Now that the internet as we know it has been around a while, you’d think that people would have stopped making truly horrible, un-usable, unreadable and downright ridiculous websites. You’d THINK that, but you’d be wrong. The aptly named Webpages That Suck has pulled together their top 25 worst websites of 2010, which is a great place to look for some holiday season laughs. My favourite has to be number one on the list: Yale School of Art (pictured above).

Having been to art school myself, I totally understand that they are doing a post-modern interpretation of a website, parodying those early 90s websites with the same tongue in cheek that Duchamp, Warhol or Koons had when making their art. I get it, OK? But the difference between a website and a piece of art is that a website such as this has to perform a functional duty: to disseminate information to the viewer in an accessible way. Art doesn’t have to perform this task. Art can therefore be as sublime or ridiculous as the artist wants it to be, without necessarily infringing on its raison d’etre in any way. Sure, art can disseminate information, but usually this is not essential factual information that the viewer has come to the art piece looking for; generally, the message of art is that of conveying the artist’s viewpoint or evoking emotions on something.

Websites are different. Now, I am not saying that all websites have to conform to the norms of usability and accessiblity. But websites that act as the one and only online interface for any business, organisation or individual should. There are laws about this stuff for a reason; defying these on informational websites doesn’t make you clever or creative in the eyes of your audience: it simply makes you annoying and stupid. Can you read – or even FIND – the school’s address on the page shown in this image on the right? Click it to view a larger image…

Don’t get me wrong: I *love* online art. I have contributed to sites such as SITO’s HyGrid (one of the earliest online art collaboarations) and I think The Johnny Cash project is a brilliant combo of art and wiki culture. And there are plenty of great sites which push the boundary between art and design. But the boundary between these two areas is really quite important when it comes to websites such as the Yale one. I would have no problem whatsoever if the Yale folks decided to make an online art piece. And I’d be fine with them creating a website as unreadable as the one they have, so long as they made it easy for people to opt out of that design and view the site in an alternate version.

My problem with the Yale site is that this illegible beast is the only place you can find the information, and they have made getting it pretty damn difficult and frustrating. I don’t care how cool or PoMo it looks, to me, this is bad design. The goal of design should be to enhance the use of an object, not get in the way of it. If you bought a can opener designed by a product designer, no matter how beautiful it was, if it didn’t open cans you’d be chucking it in the bin. If not, you could hang it on your wall and call it art. Art isn’t meant to be useful; design is. Anyone who has ever clicked ‘skip intro‘ or ‘view HTML version‘ buttons on a Flash website knows this.

The funny thing is that the Yale site used to be even worse: it used to have a flashing animated background (check it out here – warning: may cause seizures!). I am guessing some poor unsuspecting epileptic made the mistake of visiting their site, and the resulting lawsuit* forced them to change it

* I don’t really think this, but it sounded more intriguing than what probably actually did happen.

As it’s Friday, here’s a little chuckle to welcome in the weekend:

Remember the heady days of the 90s, when everyone suddenly jumped onto this new-fangled internet thing, and created multi-coloured, flashing, clashing web pages that would make your grandmother’s eyeballs fall out? Wish you could relive those days now? Well the good news is that you can! Mike Lacher at Wonder Tonic has created what he calls a ‘Geocities-izer’, which converts your shiny lovely website into something that looks like it was designed by a colourblind chimp on acid.

Here it is in all its multicoloured glory: Geocities-izer a-go-go!

(make sure your sound is turned up to experience the full audio-visual extravaganza!)

Last week I popped along to see a screening of Ivo Gormley’s documentary Us Now, presented by my old colleagues at NESTA. Not only was I curious to see the film, but I was also curious to see what was happening in the whole ‘social networking’ strand of NESTA’s Connect programme, as some potentially cool stuff seemed to be brewing just as I was leaving my job there.

Although I didn’t get much of an insight into the programme’s projects and output, I did enjoy Rohan Gunatillake‘s intro into the film, especially the tag clouds he had made based on the first names and employers of who had registered for tickets (no surprise that ‘Miko’ was a tiny speck in the cloud, dwarfed by ‘Paul’ and ‘Sarah’!). Rohan is the new member of NESTA Connect who is looking after the Web Connect side of things. I look forward to finding out more about what Rohan has in mind for NESTA.

The film itself was an hour-long series of interviews and case studies on various social media projects, based mainly in the UK. The intention of the film was to demonstrate how social media is not just a side activity people use to waste time and gab with their mates, but that the very nature of exposing connections and allowing for easier connection and collaboration between individuals could have a profound impact on society as a whole. Ivo Gormley introduced the film by stating:

more people can say more things to more people than ever before

- and there’s no way something as big as that can’t have an impact. I agree – there’s no denying this has had huge impact on the way business, governments and individuals now communicate. Transparency is now more critical than being ‘on message’; timeliness is now more important than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This was touched on in the film, but the core messages of the film were about connectivity, participation and trust.

I was glad to see some case studies I hadn’t already heard of, and I particularly liked the inclusion of an offline case study: that of Morecambe Council, who decided to let the town citizens choose how to spend £20,000 of taxpayer money on a project of their choosing. The projects ranged from improving playground facilities, to cleaning up the churchyard, to building new track for the model railway. Each project had a live 5-minute pitch, and the audience (town citizens) could vote on who got the money – a real return to town hall meetings of not-so-long ago.

It would be interesting to see if Gormley would have made a different film today, knowing what we now know about the Obama campaign and his commitment to returning power to the people. I think an interesting parallel could be drawn between the Morecambe case study and Obama’s decision to empower his constituency to canvas for votes using their own language in their own time. I think examples such as these set a precedent in which people expect to be involved, and once that’s set, it’s hard to go back to the old top-down ways. It’s this increasing expectation of participation that will create lasting, real change. The more we can collaborate, edit, re-write, comment on, vote, rate, review, participate, upload, remix, mash-up, link up and create content online, the more we will come to expect it as a baseline part of the deal, whether online or off.

It’s hard to convey the sense of hope and positivity the film embued, so I suggest you check it out for yourself. There’s loads of clips and info over here on the Us Now site if you can’t make it to a screening. And if you fancy seeing what impact the film had on the audience, Rohan has put together a Slideshare deck made up of people’s written response to the film on the night. Warm feelings just in time for Christmas!

At this year’s ad:tech there were a few decent seminars, but one speaker’s comments in particular has stuck in my mind long after the event. Umair Haque was part of the Chinwag panel discussion called ‘Micro Media Maze’ and he drew parallels between the current financial crisis and the state of the online landscape. Now that’s something you don’t usually hear at these types of conferences, so I was intrigued.

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ‘stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

Because NESTA is all about innovation, I do a lot of reading about the topic. I recently read Suw Charman’s post about the sources of innovation, and republished/summarised the key takeaways on my work blog:

Innovation does not have a size…it can be a small change that helps solve a big problem.

Innovation is not in a vacuum, and anyone might have a solution, including young people and customers.

Innovation will succeed in business when the business accepts innovation as part of their corporate culture.

It’s important to stay connected to technology and what’s going on in the outside world and new media if we want to really be innovative.

And finally,
“Innovation is not a buzzword to be repeated in meetings, it’s an action, a culture, a day-to-day activity.”

I had my own additions and amendments to these, which you can find over here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Today I feel like getting out some placards, flying across the pond and picketing the streets of Washington, D.C. The US government could potentially lift the ban which currently prevents greedy ISPs from charging people for the amount of bandwidth they use, instead of a flat fee. Here’s my somewhat disgruntled post about it from the NESTA blog, which highlights the serious implications this could have on the way we live & work online:

Not only is this a backward step for consumers (remember dial-up?), this clearly has societal implications, allowing only the moneyed classes to readily access high-bandwidth content such as video, or to stay online for long periods in Second Life or MMORPGs. But there’s so much more at stake than missing out on YouTube or online games. The entire economy of the internet would change. Would you do your banking, grocery shopping or check-in for flights online if you had to pay extra to do so?

The rise of cheap broadband also opened the door to exponential growth in online social networks and collaborative tools such as Basecamp and Central Desktop, not to mention online meeting tools and VOIP. There are millions of people online every day, collaborating on projects and ideas, sharing knowledge in ways that weren’t possible before, and just plain getting things done… Taxation such as that being debated could kill these kinds of online collaboration.

Read the full post & comment here on the NESTA blog >>

A little comment I wrote on the NESTA blogs about the constant stream of mixed and confusing messages we are bombarded with these days:

Two stories which resonated with me this morning…

1) A colleague forwarded this nugget from popb*tch:
An avatar in Second Life has a larger carbon footprint than the average Brazilian

2) Slashdot commented on the world’s biggest digital dump, where Chinese locals harvest the gold, copper and other valuable parts within discarded PCs from the West.

How should I feel about these things? It’s a confusing state, as both coins have 2 sides…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >> 

A post for NESTA which comments on the recent political adoption of things like YouTube as a campaigning tool.

Today French politics joined the USA in adopting ‘social web’ media as a platform for running political campaigns & debates – only the French are using Second Life instead of YouTube. And here on these shores, David Miliband has once again posted video onto YouTube about climate change, his third such video.

Is all of this a sign of the times, a clear indicator of the burgeoning role the social web will play in our lives?

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>