Jesse Schibilia

My last post on Web 2.0 Wrath seems to have been found by at least a few folks. Being the vain person that I am, I google my first and last name once every so often. On one of my recent searches, I found a result pointing to cnet.com. The article’s title is “When consumers become vigilantes” and was posted by Mike Yamamoto who is apparently a staff writer for CNET (read original post).

I was excited to see that someone recognized my post. This means that I am not just spouting off useless drivel for me to read on cold nights when I need to feel self-important.

I immediately looked at my AIM client to see who was online; I desperately needed to show someone that I’m apparently an authority on the subject of web vigilantism. I found my brother-in-law, John. John is a programmer and as such has an eye for minutiae. He noticed that my professor’s name is not mentioned on the cnet.com quote as it is in my original post. Also missing are any mention of digg and priceritephoto, the two entities that I was discussing in the post.

Now I am assuming that Mike Yamamoto has to change my post for some legal reason. But my quote is taken out of the exact context of the dispute. Not only does Bill Crosbie get zero props for being such an astute thinker, but this paraphrasing raises zero awareness about the entities in question and instead passes the buck onto a broader subject of ‘web vigilantism’.

This is all well and good: people should do their own research. My post is not the end-all be-all of web vigilantism. I’m no copyright lawyer, but shouldn’t Mike Yamamoto contact me if he is going to directly change my writing? Or should I just be greatful that I now get more click-throughs?

In late November of 2005, I was thoroughly impressed by the power of the digg community when they stood up for a wronged photographer and blogger named Thomas Hawk. This photographer found himself in a skeevey bait-and-switch deal (read original blog post). The short story is that this Brooklyn based company had a history of intimidating customers into buying more accessories to cover the loss they take on the camera bodies and other primary equipment. When the blog post made it onto digg, the community was outraged and reacted by flooding the company’s website, phone system, and e-mail services in a distributed denial of service attack. The company really crossed the wrong guy in this case. Read the entire post, it’s really good. You will get mad at the way they had treated people in the past and managed to get away with it.

I was excited by the power and swiftness with which this web vigilante group fought for Thomas Hawk. I talked about it with Bill Crosbie, one of my professors. While he was outraged over how a company could utilize these mafia scare tactics and still be in business, he was still wary of the vigilante tactics used by the digg community to retaliate. I was so impressed with the idea of vigilante justice on the web that I didn’t really see his point of view at the time. I saw it as a way to quickly weed out companies like priceritephoto. Today, I see his point.

Yesterday there was a similar digg debacle. Steve Mallett, a writer for the illustrious publisher O’Reilly was accused of stealing the code on which digg runs for use on a few of his own websites (linuxfilter.com, iTuneslove.com). The digg user ’steveexposed’, who obviously created a new account under which to post this story, even created a custom blogspot blog to show users all of the ‘facts’ (read original post). This story quickly went up the digg charts to the front page. At the time of writing this story, there are 2,835 diggs on the story, which was posted just over 24 hours ago. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a lot of diggs for one day.

This unknown user’s research unfortunately didn’t include the fact that Steve’s websites were based on pligg, an open-source version of digg’s engine. This is where the story begins to get slippery. Pligg is based on meneame.net, which is actually a partial rip-off of digg. Apparently the developers of pligg knew that meneame was influenced by digg, but they did not know that some of the code was taken directly from digg. Pligg is offered as open-source software, and as such claims the same integrity that is practiced by the rest of the open-source community.

So in this case, no harm came to Steve’s servers; the community seems to have realized that it was poor research before it was too late. However, there is something to be said about Steve Mallett’s reputation. He has been wrongfully accused of stealing someone’s original work. The digg community has realized this today, thanks partly to an article by Nathan Torkington on O’Reilly Radar (read original post). This story has also made it to the front page of digg, and has over 1700 diggs at the moment, but we can’t assume that everyone knows that Mallett is innocent. Ignorance in numbers is frightening to me.

So in the case of priceritephoto.com, this Web 2.0 vigilantism is seemingly a good thing; keeping people accountable for their actions. Is it unethical, perhaps…but so was priceritephoto.com’s conduct. Illegal? It would most likely be held in court as such. But in this instance where Steve Mallett’s character came into contention over hasty research, it is a horrible example of ignorance in numbers; the blind following the blind. This unknown blogger owes Steve Mallett a public apology.

If this type of vigilantism is seemingly good in some cases, and downright irresponsible in others, perhaps we should come to realize that these types of things should be left to the proper channels to deal with instead of taking it upon ourselves to make things right (or wrong).

In other vigilante news today, eBaumsworld.com vs. YTMND. This post on vitalsecurity.org seems to go over the issues pretty well (read original post). Essentially, the YTMND community along with a few other website communities have taken it upon themselves to fight back at eBaumsworld over habitual copyright infringement. eBaumsworld in the past has had less than great integrity regarding copyright. They even leeched a piece of software from Sega earlier this month. Besides the copyright infringement, in this case they even managed to reap the benefits of the incoming advertising dollars without paying for the bandwidth (tab picked up by Sega).

The funny thing is that this is all over a Lindsay Lohan image set, which since the infringement has been amended to reflect a copyright by the author.

Now if eBaumsworld had a better reputation, I think this mistake would have been forgiven. But they have consistently stepped on other artists’ toes to further their own gains. The community’s distaste with eBaumsworld came to a head last night and the vigilantes managed to shut down eBaumworlds’s forums.

I personally don’t agree with what eBaumsworld has done in this case, and in many other cases. There is a great Wikipedia article on their exploits (see article) which has been temporarily been frozen due to recent vandalism. Their history has shown that they don’t play by the rules and that is unacceptable. They remind me of the priceritephoto.com people in many ways.

Here is another case where vigilante justice is seemingly good. But if this type of action forms a new paradigm that is widely acceptable, it will not be good for the Internet as an entity. If it becomes commonplace for a relatively small group of people to crash a server because they do not agree with what it stands for, then the integrity of the Internet steps down to the integrity of organized crime.

If you have never used campusfood.com to order food from your local campus eateries then you won’t be able to fully relate to this post. The interface used to be bulky and not very informative. They really have revamped the entire site. The new code is streamlined! I write this as I eat a falafel and hummus platter from Neubie’s…yum!

As a new user enters the site, he or she is presented with a much improved start page. The usability has increased such that the users’ attention is directed to important tasks for each stage of the order. They use instruction images with arrows attached to show the user what needs to be done next. An arrow, while simple, can do a lot for a website’s efficiency. I am partial to this simplified task instruction method. By presenting users with a streamlined task set for the things that they want to get accomplished - in this case, get food delivered - the following is achieved:

1. Efficiency of the implementation is increased: Simplifying a design hopefully means less overhead. There will be less information being relayed between the server and the client, effectively reducing bandwidth.
2. The user doesn’t get frustrated: You want to fix all your bugs and streamline the task sets with the following thought in mind: users should be able to get in and accomplish what they want to get done as quickly as possible. If a user gets frustrated, it translates into lost revenue for campusfood.com just because of a poor interface.
3. The user enjoys their experience: When a user looks at an interface and sees an inviting method to get their task completed, and then they can easily complete their task, they will be more likely to use it again. This translates into more repeat business for Campusfood.

So instead of taking you on a page-by-page review of Campusfood, let me just highlight a few things that they did that I liked:

• More user information is presented to the user. The first thing that I noticed when I logged on is that I can see my last several orders with the restaurants. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but the mere fact that the company is allowing users to access their own data on the web is trendsetting for a small company like this.
• User information is presented in simple terms. One of the best things that Amazon ever did was adding ownership to the account page link. So instead of a link that merely reads ‘Account Information’, you would instead see ‘My Account’. This is a subtle, but important difference. Another example is instead of something to the effect of ‘Package Tracking’, you would see a link in your account information that reads ‘Where’s My Stuff?’ Taking business operations and putting them into common, everyday, Joe-six-pack language is an effective measure to making the user experience more enjoyable. Campusfood does this on the new design (My Account, My Campus, My Fridge, etc.)
• The CSS is bright and playful, yet clean. This is very hard for me to do. My style sheets generally come out on the verge of ‘doctor’s office sanitary’. I can’t stand ugly styles with unecessary and seemingly misplaced elements. The crew that worked on this, however, kept it clean enough for me and managed to have some fun with it too.
• The visual cues are spectacular. See the screenshot below of the restaurants in my area. Note the method they took to show you that the restaurant is closed. This wasn’t in the previous version; I think the restaurant just got removed from this list when they closed for the night.
• Also see in the screenshot that when I am logged in, there is a button at the bottom that reads “Tell your friends” with a graphic of two cans tied together a la The Little Rascals. This button takes you to a quick and easy form where you can let your friends know about your great experience with the website. This means more revenue for Campusfood!

The design is ten times better than the previous one. The crew is entirely in-house as per my correspondence with the feedback rep. It’s good to see that web design crews are paying attention to the user experience as a way to generate more revenue. Congrats guys.

I found an article by Allesandro Fulciniti that goes down web design memory lane of 2005. Fulciniti, an Italian web designer, posted this English translation of his original article over at web-graphics.com. You will find some great resources on JavaScript, CSS, web standards, accessibility, etc.; all of the best of 2005. A great read for any designer who has been in a coma since January 1, 2005.

If you read Italian, the original article is posted at blog.html.it.

Of particular interest to me is the moo.fx effect library. It is only 3 Kb and gives you some pretty snazzy visuals. Now I just need something on which to try it out.

Edit: I found a similar article on 456 Berea Street. They go over their top articles of 2005. This is a great blog and has some priceless information for designers. If you’re not reading it, you should be.

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