Small Initiatives

This is Issue 45 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter [ archive | subscribe ]

I loathe January prediction pieces almost as much as December "year-in-review" roundup articles.

Both are cliche, too-easy forms of reporting and commentary deployed when people are preoccupied and little else in print can capture our attention.

Unfortunately, my own disdain isn't enough to keep me from cooking up a 2004 prediction list for Internet designers. After a while, one learns to live with one's internal compromises, such as settling for a Twinkie in belief it's at least slightly more nutritious than the convenience-store alternative, a twin pack of Ding-Dongs.

I do, at least, offer a twist: these are all things I'm betting will not happen this year, such as my winning a Pulitzer Prize for this edition of the newsletter. We'll tarry no more:

The CAN-SPAM law will not be as successful as supporters hope, nor as awful as critics fear.

Critics worry that the law does nothing more than legitimize e-mail spam. Why worry? Who of sound mind thought spammers were holding back waiting for a thumbs-up from the U.S. government anyway?

But supporters who believe the provisions -- requiring unsubscribe options, prohibiting spoofs of header data or trojan-horse-style exploitation of mailers -- will noticeably reduce the flow of unsolicited, unwanted e-mail are dreaming. Too much spam comes from either operators outside U.S. borders or operators whose practices are illegitimate regardless of location. These people have no incentive to care about the new law.

Still, CAN-SPAM at least sets some reasonable guidelines for e-mail marketers who truly wish to comply with the law, and not to have their messages perceived as spam. And it does so in ways that don't severely crimp the ability to conduct permission marketing campaigns using e-mail.

As with Web browsers, "push" technology and home broadband, ultimately consumers themselves will decide the fate of spam and permission e-mail. Spam will go away only if it becomes ineffective for the advertisers. Permission e-mail can grow only so far as a business opportunity until the flood of spam begins to recede.

E-mail will not be supplanted as a content or marketing distribution medium.

I've read commentaries suggesting ubiquitous content syndication feeds may work as spam-free, manageable alternatives to e-mail newsletters.

But the same problem keeps popping up: RSS and other syndication formats offer no means of distribution. They are storage formats, designed for client software to come pick up their contents on demand.

Admittedly, RSS is simple to parse, filter, aggregate and organize. But it's still up to you to go out and get it. Web regulars may be fond of their news feed aggregators, but how many occasional browsers -- the modem-access set -- are well engaged enough to set one up and check it periodically?

E-mail is still the only widely used means to deliver a message to consumers' computer desktops -- on your schedule, not theirs. E-mail remains the most used communications component of the Internet, and I'd dare say the most widely understood. So that same modem-access set will check In boxes even if skipping the news aggregator or even the Web browser.

The number of actively maintained Weblogs will not continue to grow at as rapid a pace as in the past 18 months.

It can't. I believe a majority of the people who are most interested in and most capable of maintaining Weblogs already run them. So new entrants to the field are more likely to be personal-site hobbyists or curiosity seekers.

Hobbyists quickly learn that it's a lot of work, costs money and often provides little glory or reward. If you follow blogs at all, you can probably recall more than a handful of bloggers whose sites have gone dormant, or whose content lapses into loops of stale, too-personal quips.

Even pros running specialty blogs sometimes update in fits and starts. I've noticed, for instance, that many of the design-oriented Weblogs I follow did not update nearly as often in the second half of 2003 as the first. I know my site didn't. I was busy. So were those other bloggers, I guess.

That's not to say interest in or readership of existing blogs will flatten. Slowing growth of deployment for new blogs should be good news for the most active of existing blogs. It improves the signal-to-noise ratio, just as the gradual demise of GeoCities-type "personal Web pages" allowed Internet search engines to focus their indexing clout on more meaningful content and commerce pages -- and, thankfully, allowed consumers to waste less time on "JaneBob's Beanie Baby Super Fan Site."

Further, I think the Weblog format itself -- most recent quip at top, integrated comments system, all the characteristic features -- will gradually fold into other forms of content management and presentation. Mainstream news sites, for example, are adding bloglike sections alongside their standard, hierarchical headline indexes.

Mark Hurst over at Good Experience offers a solid, succinct case (it's Idea 4 in his list) for why blog software companies may even change the sales pitch on their products, touting them as content management systems instead. Makes sense to me; clearly, the awful term "blog" has to die before it starts sounding like Gollum's namesake cough.

Web standards and semantics advocates won't win much new ground against Microsoft.

Aren't we at least another year away from Internet Explorer 7? And are we at all assured that even IE7 will embrace markup and style standards cleanly?

Listen, designers. Microsoft has almost no business incentive to support Web standards in a way that would make well-formed pages predictably interoperable. It doesn't matter to MS whether your design looks as good in Mozilla or Safari as it does in IE.

What does matter is that MS sells a host of development tools and data management servers that aim their resulting applications at IE and only IE. So shout until you're blue in the face, but MS will be in no hurry to embrace the standards movement fully.

Attempting to play Led Zeppelin's The Rain Song on guitar, I will still not learn how to smooth out that tricky sliding chord transition leading into each verse.

This one I can guarantee, unless one of you knows a cheat.