House of Bosch represents something I suggested book publishers should do in a talk I gave to TOC08, embrace the web based DIY community and use the content they had locked up in their books. Now here is Bosch, using this approach to support the use of their tools (and sell a few more) in making things for your house.

Mining the Social Web - O'Reilly Media: looks like a fascinating book, just out as a Rough Cut, a really good fit with chapters 11, 16 and 17 in my own book.

Time to stop showing clients static design visuals |: Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before. While static visuals are useful for conveying look-and-feel, they are less than useful in conveying how a page will look and function when implemented in markup and CSS. Worse still are the expectations that static visuals set in the minds of clients, particularly when designers use these visuals as a method to get sign-off for a design. Is the fact that so many web pages are fixed width and centered a direct result of clients signing off fixed width design visuals? I would even go so far as to say that when you demonstrate a design as a static image you are reinforcing a mistaken notion that a web page will be a facsimile of a frozen image. And when you demonstrate a design or ask for sign-off on a frozen image, you immediately leave yourself open to the problems that so often come when you need to implement that design using markup and CSS.“

(Via For A Beautiful Web.)

Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline | Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.”

Pretty clear when you read the changing privacy policies.

What Publishers Today Can Learn from Allen Lane: Fearlessness: “We should learn not only from other content industries, but from the digital support structures that have grown up around them. To take one, the musical ecosystem comprising services such as Last.fm, Hype Machine, Songkick, Soundcloud and Bandcamp has few parallels in literature, as yet. These services surround the artistic work with a visible halo of engagement, recommendation, data generation and visualization.”

James Bridle, discussing how to look at books as not just content, but temporal and social objects too. The same approach can be applied to other areas.

Stop chasing followers: “

The internet is not a numbers game. It’s about dialog, persuasion, and influence.

Following doesn’t mean paying attention. You don’t want numbers on Twitter, not really. What you want is to follow and be followed by human beings who care about issues you care about.

This thing we make together. This thing is about hearts and minds, not eyeballs. Especially not eyeballs that aren’t even watching. Eyeballs is so 90s. And it was never the right metric.

This thing. If numbers are your strategy to win at this thing, you’ve already lost. This thing is not a game. There is no winning. There is only mattering. If you don’t understand that, you aren’t making a difference.

Meaningful for those of you making social applications too, encourage meaningful interactions, not a numbers game.

Avoid Member Backlashes to Change by Fostering Prelashes » Dogster Inc. Company Blog: “Over the years we’ve made all the mistakes you can make in regards to releasing new code that makes existing users unhappy. It’s so easy to do as you’ve convinced yourself the changes are the brave new future and the current code base is garbage, convinced yourself so much that you’ve forgotten to even look at the changes through a member’s eyes. This week we removed a large navigation area from all pages, widened the body area to use the new space and set up our headers, body and footers to handle display and UI iterations much better moving forward. Historically such changes created a huge backlash. They’ve been the same kind of backlashes that happen on Facebook, but fortunately for us don’t getting written up on CNN or TechCrunch. But now our goal is to have prelashes. No one likes change and even changing a button color can lead to a member protest. Since backlash is inevitable, make it a prelash. Let your members/users/customers know as much as possible in advance. Let them see screen shots, let super-users test on development servers, prepare tips and how-to’s on how to deal with the changes in advance and roll them out before the changes go live.”

Great way of working with a positively engaged community to ensure product changes, prelash is funny too.

xAuth and perhaps the need for socializing application security and trust - mehack: “In February we sent out an e-mail entitled ‘What’s up with OAuth?’ where we announced xAuth — our username and password for OAuth token exchange mechanism.  Hands down, developers love it.  They hated the UX / context penalty involved with OAuth, especially associated with mobile and desktop applications, for sending their users to the web.  I have to wonder, however, did we do the right thing? ”

xAuth is an interesting (perhaps expedient) development, building a Twitter community trust metric for their own apps looks like an interesting approach.