Comic Update: Boring in Five Easy Steps
August 25, 2009Today’s comic, featuring Jeff Croft in a fictional scenario where he’s rebuilt into a duller, less spontaneous being by Jakob Nielsen after a tragic karaoke accident, is something of a lighthearted poke at the death of spontaneity in the name of… well, I’m not sure what, exactly. (It also guest stars Bruce Lawson as the HTML5 Doctor)
The sequence of events that inspired this micro-drama is as follows: Firstly, Jakob Nielsen decided to talk about iterative designs in tweets (or as he likes to dress them up: “stream-based postings”). He guides us through a process where in only five easy steps he has drained the blood from a sample tweet, leaving a dried husk that will rise in thirteen days to join the legions of humorless drones that find the useit.com design both fascinating and useful.
After this, Jeff Croft cuts through the meat of Jakob’s ‘findings’ with a tweet that probably did not require five iterations: “An article by Jacob Nielsen on how to take all the spontaneity and humaneness out of your tweets in five easy steps…”
Granted, at least one iteration more might have helped in his case to get Jakob spelled right.
The fact is, Jeff hit it on the head. If you’re writing down your tweets and re-writing them repeatedly to maximize some sort of marketing message, you’re not tweeting. I’m not sure what you’re doing, but I’ll bet that most people that see the message can see what it is, canned artificial crap. You don’t have a medium of micro-messages just to waste all the time and effort of a proper e-mail or blog post on a single sentence. Spending that effort on the message not only is contrary to the purpose of the medium, it’s counterproductive when the end result is what Nielsen presents, complete with shouting-style caps, months in parentheses, and different wording to make it “punchier.”
I’m going to say Jakob Nielsen does not know what “punchier” actually means. If he did, useit.com might not look like a canary got stuck in a mid-90′s school administration newsletter.
Tweet how you like, but if you spend a half-hour at a time maximizing your tweets in some sort of business formula, don’t be surprised when people stop paying attention to your massaged marketing attempts.
Couldn’t agree more. Great post. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Twitter got inundated with “internet marketers”, “social media experts” and spammers. It’s lost its luster with me.
Amen.
But what if the medium *is* the massage? … Funny article, but I’m really posting to test the CAPTCHA-like item, which seems nicely accessible to a blind person such as moi-meme.
@Todd You could say that the web itself has been inundated with those things. I still love it though!
And I have to admit, I still love twitter. As long as you monitor who you follow correctly, you won’t have to deal with spam.
And, well… if your friends start spamming, they’re your friends, right? Bonking them on top of the head shouldn’t hurt either of you too much. ;)
At least one blind person’s screen reader pronounced “sentience” just like “sentence,” so your faux CAPTCHA made no sense to her. And people with cognitive disabilities might just give up trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do — especially if they’re also blind. Finally, people who navigate with the keyboard have to tab through the entire page to get focus on the image you want them to click.
Bots, on the other hand, can click any one of the three images and have a 33 percent chance of getting through on the first try. And if your images and question don’t change between sessions, then once they have the right answer they can flood your site.
I will say this: This CAPTCHA is less annoying to me, a high-functioning, intelligent, sighted sentient being, than many others I have encountered.
But the bottom line is still that CAPTCHAs are just plain rude. The best ways to discern people from bots don’t annoy people but do frustrate bots. Google “WebAIM” and “CAPTCHA” and you should find them.
Oh, and great point about tweets.
Cheers!
@Cliff: You definitely went well off topic, but thank you very much for the accessibility feedback on the CAPTCHA. The question does change from page-load to page-load, but the images do not currently rotate. It might be very worthwhile (if I kept this method) to do that.
Re: tabbing through the document to reach the image-links to click them, I had presumed (admittedly, in ignorance) that since the CAPTCHA came after text fields that they’d be tabbed too after the boxes were entered into. I’ll have to consider an alternative to that.
I admit, this CAPTCHA is primitive. It has, however, cut the amount of spam that Akismet needs to filter by almost 90%, so it’s also been helpful. I’d prefer, however, to not be preventing legitimate commentators. Although I agree that CAPTCHAs are rude, in a world of blog spam, even a basic checkpoint is a necessity after a certain amount of bots discover your site. I’ll definitely look at ways to improve this one based on feedback like yours, as well as less annoying CAPTCHAs such as your suggested Google Searches.
Actually, my first accessibility goal is to provide a text alternative to the comic, based on a suggestion I received from John Foliot. While doing that, I’ll try to improve this CAPTCHA in the process.
When posting to my blog (which is quite different from a tweet, I’ll admit), I subconciously try to publish at a time I think is best for my readers. To use something like that specifically in marketing, though, just reeks of manipulation. I’ve never liked marketing.
I’ll write out what I want to tweet, and then crush it down to half its length so it’ll fit in the 160 characters, but I never look at marketability in my words and phrases. The idea of ALLCAPS being good throws alarm bells. Combine that with the password hubbub and the blue links, and I’m left thoroughly confused.
Re: your captcha, I love how the buttons still have dimension even with images disabled (most sites will tell me to click something, and I have to modify the dom before I can click the button).
Frankly, though: There is no one solution that can help EVERYONE, besides the systematic annihilation of spammers. But then we’d be spam-nazis.
Also, how much spam do you normally get?
@Michael – At the height of the spam, approximately 250/day. The filter catches most of it, but it was still a lot of junk landing in my data logs. After installing my “Yarrrr CAPTCHA” (brought to you by pirate robots), it’s dropped down to about 5/day. This is greatly desired by me, because the filter has in the past had a lot of false positives (especially from link-prone commentators like John Foliot or Manu Sporny). With less junk entering the filter, it’s way easier to spot anything that got in there incorrectly.
The catch, Michael, with the “no one solution that can help everyone” approach is that we need to go out of our way to help people who have increased obstacles to the Internet experience, rather than shrug and say “too bad”. It’s one thing for people to not like CAPTCHAs based on taste, but it’s not usually acceptable to accept a situation where they’ll prevent genuine people from being heard.