Here’s one gem of a quote:

I’ll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn’t clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga’s games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga’s games.

Be sure to read the whole piece. I’m eagerly anticipating the complete issue in March.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Good ‘ol Zynga

This is another excellent book from A Book Apart. I’m not a content strategist, but dealing with content is obviously a big part of any web designer’s job and it’s something I’d like to get better at. I think this book is a great starting point, sort of an overview and introduction to content strategy. The Book Apart series are brief books, which I think is a great idea, but frankly I would have liked this book to be a bit longer; not too suggest I didn’t get a lot of value from it—I did a lot of highlighting and took a lot of notes. Below are some of my favorite parts.

What is Content Strategy?

“Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” —RACHEL LOVINGER
“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” —KRISTINA HALVORSON
—pg. 1

Understanding content:

There’s really only one central principle of good content: it should be appropriate for your business, for your users, and for its context. Appropriate in its method of delivery, in its style and structure, and above all in its substance. —pg. 4

Define a clear, specific purpose for each piece of content; evaluate content against this purpose —pg. 7

Publishing content that is self-absorbed in substance or style alienates readers. —pg. 9

publishing everything often means “publishing everything we can,” rather than “publishing everything we’ve learned that our users really need.” —pg. 11

About the importance of editors:

Great writers know what their readers want and need to hear. But the responsibility for validating assumptions about the audience and tuning the content to suit that audience remains with the editors —pg. 18

At the end of the day, we and our clients must remember [that] content is created (and revised and maintained) only when a human being is assigned and paid to do so. —pg. 23

Content and design:

In addition to attending to design considerations like whitespace and typesetting, we can act as user advocates by advising our clients and employers to reduce distractions in sidebars, fight ads that obstruct content, and give readers the equivalent of good light and a quiet room. This is one of the reasons that a multidisciplinary approach can potentially produce better results than content-only gigs for some kinds of projects—when content specialists can weigh in on presentation and design, readers benefit. —pg. 26

For medium-sized and large projects, you’ll want to document the publishing workflow: how content is planned, created, approved, produced, and maintained. —pg. 54

Once you have a sitemap and wireframes to work with you’ll be able to return to the business goals and user needs you collected at the beginning of the project and begin fleshing out the details of your content plan. —pg. 59

High-level content recommendations typically include some or all of the following:

• Primary and secondary messages to be communicated in each section’s content
• Primary (and sometimes secondary) audiences to be served by each section’s content
• Notes on the integration of major new content-related features into the site
• Early recommendations on voice and tone
• Recommendations on integrating community features (comments, forums, etc.)
• A discussion of how each of the site’s major audiences will be served by its content
• Recommendations on delivery channels for the various kinds of content you’re working with (website vs. email vs. social networks, etc.)

—pg. 60

One of the great challenges of content strategy—and especially of content production—is getting ideas from the heads of experts into the heads of content producers. If you rely on internal experts without a dedicated editor and approval process, you’re courting trouble. —pg. 66

A bit about the content strategy career field:

Here’s a little secret about content strategy: very few people got here on purpose. We mostly wandered in from one related field or another, found ourselves unable to stop fiddling with bad content, and decided to stick around and try to make things better.

Paradoxically, the best way to “get into content strategy” is to begin doing content strategy, whatever your job description currently is.

No matter where you come from, a few characteristics seem to be requisite. You can’t be ambivalent about the web. You might hate it sometimes, but it has to be in your blood. You have to care about getting things right, while understanding that “right” is something that constantly changes. You have to be reasonably good with people and exceptionally good at high-speed synthesis and pattern recognition. You need to have a solid grasp of the basics of information architecture. You need to care about design and front-end programming, which means you need to know enough about both to be able to care.
—pg. 73

Books listed in the resources section:

• Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series), by C.C. Chapman
• Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson
• Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content, by Colleen Jones
• Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy, by Ann Rockley
• The Web Content Strategist’s Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds, by Richard G. Sheffield
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Daniel M. Brown
• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, by Jesse James Garrett
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, by Louis Rosenfeld
• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, by Janice Redish
• Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: The Elements of Content Strategy

This book is a great, brief intro to some changes coming in HTML5 and what we should be aware of during the transition.

One thing I’m a big fan of is the new, short doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html>

Unlike XHTML, anything goes for HTML5 syntax—you don’t need to be case-sensitive, though I expect I will maintain that habit. Code is easier to read when it’s written uniformly.

Nice to see these elements becoming obsolete:

<frame>, <frameset>, <noframes>, <acronym>, <font>, <big>, <center>, <strike>

But take note of the word obsolete. We’re not talking about deprecated elements like we were before. Obsolete elements will still be fully supported by browsers for backwards compatibility, but we shouldn’t be using them going forward (and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to).

Some changing elements:

• Probably the biggest change for me, the <a> element can now wrap other elements, block or inline, only not other <a> elements
• With the dropping of <acronym>, <abbr> will be the one choice for all abbreviations and acronyms.
• <small> is no longer for presentational meaning, but is used to communicate “this is the fine print”
• <b> no longer means render as bold text, but stylistically different without conveying extra importance; you would still use <strong> if you want to add extra emphasis
• <i> and <em> have changed much the same way as <b> and <strong>

There’s a lot to learn about the <canvas>, <audio>, and <video> elements. They are covered in the book, but I suspect we’re still going to see a lot change in these areas so I’m not digging in too deeply yet.

Web forms in HTML5 are becoming much smarter than ever before. Of course, you have to see which browser supports which change so while you can begin using the new form features you’re still going to have to write fall-back code for various browsers.

There’s plenty more to learn in the book. I think it’s a must-read for any professional web designers/developers. It’s a quick way to get up to speed with HTML5 and get you started on what to explore next.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: HTML5 for Web Designers

I bought MarsEdit 3 (from the new Mac App Store) so this post is also a test to see if my settings still work and how the format will come across on WordPress.

Oh, and Happy New Year! It’s not June yet, so I figure I can still say that.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Writing Again

Converticon is a simple icon utility. It can import ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG formats and export to high-quality PNG or ICO files. There is no software to download and it’s 100% free.

Looks good to me, did a couple of sample tests. Need to try this on some project work and see what I think.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Converticon!

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Google Makes Privacy Easy

I recently read Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely. This book is well written, and easy to read.

If you think you’re a rational person, read this book as soon as possible. It will help you understand how we are wired and/or conditioned to be irrational, and we typically aren’t even aware of it. This concept can be a bit disheartening, but the good news is that we can fix at least some of this irrationality by being aware of how it can occur and by making a steady effort to compensate for it. The key, it seems, is increasing our awareness and planning to be irrational (this concept is explored in-depth in The Black Swan
as well).

Not only is this book very interesting and enlightening, but I found it to be quite entertaining as well. I would put this one near the top of your reading list.

Finished 7/13/09, Rating: 9/10

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

48 Days to the Work You Love will likely help you find inspiration, motivation, and just may spark a few ideas. However, there isn’t much ‘meat’ to the book. It only glosses over these topics at a high level and leaves you still to do the work of figuring out the details and coming up with a plan for finding new work or making money on the side. It offers nothing that you can’t find on hundreds of websites for free, but if you want to spend some money on this book you’ll have it packaged into an easy-to-read, paper format.

If you think that earning an hourly wage, working for someone else is the only way to make a living, you can certainly benefit from reading this book. If you already know that isn’t your only option, and/or you are already earning money on the side, you probably won’t find anything new here. I’d say it’s worth reading if you think you need some help finding a new direction with your work and income. If you already have that part figured out, there isn’t anything else for you here.

Finished reading on 7/15/09, Rating: 7/10

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: 48 Days to the Work You Love

Below are a few highlights from the guide:

When performing link building research, specifically to determine the value of a link (as opposed to relevance), the important thing to look for are URLs that have the qualities and qualifications of a rank-influencing link. [http://link-building-guide.com/Analyzing_URL_Link_Value]

One of the greatest opportunities you have for quickly finding large scale link opportunities is to look at what websites link to your competitors. [http://link-building-guide.com/Competitor_Backlink_Gathering_Tools]

We recommend a 2-step approach in the qualification stage. First, use automated methods to focus on easily measurable factors to cull the list down to those URLs most beneficial to your goals. Then use a by-hand, human review to further qualify and segment the best link opportunities. [http://link-building-guide.com/Two_Step_Link_Qualification_Approach]

There is a lot more to it of course. Be sure to read the whole guide if you want help building links.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: Comprehensive Link Building Guide

Anyway, regardless of the reason for reading it, A Wrinke in Time is a great book and a quick, easy read. It has an interesting combination of a sort of fantasy and sci-fi theme. I don’t want to give away any of the details, so I’ll leave it at that. I sort of got a C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia feeling from the book. I can definitely see a relationship to Lost as well, again I won’t mention any details in case you haven’t read the book or seen Lost.

I enjoyed it very much and I definitely recommend reading it.

Follow me on Twitter. This post originally appeared at: A Wrinkle in Time