interactivity

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.

I should have seen this coming a few weeks back when I wrote about the sudden proliferation of social network invitations.

The people at LinkedIn are not happy that Plaxo's new social networking application reaches in and grabs LinkedIn connections and profile data.

Am I the only one creeped out by how easy it is to invite acquaintances en masse to new social networks such as Spock and Plaxo Pulse?

Both these nets use the program interfaces of existing services such as Facebook and LinkedIn to let a new user log into those sites and pull their entire "friend" rosters into new accounts.

Laura Ruel and Nora Paul, writing in Online Journalism Review, neatly wrap up simple, do-it-yourself methods for Web usability tests.

The article picks up on time-tested methods I have used and liked. But its real benefit is the clear explanation for people who may never have conducted such user research, or who might otherwise make quick excuses for skipping this critical step in a Web architecture project.