Category: Four pillars

When they were asked what they wanted, the people said �Uglier horses�!

Ugly sells? Take a look at this post from Commission Networks (I couldn’t be bothered trying to find out who the person was, the site was too ugly for me and I couldn’t find an “about”). But it made me think.

I wonder if the Henry Ford “faster horses” statements can be made to apply to design. Is it possible that ugly sites are more attractive to the generations before M, because that’s what they’re used to? Brought up on green-screens and blue-screens-of-death anything looks beautiful. That generation loves looking at Excel screens on a BlackBerry, remember?

I wonder if I can extend that supposition. If a site is NOT ugly and yet IS popular, can I assume that it is used by Generation M?

Just thinking.

Foundations underlying the Four Pillars: Setting the scene

If you haven’t done so already, you must read The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

I’d like to pay Mr Asimov some form of homage and see whether I can construct the Four Pillar Foundations using the same book headings: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. This is neither meant to be pompous (in no way do I see my posts competing with Asimov’s elegant prose) nor contrived (I genuinely saw a three-layer foundation and particularly liked the chance to use the word “empire” in its new context). Thank you Isaac Asimov for making me dream many years ago.

In Foundation, I want to cover the implications of Moore, Metcalfe, and Gilder (note the use of the Oxford comma there, purists!) and set the scene with virtualisation, service orientation and commoditisation.

In Foundation and Empire I want to show what has happened to erstwhile participants in the market (even if they haven’t figured it out yet) and the move towards platform independence, device agnosticism and telephony-becoming-software.

In Second Foundation I want to bring in democratised innovation, consumerisation and market-driven “conversational” standards.

The Four Pillars of Syndication, Search, Fulfilment and Collaboration/Conversation stand four square on these foundations.

More to follow this week.

More on the need for accuracy in words and terms and metaphors

I just came across this by Jon Udell. Well worth a read.

Unless we get the words and images right, we are going to face many uphill struggles, maybe even upmountain ones. [See earlier post on blogs and anchors, frames and metaphors. ]

Co-creation

It’s worth taking a look at this from Newsweek. More shape-of-things-that-are-here. And the buzzphrase machine is in overdrive.

Take the Cerado quiz on [I promised not to]

You can find it here. I saw it while reading something on TailRank that Judy Breck had posted via Smart Mobs, and just had to do it. And I scored 23. Which I can live with -)

And by going to the quiz I had a chance to see where Haystack had got to.

Four Pillars makes no sense unless we accept that there will be StumbleUpons and last.fms and haystacks. We have a foundation (which I promised to build out next week) and four pillars. But what are the pillars holding up or supporting? More later