Cognitive Labs

Will traditional newspaper, TV, and radio outlets hold up to a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades from novel web upstarts?

At first, upstarts appeared in the form of bloggers. However, this first wave was repulsed after denting the armor of big media, as it adapted and learned to 'play the game' launching their own blogs. Establishment media figures founded TMZ.com, one of the most popular blogs based on a foundation of bubblegum pop stories,police scanner-fodder, and paparazzi-fueled celebrity rehab stories and sex scandals. In other words, the Enquirer comes to the web. However, they have not become as influential as the voices of authenticity on a diverse array of subjects, like juancole.com.

In the next wave, the insurgents are leveraging more advanced technologies, such as widgets which require a little programming skill to successfully create and distribute. This battle is heating up, as widgeteers such as slide are now heading towards $1 billion valuations; youtube also might be considered a widget developer.

Labels: blogger widgets, juancole.com, slider, tmz

Say you have a health oriented website or blog (or anything for that matter). How can you create the effects you see on yahoo, aol.com, revolution health, and others. What I am talking about are those nice pictures that fade in and out, usually celebrity-related such as the latest Britney Spears gaffe, tie in with television, or model shot of jolly, healthy-looking people on the home page of a health portal.

You can do it with a Flash slider gadget or you can do it with JavaScript.
I found a site that makes it all easier than coding purely from scratch...here it is.
I don't know that this device is a match for cognitive labs, due to our intentional simplicity, but we may use it on some other websites.

It's interesting that with experimentation, you see that the latest and greatest looks good on first glance but becomes tiresome for repeat users - a particularly bad idea is too many moving sliders and drop down boxes associated with basics like checking email. Losing a half second every time you want to check email becomes irritating eventually. That's why simple, even banal design - well executed may trump fancy templates and complex CSS. I've come to this conclusion just through watching the numbers and activity. There's a fine balance between innovation and disruption of the user experience.

Labels: Ajax, slider