2006 was the year of the people (Time magazine said so) In 2007 the elite joined the discussion, and more outspoken than they had been in the last years. In short, the web is crap! Or at least a lot on the web is crap.

Andrew Keen talked about how everyone has the same voice, we don’t check facts or sources and basically create an environment with so much * useless * information that it could have a negative effect on culture in general.

I don’t believe public / universal access to information and publishing can have a (lasting) negative effect on culture, creativity or anything else. What I do believe is that the discussion is connecting the problem to the wrong cause.

What’s the problem?
The real problem isn’t that everyone has access to information or can publish anything he or she wants. The problem is you can’t find what you want and are confronted with the things you don’t want to see or know.

In an ideal situation the web only gives you the correct answer to what you need or want.

The discussion shouldn’t be about the mass joining and filling the web with everything and photos of their cat. The discussion should be about how do we enhance our filters.

The discussion only emphasizes that filters and thus search engines aren’t yet good enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Developing the signal to noise ratio
2007 was about social recommendations and social networks. The social web works with filters by like minded and ‘friends’. Mix this with the power of a search engine like Google and we are closer to the next stage of navigating through information on the web.

Don’t say that what people make or do is not good enough or wrong. Just be happy they tried.

I have updated the original photo in this post with a new one.

While I was on holiday Eclectro launched the competition for best dance record of 2007. Last month we asked readers to submit records, made a final shortlist of a hundred songs and ask you to use the voting widget to vote on your favorite song.

We are using our magic voting mechanism.

I think we have a good representation of the best dance records in 2007. And with over 100.000 votes already I’m really, really happy.

Share the votingwidget
<br /> <object width="450" height="450"><param name="movie" value="http://www.eclectro.nl/bestof2007/bestof2007.swf"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.eclectro.nl/bestof2007/bestof2007.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="450" height="450"></embed></object>

If you like dance music and want to help us share the word, you can embed the election on your website as well, just copy the code above and change the width and height if you want to resize it.

Support
Special thanks to the guys at Freshheads who did some technical support and are taking care of bandwith :)

Back from a great holiday where in one coral reef at a depth of twelve meters I did see Sammy the Salmon’s beatbox swimming deflated. A huge (at least 40cm) porcupine blowfish.

BTW. I think Sammy the Salmon is actually a snapper ;)

Yesterday we launched a new design for the Eclectro blog. Eclectro is a Dutch blog about electronic music made by volunteers. It started this year with a default Wordpress template. Over the last months the blog grew in visits and different types of content. The diversity of content makes it interesting, but it also shifted ‘exclusive’ articles too fast from the frontpage.

We redesigned the blog into a magazine style website where we have featured content, new content and special content. The result: more articles on the homepage and a better visual identification of the importance of different items.

Next week Eclectro will start the election for best dance track of 2007. We’ve got over 300 suggestions for records and made a shortlists of 100.

With this new design Eclectro is ready for phase two. We’re growing up fast, have a great community and unlimited ideas.

Both redesigns took all my attention and time over the last weeks. Hypernarrative will probably be updated again around Christmas, after my holiday

Last week we updated the design of Volkskrant.nl. Most of the changes came from usability research and the natural change of things at a company. The previous design update was one year before.

The front page of the website is still the major outlet. RSS feeds and widgets are important, but most traffic is still generated on the homepage. With the 2006 update we changed the complete structure, last weeks update is more focussed on the presentation of the front page and article page. We improved on readability.

We have good arguments for everything that changed, some minor details, but I think the visual direction we’re heading is a solid one. What is more interesting is what this is the start of.

Object oriented design
We (users of the web) go to an object based environment. Widgets, feeds and API’s are all made to be transportable. With this new phase of data-transportability we need a design that can work with this. You need a lay-out that can be as exportable as your xml. Simple, clean and understandable.

Different parts of the Volkskrant website are made by different providers. What you want is a design that is extremely extendible like Lego, uniform like Lego and creative, like Lego. You want design to be object oriented as well. Instead of just an overall design philosophy.

There is a simple reason for it. There is just too much. The future of website development is one where not a programmer, but the designer could be the limiting factor. We can use widgets, script libraries, export and import content over databases, but we have to ask a designer to provide style elements.

Templates and CSS worked great in centralizing design, but what if your content starts drifting away? How will you stay consistent over all those widgets and interfaces? It’s a designers nightmare.

Everyone will be designing
Sure it’s great to have full control over all aspects and use of a design, but this could eventually slow down progress. We have to think around it. Style guides are a classic solution for this problem, but those are often made for other designers. Not for programmers, editors or users.

I think this new lay-out will give more freedom to develop object oriented design, small common objects that make it easy to combine and present great content. It’s like designing Lego blocks instead of the castle. And I’m quite happy with it.