Extra! Extra!

Extractable, the leading West Coast interactive agency, today announced it has won eight awards at the annual Web Marketing Association WebAwards.

Awards Extractable took home include:

* Best Credit Union Web Site - SAFE Credit Union
* Financial Services Site Standard of Excellence - Schwab MoneyWise
* Investment Site Standard of Excellence - Contango Capital Advisors
* Medical Site Standard of Excellence - Merit Medical
* Medical Equipment Site Standard of Excellence - Merit Medical
* Pharmaceuticals Site Standard of Excellence - Victory Pharma
* Technology Site Standard of Excellence - Network General
* Technology Site Standard of Excellence - IDT

The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and development of the best web sites on the World Wide Web. Staffed by volunteers, this organization is made up of Internet marketing, online advertising, PR, and top web site design professionals who share an interest in improving the quality of online advertising, internet marketing, and web site promotion. Now in its 11th year, the WebAwards is the premier annual web site award competition that names the best Web sites in 96 industries while setting the standard of excellence for all web site development. More than 2,400 sites from 40 countries were adjudicated during this year’s competition. Entries were judged on design, copy writing, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation, and use of technology.

“We are very pleased to receive this recognition from our peers,” commented Craig McLaughlin, Extractable’s President and CEO. “These awards further validate Extractable as the leading provider of interactive services to financial services, life sciences, and high technology firms looking to leverage the web as a core component of their overall customer experience strategy. Our primary focus is creating business results for our clients through the online channel. The sheer number of awards we won this year is a testament to the quality of our people and their commitment to consistently delivering the best to our clients. We are lucky to have such a killer team.”

I was forwarded this article from the Palo Alto Daily news yesterday. The article covers the recent launch of the City of Palo Alto’s new website and the rising tide of public disdain for it, citing long load times, an odd color palette, low contrast, and a disjointed user experience. The article also points out that Palo Alto paid a tidy price for the site, especially when compared what Mountain View paid for their site.

Update:
I see Valleywag’s got a short critique here.

Yesterday the Webby Awards announced their winners, including the Green my Apple campaign. The Greenpeace campaign organized some 45284 Mac fans (as of this posting) to get on a mailing list, hug their Mac, get creative with culture jamming, and ask Steve to go green. Today their smart mob tactics bore fruit. Apple announced it has heard the criticism of “environmental organizations” and is changing its policy. Kudos to Apple for listening to its users, stakeholders and the greater Mac community. Who says web campaigns based on social networking can’t create change?

According to story in Reuters, “wiki” has now been proclaimed a real word by the Oxford English Dictionary.

I find this somewhat troubling. I have been treating “wiki” as a real word for many years. I find it used in news and magazine articles constantly. Anyone who works in any web-related field certainly understands its meaning. And all this time we have been using an unofficial word.

So it has been a long journey for this collection of four letters to become a real word, but it has been worth the wait. When someone says “wiki,” there is a strong shared meaning. Others either know the word or do not, but do not mistake if for something else.

There is a bit of power in inventing a term for something new, rather than just pulling together terms already in existence (I know, I know. “Wiki” is a derivative of “wikiwiki.” But being a derivative, it is new.) A wiki could also have simply been called “an open page” or “collaborative web” or some other combination of existing words. If that had been the case, imagine the chaos that might have insued as various companies and factions tried to include their own sites under such an umbrella term.

If someone says “wiki” we generally agree on what that means.

This is in sharp constrast to other ideas which have been expressed in terminology that is just a recombination of existing words. Take “user experience designer” for example. I know exactly what it means, and you probably do, also. But if you get eight web folks in a room and ask, you will get at least nine opinions about the exact meaning.

This same lack of common meaning is true of much of the vocabulary we have been forced to establish as the web has evolved to prominence. Remember “webmaster?” Luckily, that has fallen from common usage, because it was so vague as to be almost meaningless. And “web page” is becoming increasingly inaccurate, since what you are seeing in your browser is likely a set of templates used to display a collection of content objects and applications. The term “web page” is a just holdover from thinking about the web by relating it the more familiar idea of a book or magazine page.

But, I have hope. We eventually stopped using the term “horseless carriage” in favor of terms such as “automobile,” “car,” and “taxi.” And no one says “picture show” any more unless they are a Rocky Horror fan. I think new terminology will evolve to replace some of the interim descriptions we’ve been using, and it can’t be soon enough for me. Let the names begin!

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has come out strongly against the idea of wikipedia contributors being paid by corporations to edit wikipedia articles about them.

OK, so “payola” isn’t the correct term. Payola involved payments for airplay on radio, which is controlled by a relatively small number of people. Wikipedia has a much broader field of contributors, so it’s not exactly a parallel situation.

I guess I see both sides of the argument. On one hand, any paid contributor is likely to have a strong bias that would probably be reflected in the article. On the other hand, wikipedia entries for many corporations are pretty sparse (Extractable doesn’t have one yet) because they lack a fan base.

I suspect this will be somewhat resolved over time, yielding two things: a generally accepted set of norms around this issue, and a number of people perfectly willing to violate those norms for the right price.

Of course the best solution would be to offer a method for companies to make sure their entries are robust and up to date, but with some method for curtailing useless and inaccurate information.

The IA Summit proposal review board recently approved a presentation I proposed on “Mobile IA” using as a case study the mobile website we developed for HTC America. There’s a lot of interest in the IA community about developing for new interfaces as the Web increasing goes mobile, into our media centers, and so on. I’m very proud of the work we’ve been doing for HTC and am pleased to be able to showcase it in Las Vegas in March.

Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0″ players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and Humor.

A friend forwarded an interesting discussion recently that cited the challenges that big companies are having finding talent (See: Why big high tech companies are losing the talent war). The article specifically calls out Yahoo! and other Silicon Valley giants. Initially I was inclined to jump on the bandwagon and support the framing of these companies as lost behemoths. While Yahoo! and the others clearly have their problems, it’s overly comforting as a small company to think that big companies are inherently inefficient or boring and that smaller firms are more nimble and a better bet.

But what is the real difference between working for an 800 pound gorilla and working for a scrappy start-up venture? The article stresses the advantages of a smaller environment as if to say that big companies were uniquely challenged. As compelling as that case may be, the grass is always greener on the other side. Every company, at every size faces its own set of challenges.

To learn more about the case with Yahoo! see what one SVP identifies as the problems in what he calls the ‘The Peanut Butter Manifesto’.

Any company of any size would be hard pressed to say that they have none of these issues. At the end of the day it comes down to individual choice and the battles you want to fight.

At Extractable, our battle is making the web experience work for the user and building these experiences around the business goals of the client. If you are interested in joining up with us, drop me a note—first initial and last name at Extractable.

Check out this zoomable whiteboard image showing the Google Master Plan. I’m not really sure where the cattle mutilation fits in….

The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and Arrows ‘zine), is back and in his inimitably way he makes it clear that he’s not happy with the current state of web design:

Ugly may be too strong a word, actually. MySpace is ugly. Butt ugly. Bufugly. Google is simple. YouTube is somewhere in-between. And you may want to point at them — Google in particular — and argue that it is designed, and designed perfectly. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the success that it is, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue the point, other than to say that if I were a competitor, I wouldn’t do it the same way because if you’re trying to differentiate yourself from someone else, you don’t do it by looking exactly like them.

There are definite differences between the sites on the attainment of their goal, but they all have the exact same goal in mind and it is the same goal as any other public web site, and that’s to get and keep the attention of as many people as possible.

Perhaps death is too strong a word, maybe it’s merely in a coma. Maybe the pastelization and rounded-corner floaty bits signals a tidal change that there’s no recovering from, maybe that look that’s becoming so damned prevalent everyone one looks is merely how the web is going to loo because people like it and it lends a sameness to everything that accompanies a kind of comfort factor that everyone, seemingly, has been wanting all along but never managed to find.