are a spammer until you prove otherwise. Finally, you can “retweet” interesting posts you see. This may lead folks to follow you.

But generally: say something interesting! No one cares what you had for breakfast. Think about how to be original in less than 140 characters.

When you tweet something related to the class, but sure to include #501a somewhere in the post.

And you may want to follow @halavais and @quicm.

Finally, this site has some great advice on making good use of Twitter, and you may want to give TweetDeck a try, both because it makes Twitter easier, and because it provides a nice example of using Adobe’s AIR platform.