ABC News: Guide to New ABCNEWS.com
The new site is designed to harness the power of community. And by community we mean "citizen reporters," our viewers and readers who help us report the news by contributing, commenting and telling us what they know. The redesigned ABCNEWS.com makes it much easier for our Internet users to add to the facts, ask questions of newsmakers and make their voices heard.Users will also find it much easier to submit to us video from cell phones and their home video cameras -- video that we may choose to broadcast on our site or on one of our television news programs.
Sometimes you dive into a pool, and you are going down down down and it's deep and you aren't sure you can hold your breath that long and so you want to swim up but you have so much momentum going down, and then you hit bottom.
Guess what: you can push up when you hit the bottom. It's actually a lovely lovely feeling.
Another reason I love what I do.
If you really want to know what it's like to be an entrepreneur, well that's what it's like for me. Last week, we oved heaven and earth to get Found|Read up on PublicSquare. PS is not Wordpress, and so the design, optimized for Wordpress were missing consideration for a ton of our features. Honestly, we were still adding in the comment management tools yesterday which was a shame because we got techcrunched Saturday morning. But you can only do what you can do-- and we did it and I'm proud. It's already an amazing community. People are talking, sharing ideas...
So having called in all my babysitting chits for this launch, I promised Philippe sunday off to go play with the boys, taking Amelie. Pal Andi came down and we decided to use the gorgeous weather to attack the garden. Many hilarious adventures ensued, including Amelie losing her diaper (how?) and falling off the nursery plant shopping cart, Andi winning a battle with blackberry bush-- but at what cost!-- and me hurting my back. I drugged up and was asleep at 8:30 along with Amelie, curled up together on the couch. Hal watching a nature program on sea turtles we drowsed off (yeah, that's good for the back!)
Miraculously I'm doing better, but I fly out to New York today, and I haven't packed so I pop up wide awake at 3:30 a.m.. Making coffee, I noticed those golden beets sitting on the counter forlorn. Some knit to relax, some paint, some build model airplanes -- I peel.
Today I feel like I woke up on a balance beam. Found | Read up, two potential killer employees, three potential awesome killer corporate deals, four potential killer new advisers and a partridge in a pear tree. But at 4 a.m. it's still just me, in my lame plaid PJ's and despite the event horizon I also see the horrible documentation and the massive usability bugs and the missing critical features and the weak-*ss front page. It's like scaling a mountain range-- I scrambled up the top of the first mountain and now I can see that scrambling down the other side while faster will not be easier *and* I can suddenly see there are several more mountains to go.
4 a.m. Some knit. I peel.
Monday I listened ot a pretty terrific forum, a radio program on my local PBS station. Because their site behaves in a way I can best describe as erratic, here are the relevant links:
The show discusses the lure of "the dark side" with Philip Zimbardo. What makes good people do bad things? Where is the line between good and evil, and where does this line become blurred? Can we curb this seduction to commit immoral deeds?Philip Zimbardo , professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
Download (MP3)(Windows: right-click and choose "Save Target As." Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose "Save As.")
I've long been fascinated by the Stanford Prison Studies, and the effect they had on research, but more so on the learnings they gathered so very quickly and so very deeply. In this talk, one thing I couldn't help but fixate upon was the details-- his choice of military-style outfits for the guards, including reflective sunglasses, or the hospital-gown style uniforms for the prisoners.
Because I spend most of my time considering which features affect community behavior, I wondered what is the online equivalent? What are those aspects of the fixtures of our design that create or dissuade evil (and how could it have affected the situation that led to Kathy Sierra's life threats) Is anonymity on the web something we want to discourage? How can we continue on without flagging (which obviously PublicSquare has.) I've been told that people feel more kindly to me and respond more gently when my avatar includes my baby. How can photos change our communications? Does a icon carry the same weight as a photo, does a photo carry the same weight as a photo of a face?
Good and evil are not something we as designers think of all that often. In fact, fairly often we hand wave and point to Leni Riefenstahl as our icon of beauty in the face of evil (beauty as the face of evil?). But we are not just recorders of life who can choose to do so with or without style, we are the architects of life, just as much as architects of buildings or urban planners.
I think every design choice in PublicSquare is built with conscious or unconscious implications on user behavior. You are responsible for your actions. Your bio carries every comment, every story you write. Your photo hangs out next to your words, as does your reputation. The reputation on each comment reflects passer-by's reactions. People don't approve when you make a snarky comment, or even when spelling errors are publicly mocked. The community decides what's acceptable and what's not, if you give them the tools to do so.
I wonder what tools create abuses of power. The theory in Zimbardo's book is most people have the capacity of evil within them, they just need the right situation to bring it out.
We can't hand wave if there is even a slim chance he is right.
If we design community spaces, we must design with community mores, be it a small community or the community of man.
It's funny, but after awhile I kinda forget I can blog. I mean, that blogging is something I do with my time.
Have you ever had a meal that surprised and delighted you, a meal that satisfied a part of you that you never even knew was there, or a meal that comforted you and made you feel like you were home again? This site is dedicated to those individuals who create those sublime memories for us-the chefs. As Michael Ruhlman points out in “The Reach of the Chef”, we are in an age of the Celebrity chef and this is about celebrating those people. And it is created by foodies for foodies all over. This is for you.
I'm in. Are you?
