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Megway!

I love the Korea example.

Give us more!

Oh, no! you guys have all gone retro!

Ok, I fully admit, there is a “cool” factor to the retro web, where every page was different, and exploring was “fun”. Really, the web is just another communication medium. If your content isn’t worth reading, your design isn’t going to hold up over time. That isn’t to say design only exists as a means of finding content. I think the Jakob Neilsons of the world take it to a bit of an extreme.

Design is about augmentation. If the content is good, design can make it better. If the content is crap, good design will only be looked at as the pretty candy coloured shell, and not remembered. A lot of us are designing websites that mimic print more than ever now because we can. We finally have that much control that we can lay out areas of content in a usable fashion.

Freddie Mercury: What do you guys think about every group using electric guitars, base, and drums nowadays?

Mick Jagger: It’s an utter bore. And I just can’t stand guitar solos.

John Lennon: Yes, quite. Have you heard what they’re doing with keyboards these days?

Pete Townshend: Hey guys. Sorry I’m late. I brought dope. What are we talking about?

I’ve been wanting to make a site where the content is solely images; no html text. I think this fireside chat is my inspiration.

Can’t wait for parts 2 and 3. Super good stuff this fireside chat is.

I’m not sure what killed blogging, but CSS , standards and RSS might be some of the culprits. I blame Digg and their ilk for a lot of it though; the single biggest problem with blogging today is that the conversation of yesteryears has been replaced with the stream of articles of today.

Dialogue has become monologue.

The use of CSS now reminds me of the use of Flash in the late 90’s / early 00’s. There is a visual vocabulary that is established, and people use that as a foundation. Everything ends up looking similar. The thing that will always set you apart is your brand. Unfortunately GUIs can’t always completely reflect the brand. Does anyone remember Kai’s Power Tools?

The real question is now that the “next gen” of web is application centric how do you brand these GUIs? Unique design was easier when they were for stores, auto websites, brochures, etc.

For me part of the “web 2.0 pipe…” as Greg says is the “social-networking, online community, design-by-committee, content-by-committee” aspect to so many sites. Some of this means sites start to look the same because expectations are now being made that you “interact” and “contribute” content to the site.

In the old days we built sites and presented or pushed the design/information out there…now there is so much noise from the masses that sometimes the message gets diluted.

I’d like to suggest Google Reader’s new “Next” bookmarklet as a good RSS reading tool. Clicking the bookmarklet takes you to the next article in your news river—but on the blog for which it was written. So you’re actually visiting the articles’ native habitats.

While it doesn’t solve the problem of people writing for syndication, it makes reading more interesting because you get the original context (colors, design, type, sidebar elements, et cetera).

I wonder if things are just getting a little too polished. Everything has its place. Everything has a format. Everything is properly titled and dated and tagged and so forth. Sites like MySpace are ugly but they’re definitely not sterile.

What killed blogging? I actually think we’ve barely touched the surface of blogging. Things just might have evolved a bit.

More and more people are beginning to understand the value of a blog. However, no longer are people starting blogs just for personal interests or niches, they’re using them in a variety of other contexts. Ex: coaching, parties, events, teaching, etc.

The practicality and usefulness of blogs have been overlooked by the blogosphere’s association with the concept of conversation. Blogs are definitely not dead, they’re just evolving into something entirely different.

“Most of the job emails I get now”... must be nice.

Personally, I got into all this starting with the Zen Garden and then Mezzoblue’s blogroll. Most of the weblogs I read featured folks vocal about web standards. It felt a lot more technical in those days and was quite cool to see it unfold. Akin to riding a giant wave. ;; I miss SimpleQuiz. It is a lot more subtle now as those people have grander projects (or got married) which leave less time for other things. ;; Dunstan ;_; Bowman

I find myself still reading many of the weblogs in their web form. They look quite pleasant and makes me feel happy. Like passing by a nice painting in the hallway everyday.

For a long time, I’ve held off using an RSS reader, but found it useful for sites have a high volume in posts like Engadget (corroboring Jason’s point) or sites I’d rather not see, because of the graphical ads. I was using Newshutch (and still do for web comics), but the Google Reader has a nice feature to mark things read as one scrolls past them. Handy for skimming through a backlog of things. _

Some of the commercial Korean web sites I’ve seen use vibrant colour palettes, which was refreshing. When many of the sites we saw in English gravitated towards blue, they experimented with teal. I lost the site, but this is so marking to me that my mind associates teal with Korean sites. I was also playing a game called Guild Wars, and the US site was pretty lame compared to the Korean one. There was some outcry, because the game was being developed in the US. PR had to fan the flames and explain that broadband penetration in South Korea was much greater than in the US. The US site has been re-vamped though. On the other hand, I have not been impressed with Chinese web sites. The fonts aren’t as legible as the ones used on Korean sites and there is an affinity to blinking ads/text. For instance, a major TV network in Hong Kong.

T_T lost a chunk of my comment. The game I was referring to was http://guildwars.com, which was developed inthe US, but the Korean website was so much cooler http://guildwars.co.kr/ . PR explained that broadband was more available there. The main site has since re-vamped.

I find Chinese sites I’ve seen to not be as nice, because of crammed text and blinking things. An example is http://tvb.com

._. and is the AJAXy comment new?

It seems to me that you guys stopped this discussion just short of making a conclusion. Maybe I’m off but it seemed like the conclusion you were heading towards was moving from a blog formatted like a newspaper, all boxes and colums, to a blog formatted like a magazine. I mean a designerly (it’s a word!) magazine format where articles break out of their columns and work synergistically with images. Where each article can have its identity and be designed thoughtfully with the content in mind more than a predesigned structure would allow. Perhaps you wish that each blog article or articles in a series had their own unique design. That would certainly make blogs more unique and individual.

But I think that in the life of the WWW content and design have always been out of sync and when either one gets too important or has too much focus the pendulum swings back the other way. I remember over designed websites with virtually no content in the mid 90s. Now there is so much content that we have to ignore the design and strip out and aggregate the content of blogs just to beable to take in a fraction of what is out there. So it seems that so much content forces design out of the picture.

I also see the web becoming more application centric lately, some say Ajaxy, but it’s server side scripting with or without asynchronicity (PHP, Ruby, Cold Fusion, etc.), and Flash too. It seems everyone wants a web site with apps without thinking about how they would use them or even why they need them. So it’s like design without content all over again. Maybe you could call it applications without application? But the great thing about the pace of the internet is that whenever someone sees a tired trend there is usually someone else breaking out of it.

If blogging is dead, what the hell is this?

You dont have to do what kotke did, you can just take it.

http://www.0sil8.com/episodes/98/08/28/index.html

Also, didn’t web standards give bloggers something to yap about for a while (LJ/xanga users aside) ?

Glad to see some friction in this discussion. (Thanks Jason.)

For instance, I think it is great that people are spending more time on the “little” design things like kerning, leading and white space… and in general, making type more readable on the web.

Making it more readable makes the information/content come to the forefront, and lets the reader forget about the medium.

Do we really need to be reminded over and over again that we are reading on the web?

I, personally, feel like some of these formats (like blogs) are a natural maturation of the medium.

Look at beautiful book design… the differences are subtle, but not necessarily in the “look at me” vein.

Err, the latest three comments.. is that because the blog post contains the work “korean”? :o

Blogging is “killed” only if that means “mainstream”. Sorry, cool folks. The uncool people found your playground. Better move on.

Daniel: No, it’s not just about it being mainstream, it’s about it becoming impersonal.

It would of been better if they could of actually of named some actual sites that they have seen lately that they were impressed with.

I mean to say nothing is impressing me is almost absurd, because they themselves are producing stuff on the web, and are they trying to say even waht they are doing isn’t impressive?

Also I am a huge fan of grids, and boxes, and columns, it brings order from chaos, is cleaner. Also you still have PLENTY of freedom.

In the early days of the web, the sites designed where TERRIBLE !

hehe. I’m half-Korean – so I wonder if that means my designs are half-good? jk. :P