Giraffe Forum

Websites will achieve maximum value when they focus on the tasks of their customers, not the technology or content.
Who will use this? How will they use it? These should be two of the most important questions asked when managing a website. Until they are answered with absolute clarity, the website does not have solid foundations.
The […]

From a closed, centralized, cohesive unit, the organization is being changed by the Web into an open, dispersed, cohesive network.
There are few better websites than the BBC, and there are few organizations that truly get what the Web is about better than the BBC. I came across a set of 15 BBC Web Principles some […]

Everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added than subtracted?
I use a survey service called SurveyMonkey a lot. It’s a great service. Recently, they upgraded, adding lots of new features. The problem is that some of the older features that I regularly use […]

Those who created information rarely had to worry about the impact of what they wrote. Until the Web.
A key element in journalistic training is studiously avoiding thinking about the impact of what you’re going to write. Good journalism is about finding out what needs to be said and saying it regardless of the consequences.
This […]

Life is complex, yet in many areas of life, we want simplicity. Perhaps simplicity is an illusion? It is, however, a key challenge of the designer and manager.
Here is an interesting article by Chris Chatham on the limits of simplicity:
Theories with the fewest assumptions are often preferred to those positing more, a heuristic often […]

Some interesting observations on the complexity-simplicity debate by Sam Vaknin for The American Chronicle:
Complexity rises spontaneously in nature through processes such as self-organization. Emergent phenomena are common as are emergent traits, not reducible to basic components, interactions, or properties.
Complexity does not, therefore, imply the existence of a designer or a design. Complexity does not […]

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, writing for Time:
Perhaps Internet actions speak louder than survey answers. Take the cost of gasoline. Despite gasoline prices reaching an all-time high this month, searches for “gas prices” during September 2005, when gas prices breached the $3/gallon mark, were six times greater than last week when […]