BuiltByDave.co.uk The Wireframe of a Blog </> feed

MyBlogLog (acquired for $10m about a year ago by Yahoo!) is a nice idea. You include a small line of code on your site & it displays who your readers are. I won’t go into the stats you can collect from from doing something like that, but needless to say you can get a lot of information. It’s valuable information as well.

To your website visitors it provides social proof; that they are in the right place, that your content is worth reading, that their friends read your site. For you it provides reputation by association. But, it’s a lie.

• Visiting a site doesn’t make me a reader
• I don’t consider myself to be associated to someone because I read their blog
• By visiting a site, I don’t endorse it, or it’s content.

It’s not social proof, but it’s cleverly disguised as social proof. What’s more, I think people trust it as social proof.

p.s. screenshot of MyBlogLog’s widget nicked from Will McInnes’s blog. Few familiar faces in there; Nic Brisbourne, Ivan Pope to name a few. See, social proof?

p.p.s. with people moving from visiting sites to feed readers how valuable is it really? Google saw that, and with Google Reader & Feedburner need I say more…

p.p.p.s. without manually removing cookies from your browser there is no way to stop it tracking you (logging out won’t work)

This is my checklist (in no particular order) that I run through whenever I’m considering starting a new project, obviously not everything is applicable for every project. Thought I’d share.

• Widgets
• Stats
• API
• Social
• Viral
• Lock in
• Mobile / iPhone
• l18n/l10n
• Scaling
• Machine tags
• QR Codes
• Microformats
• Privacy
• Search
• Relevance
• Story
• Scan-ability
• Interest register-able

Simon and Nat were in town this weekend and just before lunch, while spending time in the Pavilion Gardens the topic of coworking came up. This lead to ‘hot officing’, which is something I’ve talked about for a while and recently started planning for myself. I started thinking about this a while ago as I was getting frustrated with working from home (it’s great, but sometimes lonely) and Brighton being the media/web hub it is the concept just works.

• I don’t want to rent a desk (I’ll go there once a week)
• I don’t want to be tied to a single office (friends, love you all but change of scenery and distractions is healthy)
• I want the flexibility to work from home, from a coffee shop, or any spot with wifi
• I want to met new people and companies

My first ideas around the topic were not in an “office”, but around a “home office”, i.e. There’s room for 4 others to work at my place. The flexibility of working from home, but in a room of people working. One rule, the attendees chip-in and get the host(s) lunch as a mid-working-day thank you (or drinks in the evening etc). A wiki could handle this well.

The same wiki could handle this for offices, with very similar rules. As I work my way around the few offices I’ve already asked, I’ll check if they’d mind being listed in a wiki and start compiling a list…

… anyone outside Brighton care to join? … anyone outside UK care to join?

How cool would it be to browse to a wiki, click Paris, and email checking that next Thursday isn’t booked. Next week I’m in town for two days, and now I have an office as well!

Trying to find the right person? Why not advertise the way a person advertises? Business cards. Get a few printed with additional text “We’re hiring a designer”. That’ll let everyone you meet at the next conference know your hiring, who you are, and your contact details.

If the position isn’t of interest to the card receiver (or their network) the card will get forgotten in the pile or thrown away (after details copied you hope). So my thinking is it’s unlikely (but possible) someone might come looking a year later!