KonzeptioNerd

Book: Positioning

Al Ries’ and Jack Trout’s Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is dated, controversial, and still a planner’s bible. Ries/Trout start from the observation that we live in an over-communicated world (even more true today than 30+ years ago when the book first appeared). Their remedy for all who want a slice of mind and [...]

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Value added Web 2.0

The persistent buzzword Web 2.0 is commonly understood as denoting either a group of technical advances in web programming or as a grassroot reappropriation of what had turned into an entirely commerce (and advertising) driven endeavor: the internet. In their 2006 volume Interaktive Wertschöpfung (interactive value creation), Ralf Reichwald and Frank Piller take an opposing [...]

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Sechzig Grad

Probably the next thing after diet-blogs: book-writing-blogs. Sechzig Grad is probably not the only example of book-written-in-blogfor-cum-blogging-about-writing-blog (or, more generally, of self-motivation-by-publication-blogs).

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Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Disorder makes a great tandem read to Norbert Bolz’s bang design and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. Weinberger, too, is dealing with things gone out of control. But when items break out of their traditional categories, Weinberger gets all excited and fired up.

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Usability and Sociability

Jenny Preece’s Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000) is rather reminiscent of Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building on the Web: a large volume (about 400 pages), generous spacing, amiable line drawings. Preece is a useful complement to Kim: where the latter bases her observations on wide-ranging community experience, the former accesses current research, especially [...]

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Community Marketing Management … for Beginners

I’m reading Frank Mühlenbeck’s and Klemens Skibicki’s Community Marketing Management because I’m currently researching online community theory, but I’m not sure reviewing it here is the best of ideas. Let’s see. CMM has various problems, the biggest one appears to be target group insecurity.
Mühlenbeck and Skibicki appear to be talking to a rather concise audience [...]

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Banging Things into Shape

Norbert Bolz’s “design manifesto for the 21st century”, bang design makes a good companion read for Sterling’s Shaping Things. Bolz writes in reaction to developments similar to those Sterling picks up: The future of the thing in the age of its digital taggability1, and the “body in the age of its technical reproductability” (p. 135).
bang [...]

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Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design for the Web is certainly the piece de resistance of or the user experience design and Garrett’s something of the godfather of the discipline. You simply cannot do UXD and not have read the Elements. Together with ia/recon and the Visual Vocabulary (already drafted [...]

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Community Building with Amy Jo Kim

At eight real-world years, amy Jo Kim’s “Community Building on the Web” should be of interest mostly as a socio historical document. But Kim’s advice is still valid for the second wave of online communities - and not only because everyone’s still quoting her left and right. If nothing else, it’s a good starting [...]

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What you want (to be)

At first I thought, Paul Arden’s It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be was your average load of motivational mumbo-jumbo. One reason for this may be the misleading German title, which translates exactly to It’s not who you are, but who you want to be, putting the whole thing [...]

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