hyalineskies

“We are disillusioned by our own subculture as we find our own intraindustry trends such as Ruby on Rails to script.aculo.us, but even with all of the ‘the web design industry is still looked upon as artistically impoverished in comparison to other creative industries’ talk of the previous few paragraphs, we can’t ignore the respect that we are gaining. Ironically, or maybe, in some subversive manner, purposefully, our trendiness is beginning to leak further into the mainstream. The Web’s trendiness as well as the Web as haute couture philosophy is a direct result of our Web 2.0 advocacy.”

It seems that this whole web design business is getting trendy. I interview Jake Tracey, Roger Johansson, and Michael Heilemann, all three industry personalities and 9rules network members, on their views of the trendiness in design, only to find a bit of a conflicting intraindustry opinion: are we being egotistic?

It’s necessary to listen to our readers’ feedback both on content and design, even if the only feedback we’re receiving is in the form of statistics. I explore a scrapped redesign, content e-mails, and the rules of web usability to come to a powerful conclusion that we are doing more than maintaining our own sites: we’re maintaining the social infrastructure that Web 2.0 is founded upon.

“I’ve always found RSS to be extremely useful. Since the inception of a CMS-based hyalineskies, I’ve offered RSS support for the site and have watched feed usage grow continuously. I, however, have somehow (somewhat hypocritically) kept myself from using RSS in what is quite possibly my most technologically stubborn mistake possible.”

With the increasing use of XML/RSS and the “unstructured web”, we need to spend a little bit of time not looking at our designs, but instead looking at the content that we wrap with them.

“It is with this same condescension that the editors look down upon the democracy and socially-aware self-government of independent news sites such as MetaFilter and Digg as well as Internet media phenomena such as the blogosphere and Web 2.0. Hypocritically, however, they are amazed at the extensive amount of participation present on such sites and want to harness them for their own content. Herein lies the paradox of online journalism: they want Web 2.0 and its social audience without the social aspect that lies at the core of the Web 2.0 infrastructure.”

After a lengthy debate with my boss and editor-in-chief of The Michigan Daily, Jason Pesick, I attack the problem of online journalism from both the perspectives of a designer and an editor. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that I know which one will win.

Internet Explorer 6 is useless. Through the power of the blogosphere, we can move the majority of the userbase to something better.