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What is a User Experience Designer?

Another fascinating – and in parts infuriating – podcast from Sitepoint, who bring in two User Experience Designers to repsond to Ryan Carson’s tweet that “‘UX Professional’ is a bullshit job title. It’s just a way to over-charge naive clients. All web designers should be UX pros”.

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the Web

Using Content to Promote the ‘Right’ Choice

The challenge, according to Jack Fuller in the Summer 2010 Edition of Nieman Reports, is ‘to induce people to want what they need’. In this way journalists – and I’d say content producers by extension – can go some way to improve engagement in dialogue with other members of our community, including those with opposing […]

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Why Old Spice Man Succeeded

Even though it’s still the aftershave your dad wears, and you’ll never buy it, the campaign worked. It doesn’t matter if the product is a dud one (I don’t think the brand mattered here), social media campaigns can win nevertheless.

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Science | the Web

Worrying about loss of ‘authority’

Many academics and other professionals worry about social media and the loss of authority in other voices which often now have equal power. On the other hand, those ‘less authoritative’ voices are just the latest in a long history of people complaining how the ‘establishment’ fails to let others in. But the very reason that […]

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Why geeks should ignore the iPad

I mean proper geeks. Not gadgetophiles, not Stephen Fry. I mean Cory Doctorow, Jonathan Zittrain, Richard Stallman and me. The first of these men have been quoted on Nick Carr’s post The iPad Luddites, and Nick suggests that we should all just shut up about the fact that the iPad may usher in an era […]

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Free or Die

There’s been a lot written and said these past few months on the subject of Free, Freemium, Freetards etc. And a hell of a lot of it has been crap. First there’s Free, by Chris Anderson, perhaps the Freemium bible. Then there’s Lilly Allen and those who fell upon Allen like several tonnes of bricks. […]

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Computer Training

You need training to use a computer. If you’re not trained, you’re wrecking it for the rest of us. So maybe we’re not trained. Or rather, we’re self-trained. We take a natural interest in computers: how to make them faster, more useful, more powerful, more fun to use. Most people don’t, and that in itself […]

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The End of Civilisation as We Know it. Oh, wait.. no.

I feel like the web, Web 2.0, Freemium, Twitter, AJAX and all that other crazy stuff we find ourselves mired in is about to implode. The backlash has begun. It’s likely because ‘normal’ people (also known as ‘the rest of us’) are now involved (as it should be). I also think that we’re on course […]

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