During the two conferences I attended recently, Web Directions South and OZ-IA there was a distinct theme in some the sessions on opening up the corporate knowledge based.
You know the score, you have bound to have heard this before. Don’t lock the corporate information up, allow those statistics and figures, you are already presenting to the public to be readily accessed via some type of API. Allow people to remix, mashup and represent the information. The concept goes that it’s better to allow this via a controlled API then have people scrape and represent or misrepresent the information. Hence you maintain control of your information using the API than the traditional scrape method.
The Web is wonderful it’s full of all this content, all this information. It’s a copy writer or blogger’s dream. You just don’t have to do any work at all. It’s all laid out there for you, all you have to do is find it and take it.
Maybe just write a small introductory paragraph and then simply cut and paste the rest of the article you have found and publish. Easy!
Oh isn’t the web great. It allows such theft of someone else’s work. It’s fine to do isn’t it as the poor suckers put the information online so we could steal it… NO STOP IT!
I should have called this “Ten ways to make your web designer pull their hair out“. This is a sister post to my Ten Things Web Designers Forget.
I have a lot of respect for people that have made the jump from the traditional arena of print design and can now honestly work in the area web design. However this is a reminder to the rest of the traditional print industry that is pretending to be web designers. Stop it! You are giving designers generally a bad name.
So let’s start with a few basics you are just not getting:
