Michael Boyle’s weblog

The most recent member of the “our archives are more valuable open than closed” group among the traditional media is Sports Illustrated, which has opened the SI Vault. You can now read 54 years of Sports Illustrated history at your leisure.

Jon Lebkowsky has written a response to The Economist’s article on Social Networks, Everywhere and Nowhere on the Social Web Strategies blog. Money quote:

For months I’ve been saying that Facebook is the next AOL – a gated community that works for a while, but ultimately can’t be open enough to sustain prominence. This is probably true of MySpace, too… at the moment, both systems are growing and capturing mindshare… will this last?

One thing that few know about me is that I am wild about fantasy baseball. One of my longest-standing and best fantasy baseball friends recently confirmed what we’d all suspected for a long time: he has entirely too much time on his hands.

Just kidding! But Jason has been blogging for the past few months – It is about the money, stupid and doing a very very good job of it. He’s taken to the form like a fish to water, and if you follow baseball even a little bit, you’ll definitely enjoy it.

Like many, I’m pretty skeptical about big network led efforts to bring their TV and other content online, but still kind of optimistic. So it was with interest that I read John Battelle’s post Hulu Is Up at Searchblog. His conclusion? “This is a big step.”

A response, in three screen captures:

The nice folks at Common Craft have posted a video that explains Twitter in Plain English – and does so very very well. (Appropriately enough, I found this via Julien‘s tweet a few minutes ago).

Avenue A | Razorfish’s Garrick Schmitt has written a great post in the Digital Design Blog that riffs on information from their Digital Outlook report: Does the Home Page Still Matter?: Why Distribution Trumps Destination Online. Most of the web folks that I know have been working on this basis for some time now, but it remains important to underline that the old “get people in through the homepage” model is broken (and likely always was, it was just harder to figure out before).

Trying to force people into a specific usage pattern is a recipe for failure – trumped only by the mistake of trying to predict where users will come from in the first place. What does this mean in practice? Many things (and the conclusions in the post are right on), but two immediate things spring to mind:

• Deep links have to provide context within the URL itself (i.e., be readable)
• Don’t hide content in non-machine-readable formats that people can’t link to directly (and that Google can’t grok)