On Tuesday, September 9, I had the opportunity to speak to the Potomac Employers Roundtable. A group of about 30 people, largely senior HR and Administration professionals from a wide range of organizations (PR consultancies, HR consultancies, nonprofits, and for profits) gathered in the board room of Williams & Mullen bright and early to discuss the role web 2.0 technologies can play in our organizations, and what implications they might have for office policy.

I opened the session by sharing the stories of some of my recent experiences around this topic and then talking about what differentiates Web 1.0 from Web 2.0 (short version: collaboration!), and some of the things Web 2.0 allows users to do:

• Build their own sophisticated web content quickly and easily
• Pull the information they want to themselves in the way they want it
• Enjoy a more dynamic, collaborative online experience

We then had a spirited conversation about various Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, microblogs (aka Twitter), wikis, RSS, and SocNets (aka Facebook and LinkedIn) – with attendees weighing in with their own experiences, personal and professional, using them.

The focus then turned to the topic of the day: policy setting.  Check out the information presented about HR policy and Web 2.0 at Thanks for Playing.

As the next step in their march to world domination, Google jumped into the browser wars recently with the release of Chrome. I downloaded Chrome to try it out - frequent readers may recall that I’m an IE loyalist, primarily due to its status as the de facto standard for browsers, but Google has been able to dethrone the kings of other software realms, so I was interested to see what their considerable coding muscle could provide in the browser space.

During the installation process, I was intrigued by the not-quite-ubiquitous usage stats checkbox. Tip of the hat to Google for leaving it unchecked as a default, but a big ol’ wag of my finger at them for the one critical word missing in this sentence:

Optional: Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.

Can you spot the missing word? Anonymous. Traditionally, these sorts of error reports and usage stats are sent without any sort of identifying information, as a way for programmers to see how their creation behaves in the wild. Google, on the other hand, has made their browser into (potentially) another arm of their total information awareness machine. And while I trust that they don’t intend to use this data for evil (not only is it in their corporate motto, but to do so would ensure Google’s destruction - we only give them access to all of our data with the understand that they won’t abuse it. Betraying that trust would mean the end for Google), I’m still a little wary of helping them fill in the gaps that Analytics, AdWords, Gmail and search don’t cover about me [Update 9.16.08: the German Government is apparently telling citizens not to use Chrome, for privacy reasons. h/t Valleywag].

Read about my impressions of the browser post-install below the fold…

(more…)

I’m the guy here at Beaconfire that, more often than not, codes the HTML pages that turn your elegant, professional, or enticing new site design into dynamic, active, enticing Web pages. It’s what happens between the designer working in Photoshop, and our crack development team building the site in whatever CMS you’ve decided to go with.

I love coding pages. Each design brings with it new challenges and figuring out how to bring the collaboration between the client and design team to glorious click-able life is always fun for me. As Web design continues to become more mature and sophisticated and the technologies available to us become more dynamic and interactive, this job just gets more and more interesting.

Lately, most sites that we’ve designed, built, or both, have called for some sort of “flyout” navigation (American Legacy, Bronx Zoo, Bread for the World, AFSCME). An aside: some people call this kind of navigation “dropdowns,” but I feel that suggests that a click might be involved (as in dropdowns in online forms), whereas the the word “flyout” more specifically describes something that appears when you simply move your mouse over an object. So for the purposes of this post, I will now dispense with the quotes around the word and just refer to flyouts.

(more…)

Everybody loves a good Google Map mash-up. For those of our clients who already have geographically tagged data, an interactive map provides an intuitive way to visualize the scope of their work and at the same invites their audience to interactively play while learning more about their organization. And of course it has that Web 2.0 cachet that buzzes in the ears of CTOs. Sometimes the result is “neat” but fairly unexciting – more of an excuse to use display data that happens to have city, state and zip with it than a meaningful experience for the user.

Under the best of circumstances, the map is useful to the end-user and compels them to dive in and play around, while at the same time delivering relevant information. On a recent project, Beaconfire worked with Share Our Strength to develop a Google Map for their Great American Dine Out campaign. It’s a fantastic program that has participating restaurants giving a portion of their proceeds to end childhood hunger during the week of September 21^st to 28^th. Diners give to charity simply by eating out at participating restaurants – all you need is your appetite and a way to find the restaurants in your neighborhood. Which, of course, is where the map comes in. I’m lucky enough to live in an area with plenty of options to choose from – if you’re in the neighborhood that week, there’s a good chance you’ll see me over at Dino eating too many appetizers and drinking artisanal gin (anything for a good cause!).

But back to the map – as useful and hopefully well designed as I like to think it is – it’s not all that different from other mash-ups. At times it might seem as if you could just swap out the data with something else and get the exact same effect. The sidebar information might change, the markers might be transformed into smiley faces or KOA rest stops, but the behavior would be the same. In fact, Google MyMaps is based on this concept – no matter what data you have, the map works the same way. You might even start to think of Google Maps as a straightforward and predetermined set of interactions. But in the wild, Google Maps often act very differently from each other, and both usability engineers and developers have tough choices to make when they create the code behind it – what to show, and more importantly, what NOT to show.

(more…)

Ah, the frenzy of a site launch. You’re templates are in. The CMS is ready. And so now it’s a race to enter your content. You’re copying and pasting left and right. You’re putting in your links. Entering place holder content where you need it. You’re jamming away in the WYSIWYG editor. Everything moves at a breakneck pace.

And some things get forgotten.

Perhaps there’s a placeholder link that was never replaced. Maybe one of your content editors didn’t realize the importance of alt tags in your images. And the WYSIWYG editor added empty paragraph tags with reckless abandon.

CSS to the rescue.

(more…)

I wrote an article for the September 2008 issue of ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s Membership Developments enewsletter titled “Thanks to You: Increase Member Engagement With Volunteer Recognition Programs.”

“We all know that our organizations couldn’t function without a cadre of dedicated volunteers. These [volunteers] support our work in a variety of ways with their own time, expertise, and resources (financial and otherwise). We can only hope that the returns they receive, whether self-interested or other-directed, justify their investments.”

Check out the rest of the article, which includes specific tips for volunteer recognition, at the ASAE Web site.  Comments, additions, and suggestions highly encouraged!

Over a year ago AOL launched Circavie for creating interactive timelines.

With your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account, you can log into Circavie and start creating timelines by uploading photos or directing Circavie to the URL of your photos and/or YouTube videos. Add your own commentary, and you are ready to go. You can embed your timeline on your Web site, just as you would a YouTube movie.
Check out this history of Beaconfire, which took less than a half an hour to create:

As a free product, Circavie does have its limitations. If you embed your timelines on your Web site, you will have Circavie branding on them. And there is very little available in the way of customizing the look of your timeline – just a few color choices. Circavie also does not yet offer any integration with other photo sites, such as Flickr (though perhaps someone could invent a handy Flickr API applicaitons to fix that). So if your timeline needs are very complex, you may need a more robust tool. But for getting a basic timeline up in no time, Circavie is an excellent tool.

Beaconfire designed a new intranet for Feeding America, formerly America’s Second Harvest.

Feeding America is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization. They are a network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations, serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The new Intranet, named HungerNet, launched at their annual network conference in May to rave reviews.

(more…)

A few weeks back, a colleague sent around a message with the subject line of “So do you like awesome plugins?” referring to an app called PicLens by Cooliris that transforms website images into a 3D wall. I skipped over it. I’m not morally against awesome plugins, but I already have enough problems with my open browsers leaking memory and crashing to desktop to want to throw some other junk on top of at my work machine. And 3D in the browser still reminds me of terrible virtual reality tech of the 90s like VRML. But then folks kept bringing up PicLens – my officemate kept talking about how amazingly fast it was, and when I would go to talk with fellow employees at their desks I would notice the little PicLens icon in the upper right corner of their browser. Eventually I installed it and found that:

1. It is bafflingly fast
2. It becomes great way to view sites with big photo galleries
3. It doesn’t work on ¾ of the sites I want to use it on

The reason behind number 3 is that PicLens relies on a technology called Media RSS, an open standard originally created by Yahoo!. It’s a simple and effective way of delivering image, video and audio content with descriptive text and small thumbnail versions to applications or readers that know what to do with it. Several large media sites like Google Image Search and Flickr already employ Media RSS, and therefore work automatically with PicLens. But, up until now, developers who wanted to deliver Media RSS had to construct their own feed in order to enable PicLens on their site.

Recently, however, the company Cooliris changed the name of their product from PicLens to Cooliris (another chance for me to use the adjective “bafflingly”), and at the same time added a “Quick and Simple” method for site developers to interactively create a Media RSS through the Cooliris site.

That’s great, but as a user I still have to rely on other sites to get up to speed before I can use Pic… uhhh, Cooliris, on their site. So here’s a hack utilizing Yahoo! Pipes that lets you enable Cooliris on just about any site, after the jump.

(more…)

Clients aren’t the only ones who could use some advice to make the Request for Proposal (RFP) process go more smoothly. Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of good, bad, and ugly in vendor responses, too. To that end…

RFP Dos & Don’ts – For the (Potential) Vendor

• DO proofread! I’m not going to discount your proposal because of one or two typos. But one or two typos per page or serious grammatical problems lead me to question your attention to detail, your competence, and frankly, your intelligence. Even small shops usually have at least one person who’s a good editor. Have her give all your proposals a once over before they go out the door. If you’re the one in a hundred shop that doesn’t have anyone on staff who can copy edit, hire somebody.
• DO call me. The RFP process is kind of like dating. Signing the contract is kind of like getting married. I’d like to get to know you better before I make that commitment.
• DO be accessible. Let me know whether you like email, land line, or cell contact, and then when I do contact you, take my call. Answer my email. Call me back. I know you’re busy – I’m busy too. But don’t make me call out the FBI to find you if I have a question. However…
• DON’T hound me. If I tell you I’ll be letting all the vendors know one way or the other on Friday, don’t call me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday “just to check in and see if you have any questions.” Just don’t.
• DO respect my process. Assuming I’ve read part one of this two part series, I probably wrote a pretty good RFP that includes information about the timeline and decision criteria. Subverting the process by going around me to my boss or my staff is a BIG no-no. If I say the proposal deadline is Friday at 5 pm EDT, have it to me by Friday at 5 pm EDT. And if that’s going to be a problem, don’t wait until Friday at 4:53 pm EDT to ask for an extension.
• DON’T talk about what your competitors do or don’t do. Nine times out of ten, you’re wrong. Even that one time that you’re right, it’s petty and doesn’t reflect well on you or your firm. When I’m reading your proposal or talking to you, I care about what you can and can’t do. I’ll worry about your competitors if and when I talk to them.
• DON’T send me the LONGEST possible proposal. DO send the SHORTEST possible proposal that answers my questions and addresses my needs. I’m probably reading 4-6 (or more) of these things. If they’re each 50 pages, that’s 200-300 pages. I’m not even going to remember who’s who by the end! Edit, edit, edit!
• DO skip the boilerplate marketing fluff. I’ve seen it. Everybody says they’ve got the greatest widget since sliced widgets were invented. It just pads up your presentation and wastes trees and my time.
• DO have good references in the market. Sure, I’m going to call your reference list (aka, Your Carefully Chosen Group of Only Your Most Blissfully Happy Clients), but if I know what I’m doing, I’m also going to ask around. Three glowing references don’t help you if the 10 other clients I find through my network all hate you. Remember: as long as your price is in the ballpark and I’m confident you can do the work, I’m buying based on relationship, personality, and reputation. Make sure yours is sterling.
• DO make sure I can open your files. Lots of us have switched to Word 2007. But not everyone. And, as usual, Microsoft changed the file structure so that Word 2003 chokes on Word 2007. You know what doesn’t cause problems? PDF. And if you send over your proposal and don’t receive an acknowledgment that I got it, drop me an email without attachments or give me a quick call to make sure I got it. I asked for your proposal. I want to get it. If it’s stuck in my spam filter, I want to know. It’s OK to check.

What’s the common theme? Relationship. We’re about to enter into a relationship. You don’t start a dating relationship by refusing to talk to the other party, withholding information, and putting them through a lot of silly, unnecessary tests (and if you do, odds are you’re single), and you don’t want to start a vendor relationship that way, either.

But don’t just take my word for it:

• RFP+MD: The Cure for the Common Proposal
• RFP Do’s and Don’ts, Kevin Lee, The Click Z Network
• MPLS Preparing an RFP, Robbie Harrell, SearchNetworking.com (free registration required)
• Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts for CRM, Dan Hooper, TechRepublic
• Winning the RFP Process, Diana Kruppstadt, Bnet
• How to Write a Request for Proposal, Instructional Designs, Inc. (This is a visually horrible site with good information. So if it makes your eyes bleed, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
• How an RFP Can Help You, Freeman (yep, everyone’s favorite expo management vendor)
• RFP Strategy, Tim Greene, Network World

Edited September 5, 2008 at 12:10 pm to add:  There’s a debate on this same topic going on right now at ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership’s Acronym blog.  Check it out!