Not getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries? Then become a resident of the Playdo community! Create a citizen and start living in Playdo-land just like you wish you could do in real life. A web-based 'The Sims'? You be the judge.

Looking for something fun to design that doesn't involve committees, a cubicle or red tape? How about a CDR? stereotypography and 5inch.com are holding a cd print design competition. The deadline for entries is June 1st. Winners will have their designs printed and sold on 5inch.com and will receive a bunch of blank CDRs bearing their winning design.

37signals has officially released their contingency design white paper. It's well written and free.

On a tangential note, I'm pleased to see good things coming out of companies affected by the economic downturn. It's good to see that when the going gets tough, the tough really do get going.

Dooce.com will be bootylicious no longer - she's shutting down. I'll miss her cantankerous yet poignant perspective on all things 'life'. Good luck Heather - I hope that you and your writings make their way to the masses again - on your terms.

Adaptive Path strikes again with their recent essay on their approach to setting priorities for web-based project initiatives. Bonus - the piece is generic enough to apply to a multitude of decision-based/priority-based situations, web-based or not.

Testing Your Web Application - A Quick 10 Step Guide would've been a good primer article if the steps weren't presented in the order they were. Thinking about usability after you've set up your test environment, begun logging and fixing SIRS, unit tested and validated your HTML is ludicrous. Usability should be thought about during step 1 and tested all along the way.

I mean, how usable is a web application going to be with usability not taken into consideration until step seven of a ten step process?

Peter has a really good point about the Argus diagram, which I think makes sense - in theory. In practice, however, it's a far different story. I mean, how often does existing content support the ever changing business goals of an organization AND the needs of the user? Never on any project I've ever worked on.

I agree with Peter that content should be driven from within an organization and must align itself with business goals to be deemed 'successful' from a Business Context perspective. In order to ensure this success, content should be reviewed/re-purposed/rewritten whenever the Business Context shifts. What I feel is missing if content is simply tucked away into the Business Context (and what I think Peter and Lou were trying to get across with the diagram referenced above) is that content has just as important a relationship with it's users. As such, content should also be reviewed/re-purposed/rewritten when the needs of it's audience changes.

All that said, I think the content relationship I've come to know looks more like the image below.


What do you think? Where does content 'live' for you?

I have to agree with John and Steve... the map of the city of Weybern is an excellent use of Flash. Why? Because providing single session drill-down capabilities into a vector-based image set is one of the primary functions Flash was built to accommodate. If this page were purely HTML/image-based, a user would need be forced to reload the page multiple times to accomplish what Flash can do with a vector-based map. If only MapQuest's Weybern map were as usable.