Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
The Five Stages of Hype
The launch of Apple’s Music Store will provide an excellent opportunity to test out a theory I’ve developed over many years of tracking high tech news. I call it the Five Stages of Hype, and it goes like this…
STAGE 1: “It’s Revolutionary!”
Over-eager pundits leap at the chance to be the first to write about the new technology, and buy the company line hook, line, and sinker, probably without ever using the product.
STAGE 2: “It’s Nice, but Not Revolutionary!”
The somewhat more mature reporters get smug and “pshaw” the Stage 1 reporters. Stage 2 reporters MAY have used the product, but mostly they’re interested in being seen as boldly bucking the early reports.
STAGE 3: The Geeks Weigh In
After the initial hype dies down a bit, the Geeks get to work. Now you start seeing reports from the geek front lines about features, flaws, security holes, etc. The final verdict is always: Hey, this is just software! It takes bits and turns them into other bits! (Or, in the case of hardware: Hey, this is just electricity, plastic, and metal!)
STAGE 4: The Quiet Time
This is when people actually start using the technology. The company (or companies) responsible quietly improve the technology, other companies develop similar technology. Aside from rehashing an occasional press release, The Media has moved back to Stage 1 regarding something else. This stage could last months or years. This is the only stage that really matters. This is where a technology either dies a quiet death, or moves on to Stage 5. The Segway will not make it to Stage 5.
STAGE 5: Boring Ubiquity
No one quite knows when this stage begins. It’s a very personal thing. One day, you take a look at your day-to-day environment, ponder the various bits of technology around you, and think, “Hey, wait a minute. Ten (or five, or two) years ago, no one would have imagined this stuff. Now I just take it for granted.” There’s no press release. No Dateline Special Report. You just look at the DVD player, TiVo, microwave, or wireless optical mouse, go “huh”, and get back to your bowl of Cheerios.
Punk Rock Usability
I’ve just started work on a website for a friend’s band. I rarely do freelance work outside of my own little projects, but I really wanted to take this on as a challenge. For the first time, I could really try my hand at a site that was not geared towards computer geeks – quite the opposite, in fact, as the band in question is a punk rock trio. The vast majority of band sites emphasize style over substance, which is idiotic considering the "product". If your web site is there to sell really boring industrial widget whoosamawhatsies, you may need to jazz things up a bit to make things interesting. But when a web site is devoted to displaying someone’s actual art, what do you want people to notice more — the site, or the artists’ work? Museums have known the answer to this question for centuries.
On the other hand, the site must capture the personality of the artist(s). You can’t duplicate UseIt.com and change the words to talk about a punk rock band. Well, Jakob would probably argue that you could, but he’d be wrong.
So, therein lies my challenge. Can punk rock be “usable”? Can usability be punk rock? I guess we’ll find out the answer soon enough! When the site is launched, Chausse.org readers will be the first to know.
Geeks and Cops
I’ve noticed an interesting parallel between engineers and police officers. A police officer never refers to his gun as a “gun”. It’s always referred to as either a “weapon” or a “piece”. An engineer never refers to a his computer as a “computer”. It’s always referred to as either a “machine” or a “box”. I’m sure there some interesting psychosocial reason for this, but I’m a Computer Science geek, not a sociologist.
Name That Car
I spotted this car while heading back from lunch. Thankfully, I had my trusty Digital Elph with me.
Don’t Bookmark Anything Yet…
Having stumbled across Tim Berners-Lee‘s”Cool URI’s Don’t Change“, I’m having angst about the URL’s on Chausse.org. As you can see, most pages end in “.cfm”. This means that if I ever decide NOT to use ColdFusion, I’ll have to change the file extensions on everything, thereby breaking all the URL’s. I’ve already taken one step in “futureproofing” the site. You may notice that everything is in a directory called “chausse”. This way, if I ever have to move to another server, perhaps cohabitating in the hosting space of another site, as long as there’s no directory called “chausse”, I’m all set.
Now, the problem with the file extensions is, theoretically, an easy one to solve. All one has to do is put every document in its own folder, and rely on the default document settings to provide the page. Therefore, for example, by moving “contact.cfm” down a level into its own directory, and renaming it “index.cfm”, I could give it the URL:
http://www.chausse.org/chausse/contact
This is a very future-proof URL. The devil is in the details, though. I had started going down this path initially, but abandoned it. The problem? Well, frankly, it’s a pain in the butt to manage. When editing a bunch of files in Dreamweaver (and other tools have similar issues), if every file is named “index.cfm”, one ends up staring a bunch of tabs called “index.cfm”. I have to keep clicking tabs randomly until I hit the one I’m looking for.
Well, poor developer tools have always been a really lame excuse for bad software architecture. Perhaps I’ll suck it up and do the Right Thing. Especially since, once the page templates have been nailed down, one rarely, if ever, should be editing “a bunch of files” at once. Meanwhile though, don’t bookmark anything!
New England Weather
Trying to figure out what to wear, I checked out the weather… Here’s today’s forecast:
Hm… Gotta love New England.
Welcome!
Welcome to Chausse.org! I’ve been thinking for quite a while that I needed a semi-professional website to showcase my work, inform people of what I was up to, etc. etc. Well, here it is! I apologize to anyone who was expecting Webslice Labs to be up and running by today, but I desperately wanted to get this site up first. This way, I’ll at least have a place to explain why Webslice Labs is taking so long!
In a fit of standards-compliance mania, I designed this site to be table-free, CSS-based, and XHTML 2.0-Strict compliant. Not to mention compliant to both U.S. Section 508 AND the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. So, a hearty welcome to any assistive technology users.
There are no “comment links” on this site, as it is intended solely as a one-way communication vehicle. You can, of course, contact me, using the link provided, with anything you have to say. Those looking to continue the witty repartée which was found on a certain weblog I used to run, will have to hang tight until its successor, “Ridiculent.com” is up and running. I will keep you posted. Where? Here, of course!