Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

A List Apart: The Survey, 2008

This post is just to make sure that the shame and evidence of blatant ripoff never go away or get forgotten. Seeing anyone do stuff like this in the year 2008 when (almost) everyone has Internet access is leaving me speechless:

It goes without saying that:

• the implementation sucks
• it’s nowhere near the functionality or aesthetics of the original BBC version

I could go on and on about various technical stuff that sucks, but I just don’t have the strength to do it anymore. Resignation is slowly kicking in…

Mi3dot.org’s Plagiarism forum thread has the inside scoop on who’s responsible, who profited and whatnot. Aljoša’s post illustrates the similarities even more.

Some other (Croatian) sources:

• business.hr: HRT u izradi novog portala plagirao BBC
• T-portal: HRT ‘posudio’ dizajn od BBC-ja?
• Index: Iz koda HRT-ove stranice najednom nestalo ime tvrtke koja ju je radila
• Index: HRT-ova nova web stranica besramni plagijat bbc.co.uk
• Index: Hašim Bahtijari: Pitat ću na Vijeću koliko je novaca utrošeno na izradu novih stranica HRT-a
• Index: Hašim Dizajneri složni: HRT je pokrao BBC, i to loše

Because the announcement is in Croatian, here’s a quick recap:

The feature enables site owners to integrate voting buttons for their content directly on their sites (something along the lines of reddit, digg etc).
The buttons are included with inserting a simple <script src="..."> one-liner anywhere on a page. Our API takes over from there.

The system figures out if the content already exists on our end and if it does displays real-time stats for it. If the content doesn’t exist yet, the system pushes out a link that makes submitting that content practically a one-or-two-click operation.

If the user browsing your site is also logged on to our site (via “remember me” functionality or just for the current browsing session) he can vote with a one-click action without ever leaving your site. The click fires up an async AJAX call and registers the user’s vote.

We’re currently offering some customization options (for pre-populating certain submission related variables which make content submission even easier for your visitors) and we’ve bundled two skins: a horizontal and a vertical one (so everyone should be able to integrate the buttons easily without them having an impact on their site’s layout).

Further customization and layout options are a piece of cake to implement now, but first let’s see what the users think and what their usage patterns are.

This is just the first of (I hope) many new exciting features which will all use Croportal’s API. My plan is to make practically every (common sense) piece of content available through the public API. When that’s done, sky’s the limit in terms of possible mash-ups, widgets, data visualizations, integrations etc.

Fun times ahead.

• Douglas Crockford — An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM
• Douglas Crockford — Advanced JavaScript
• Douglas Crockford — The JavaScript Programming Language
• Nicholas Zakas — Maintainable JavaScript
• Joseph Smarr — High-performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught Is Wrong

Not that these can replace a good book, but some of the stuff in there is pure gold.

I received the first invite from Ivan Brezak Brkan on January 25th, and they’ve been pouring in from all sides ever since. Thanks all, but I think I’ll pass for now.

I still haven’t registered. And I don’t think I will at this point. Tried snooping around the website a bit? I did. Noticed it was slow as hell. For the whole weekend. And today too. I’m hoping it’s due to the overwhelming amounts of traffic and not the PHP code behind the whole thing.

The concept of the thing feels “fishy”. Get paid to do stupid things. go to job interviews. Come on. It sounds almost as silly as those damn “get paid to INSERT-EASY-TO-DO-VERB at home”. Why would anyone (in their right mind) pay to get people to show up for job interviews? Isn’t getting a good (good == proven track record) recruiting company a more lucrative endeavor for a company that needs new hires?

Finding good people to hire is like searching for gold, and for all of the folks out there who don’t remember what that consists of, here’s a picture:

The people in the HR departments are about to get an influx of extra dirt to sift through. With chances of it containing gold being exactly the same, if not smaller. Hooray.

The only business who’d approve of such an exercise is the one that is highly optimized for landing people after/during interviews. And that shit takes skill, time and money. It’s like a highly targeted & optimized SERP. Except it’s about employment.

I know their website states “it’s for you if: you’re happy at your job, you’re good at what you do and you’re not looking for a new job” — that’s clever design & copy. They need as many users as possible. And once you get “many”, you start loosing in other areas. Quality usually goes down first.

Kudos to the two managers though. It’s a hell of a way to open up and create a nice little niche for themselves.

Expect a more detailed review in the following days, once I get the chance to actually do something with it.
Watching 6 consecutive episodes of Californication kind of exhausted me.