Cheers! Columbus Brewing's Pale Ale (Old Label) in my Columbus Beer Camp pint glass. | Photo Credit: Michael Paull

If you find yourself paralyzed by choice-overload at your local carryout tonight, I might be able to help.

I’ve compiled a complete list of my beer review columbus for the Columbus Dispatch over on the On Tap page on this site. Almost thirty great beers, complete with pairing recommendations and availability.

So now you can read through my back catalog while you wait for my next column, which should run on May second.

Or, you can tell me what I missed. I always love a recommendation!

Cheers!

It starts at the 54:40 mark in the episode, though the entire episode is great and I recommend you just subscribe to the podcast.

What I loved about the conversation was that Dan did not just focus on building an app that delivers his content to his audience – he recognized that there are already a number of ways for that to happen, and that he wasn’t really going to do it better, and that, in fact, asking users to get that content in a dedicated app that divided it off from the rest of the content they consume (could be a podcast catcher, could be a browser) was starting out by making things worse.

Instead, he identified what made consuming his content different and better: the experience of listening live, made unique by the specific hosts, formats and audience participation, and built an app that facilitates that specific thing. He even thought about what features he could include that would cater specifically to his most ardent fans, and thought about ways to monetize those features while enhancing the experience for everyone.

It’s a very good case study playing out in real time as Arment (the creator of Instapaper, and so a pretty good person to be providing feedback and insight) talks through the features, design, business model and functionality of the app, which is in final testing pending a release to the iOS App Store – at which time I’ll be paying for it for sure.

Jeremy Keith – There Is No Mobile Web – BD Conf, Sept 2011 from Breaking Development on Vimeo.

Bloggers are a key audience for digital content creators whose needs and priorities usually go unconsidered by product teams. Bloggers on a beat covered by a media organizations – whether its national politics or local high school football – are certain to be among your most savvy, committed and loyal readers, and their blogs can provide valuable new unique users to your content if they find it link worthy.

To build audience, bloggers excerpt, link and comment on content from a broad range of sources on the topics of interest to their readers. Their incentive is to link to the best content they can every time, and the content experiences they link to are extensions of their site’s ux. When choosing which sources to reference, their first priority is to the quality of the content, but it isn’t the only thing they consider.

John Gruber today posted a follow up to a post he made wherein he linked to ReadWriteWebTheNextWeb. Gruber’s excellent blog, Daring Fireball, has a huge, committed following and a reputation for sending a lot of traffic to the sites he links to quickly. His follow up was prompted by a tweet from a reader about the page weight of the ReadWriteWebTheNextWeb article (3+ MB!) he had posted to, and explained that he considered not posting the link despite the quality of the article he was posting to because he doesn’t like the site. With this page weight information brought to his attention, he seems even less likely to do so in the future, though he doesn’t say as much in his post.

In the new media landscape, content creators cannot ignore the basic principles of good web design, which include limiting page weights and load times (even today in the era of broadband). This seems like an obvious statement, even though, in this case, a web only publication about digital products doesn’t seem to be aware of it, but what should be really interesting about this incident to content creators is that the experiences and perceptions of the specific bloggers who blog about the issues your organization covers should be inputs to the design process.