Shaun Inman has redesigned. It’s not visu­ally as rad­i­cal (or gim­micky) as the last two, but con­cep­tu­ally, tech­ni­cally, and cre­atively it is far more stunning.

“The four stripes down the left-hand side of each page of this site pro­vide ambi­ent tem­po­ral con­text to the item cur­rently dis­played — as does the bright­ness of the back­ground color and over­all con­trast of the page you are viewing.”

A few months back I’m so sure I would have dis­missed that as a fine load of waf­fle indeed. “Ambi­ent tem­po­ral con­text”? Puh-leeaassee. But it does actu­ally make sense. Almost in an Edward Tufte kind of way. It’s excit­ing and dynamic and auto­mated and what­ever else (pre­sum­ably because of his brain being abnor­mally advanced and adept at ninja JavaScript­ing + less obvi­ous back­end things, etc.), but it actu­ally does so to an end.

The visual rep­re­sen­ta­tions are use­ful. One will dis­cover chronol­ogy very rapidly, or per­haps sim­ply under­stand with greater pre­ci­sion, the tem­po­ral nature of con­tent fea­tured. It feels on first glance wanky as the way that the word “sym­po­sium” is bandied around in academic-parlance when speak­ing of what nor­mal peo­ple would term a con­fer­ence, but it’s really not.

I think there’s some­thing about geek cul­ture that lets us be a lit­tle eclec­tic. A lit­tle ironic (social­ist imagery for self gain?). There’s a dif­fer­ence, of course, between straight “geek cul­ture” and IT cul­ture — IT cul­ture is peo­ple stuck in a cubi­cle writ­ing code. Geek cul­ture, as I define it (because I iden­tify with it), is more about ridicu­lous man­i­festos and spec­u­la­tion about the next wave and pur­su­ing possibly-never-eventuating ideas. Like Parakey, for exam­ple, which scares me (would scare me) if it ever got anywhere.

Yes, even the young and hip in our midst are afraid of change. Not that that would be me. I’ll take my free designer’s drinks where I can but at the end of the day (that is, in about an hour’s time) I’m still an ill-defined gen­er­al­ist. Which is a self-effacing way of say­ing strategist/integrator. Which is a pre­ten­tious way of say­ing broad knowl­edge of dubi­ous depth.

Labels aside, it’s inter­est­ing to observe one thing that demar­cates (in the view of a char­ac­ter I met today known as RLS) con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems from blog plat­forms. I was stunned to hear a fairly seri­ous web devel­oper (even if we dis­agree on MVC and behaviour/content/presentation con­cepts) dis­miss con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as “the worst thing that ever hap­pened to the web”. A few hor­ror sto­ries about migra­tion later (and a few “Josh, you really haven’t been around long enough to know” looks, no doubt) and it all started to make sense. The prob­lem wasn’t migra­tion or data (yes, even data) or closed/open source or any of the usual com­plaints, but users. And the flex­i­bil­ity that users demand and that con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems have never will­ingly provided.

This is the sec­ond para­graph of the sec­ond big idea of this blog post: I have no way to dis­tin­guish and define this para­graph as belong­ing to the sec­ond big idea. I would love to be able to have been able to put the open­ing two words of the last para­graph (“Labels side”) in small cap­i­tals to demon­strate the start of a new sec­tion. I can’t. My soft­ware doesn’t let me do that — or, if it does, it does so in a way that isn’t scal­able and seman­ti­cally sound. Or, if it does let me do so in a way that is scal­able and seman­ti­cally vir­tu­ous (both in an inter­nal data struc­ture (rela­tional DBs and so forth) and seman­tic markup (HTML, XML, XHTML) con­text) then it’s nigh on impos­si­ble to use and makes so much work it’s infi­nitely faster for me to write a Dreamweaver tem­plate, lock it, and cre­ate new pages man­u­ally based around this. Case in point, ezpub­lish. Full points for exten­si­bil­ity and flex­i­bil­ity, abstracted data struc­tures, etcetera, but a big fat fail for mak­ing this prac­ti­cally use­ful. Hav­ing to reload the web­page or change views in order to put a photo into a doc­u­ment is not accept­able — media library is great, but not if it takes me away from my con­tent for a moment.

The point is, tools get in the way often in ways com­pletely for­eign to hack-it-and-manage-it-yourself Frontpage-esque ways of think­ing. Accord­ing to RLS, this is par­tic­u­larly offen­sive in light of its sim­i­lar­i­ties to bad man­age­ment practice.

You don’t stand over your employ­ees wield­ing a club in order to make them do things your way. You pro­vide them with facil­i­ties to let them get the job done as best they can, and tools to enable them to inno­vate and improve your busi­ness processes, rather than play­ing the auto­crat and cre­at­ing automa­tons who don’t inno­vate and don’t think, either. As we can all imag­ine, non-thinking users are quite dan­ger­ous if you’ve got a hole any­where for them to fall in to. (Unless you’re work­ing in school IT, in which case think­ing users are the infi­nitely greater risk!)

There­fore, con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems are con­stric­tive and evil. I went from a posi­tion of want­ing to exclaim “what are you on, that’s com­pletely insane, step away from that data­base!” to being con­vinced when he told me we were think­ing along the same lines. So what’s my song that sounds so similar?

In a few points, some­thing like this:

• Struc­tured data is good.
• Inter­op­er­abil­ity is essen­tial and good.
• Users are dumb.
• Users are smart enough to want good tools they can use, even if they don’t always have the lan­guage to describe what they want.
• Good tools let you struc­ture data with­out think­ing about it.
• Good tools take advan­tage of struc­tur­ing data as a part of users exist­ing work­flow and busi­ness processes, and don’t increase admin­is­tra­tive burdens.
• Good tools let you manip­u­late data and recy­cle it and re-envisage it in pow­er­ful, clear, and excit­ing contexts.

One of these things is not like the other one…

But most of it is. RLS empha­sised the impor­tance of flex­i­bil­ity. I do that, too. Only my flex­i­bil­ity is based around bend­ing (or bet­ter, design­ing) the tool to make it accom­mo­date user require­ments prop­erly, rather than dis­miss­ing the tool and return­ing to abstract seman­tics and poorly defined data struc­tures (i.e. none except by HTML markup). Of course, I’m biased, and am pos­si­bly mis­rep­re­sent­ing his thought.

In fact, there were sev­eral impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tions to what he had said. This the­ory applies only to large bod­ies of text (in this case, record­ings of semi-legal pro­ceed­ings), not to other con­tent types. For exam­ple, CRM tools are accept­able. Photo man­age­ment, pre­sum­ably, would also be accept­able. That all makes sense. Most curi­ous was the idea that blog­ging util­i­ties were accept­able, whilst con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems were not.

Yes.

The the­ory is sim­ple enough: blogs are some­thing you give users and say “here, have this, work with it and manip­u­late it as you will”, whilst con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems are some­thing foisted upon users by middle-upper-management. Unfor­tu­nately, to me, this seems more like what I imag­ine an anti-uni-IT-service cam­paign run by Social­ist Alliance would sound like. That is, not an objec­tion to the tools them­selves, but merely the bureau­cracy behind these.

It’s not quite that sim­ple, though.

Blog users do have a rep­u­ta­tion for tak­ing things in unusual direc­tions. Think about cat­e­gories. We kicked off with those and then grew out of them. So all of a sud­den we had tags, instead. Then tag clouds. Then folk­sonomies. Sure, some of these things are gim­micks that are going to die off, but the point is there’s scope for inno­va­tion that tra­di­tional con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily take kindly to. (Good ones would, but that’s besides the point, because I have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion RLS hasn’t encoun­tered any well-written, exten­si­ble, con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem). So blogs are quite dif­fer­ent in that regard, and very much descrip­tivist with their con­tent — that is, they take it and let it grow as it will, some­what organ­i­cally, and gen­er­ally kick back and let users take their course. No pre­scrip­tivism here.

So there we go. Josh rolls elit­ist design/usability con­cepts, geek cul­ture, labels, inter­gen­er­a­tional con­flict, a dis­cus­sion of con­tent man­age­ment ver­sus blogs, and lin­guis­tics all into one blog post. Now what cat­e­gory do I stick this in?