Clinton over at Everything to Everything just posted an effusive article about Prezi, a new presentation building app. He shows, as an example of what Prezi can do, a presentation by Mojo on their Gamification service. I found that I had the same reaction to both Prezi and Mojo: they’re window dressing at best and dangerous at worst.

As much of a cliché as it has become, I am a firm believer that content is king. You can add all the badges and animations that you want but boring content is still never going to resonate with people. Going further, you potentially risk overshadowing your content with flashy presentation. Gamfication, in an admittedly nightmarish extreme, even has the potential to induce addictive behaviour.

One of Prezi’s testimonials inadvertently makes my point for me. Umair Haque, in discussing his use of Prezi, says that his audience responded with “Nice content – awesome presentation! What did you use to make it?!” Does that not seem backwards?

Their photos are actually pretty impressive from the inexpensive GPS/Camera equipped cell-phone.

I find it disturbing these days that people will believe almost anything sent to their inbox from a friend or colleague.  I recently received the famous e-mail about Mars being closer to the Earth than in anytime in history in August and that this will never happen again in anyone’s lifetime who is alive today.  Exciting news to be sure!

The e-mail continued to reveal that Mars would appear almost as big and bright as the moon in the night sky…again, fascinating.  However, the truth just isn’t so.  I guess implied in the hyperlink in the previous sentence is the trust I’m putting in NASA, the source of the information debunking this hoax.  I certainly hope they are telling me the truth, and based on the source, I’m inclined to believe them over an email that arrives from a friend, after being forwarded thousands of times over nearly 6 years since it was originally sent out.  No doubt the original author of this fiction must be impressed with the longevity he or she has achieved.

The more I watch the Jon Stewart show (unfortunately one of my favourite sources of “News” and Entertainment these days), I wonder how the eroding trust I feel in the major “News” organizations that report daily on happenings around the world will impact what I believe in the future.  How can the average person be expected to determine what is fact and what is fiction with so much information passing through our television sets, inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  I hope that we figure out a way to keep determining mostly what is fact and what isn’t, because with the volume of information we hear on a daily basis, we really do need to watch what we believe…something many of us seem to have forgotten.

Now…according to the article in the Ottawa Citizen about this, it will take nearly three minutes for the signal to travel from the earth to the source.  I guess instant messaging and real time communication are somehow out of the question.

What was interesting, is that the key technological hurdle needing to be overcome is the ability for a signal to be smart and be able to deal with disruptions and connection problems.  The new concept is called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN.  If a signal is blocked, the server can sense this, can save the content and send it on when the way is clear.”   We are constantly building web applications that rely on communication with other systems, sometimes asynchronously.  While there are mechanisms that can deal with disruption to a certain extent, this concept is interesting in that one could be sure that a transmission would arrive eventually, even if the system accepting the message isn’t available immediately.

I’ll be interested to see if this is one of those space program advances that actually helps us on earth, or if its just a cool idea that doesn’t yield any practical application.

OK…first things first, I haven’t read the book…however I’ve often thought about the ramifications of the industry in which I work and how it has impacted the youth that is the prime consumer of many of the Internet properties in which I’ve helped to build.  Of course…when I say “helped to build” I don’t necessarily mean literally, but through the advancement of Internet technologies and systems to which I have contributed a very small part of…one could argue I’m closer to the centre of this situation that most.

In helping to create and deliver various Internet related training courses in dealing with web writing, we have always preached that content on the web needs to be short and direct.  In fact, at times we used to use rules of thumb since most writing and content on websites was repurposed from print material.  One of those rules was to take a document for print, and cut it in half, then cut it in half again in order to arrive at the optimal amount for a web document.  Obviously rules of thumb are just a guideline, but the point was clear…keep things short and sweet for online writing.

Jakob Neilsen’s How Users Read on the Web mentions several details about how users read web pages, and consequently how writers should write.  Virtually all of this advice leads to shorter copy, content that is bulleted and built to enable users to “scan” the page rather than truly reading it.  In fact, his research suggests that only 16 percent of users actually read a web page word-by-word.

Back to the article…the basic concept behind Bauerlein’s book is that people are constantly hooked up via e-mail, IM, social networking sites and the like.  So much so that “something insidious is happening inside their heads.”  In fact, the Internet gives us access to so much information and so easily, yet people merely seek to connect with a closed circuit of contacts.

As I read the article, I found myself thinking that our best efforts for our clients result in producing websites and web applications that feed this very problem.  Instead of creating websites and applications that would help curb this problem, we rather just accept the fact that people no longer read or truly understand a web page, but are merely focused on quickly scanning the page and moving on to the next bit of information or content.  An interesting irony that we have so much easy access to volumes of details and information, and nobody is really paying attention.

I wonder what website and information architects think about this situation as they design sites that are intended to drive sales, or sell products, or deliver services in as quick and efficient a manner possible.  I wonder where we’ll be 10 years from now and whether or not we’ll even have the attention span to finish a blog post like this in its entirety…did you make all the way to end of this post?