Navigating your way through a website should be a smooth experience. But ensuring that it actually is, can be a rather rough ride…

Today, Project Red Stripe’s first service goes live: the site to gather ideas from the outer world (as opposed to our Big-Brotherish dungeon). But as I am writing this, we’re still busily testing our handful of web pages – and still finding bugs. There are files that have mysteriously disappeared, broken links and (inevitably) typos. And then there is this browser called Internet Explorer, which most netizens use, but which makes life rather difficult for web programmers…

Overall, though, our little application, called Red Stripe robot, held up quite well. I tried breaking it by putting in a very long idea (about 50 pages of text) and tagged it with the term “test” 50 times. The site accepted the submission without protesting, but it showed up 50 times in our database where all the ideas are stored (a bug Stewart, our resident geek, has since fixed; we’ve also limited the length of submissions to 400 words).

It’s the non-technical stuff, though, that has proven the real hassle, particularly since we want the whole world to be able to submit ideas. Are the terms and conditions legally ok? What about the privacy policy? Closer to home, will our colleagues at the mother ship actually send the e-mails out to readers of Economist Group businesses and put our ads up on their websites?

Barring a last-minute catastrophe, recipients of our e-mail and those who see our ads can click through to our new homepage. It directs users to a brief that explains what we’re trying to do and a web form into which they can type their ideas. Once they click that “submit” button, they’ll get an e-mail thanking them for their contribution, which goes directly into our database to be examined later.

Yet there is even more going on behind the scenes. We ask contributors to “tag” (web 2.0-speak for “label”) their ideas with keywords that will then appear as a “tag cloud” next to the form. We also have an administrative online tool to look at each idea, add more tags and write comments.

Once we have 25 serious ideas, we’ll start taking a closer look at the submissions. In the meantime we’ll do some brainstorming to come up with some ideas of our own. So, as we say in our brief, start polishing your crystal ball - and tell us what the future holds for The Economist Group. The deadline is March 25th.

Exposing one’s soul is not something I would naturally choose to do, let alone in public. To share my deepest thoughts and concerns is a practice I would usually reserve for a select and intimate few. Yet the web in its current incarnation seems to challenge this notion head on.

Through blogs and social forums, not only does one expose oneself to an unknown audience. This exposure also invites both judgement and interaction. I am not comfortable with this exposure. As a result, I find blogging difficult.

I like to be able to define my audience and to manage both the output and likely level of interaction. It takes a newly sought boldness to relax these requirements, to just write and be open to whatever the web will offer up in response, if anything.

Perhaps this is not that different from what is happening in real life. In dealing with other people, using a product or service and consuming information we all naturally make assessments and form opinions. The interactivity of much of the web with its comment and ranking features makes it easier for all these thoughts to be fed back. This can be a positive thing, for this feedback could lead to ongoing improvement.

I approach this world with hesitation. I see that perhaps the potential costs to pride, control and privacy may be worth the possible benefits.

Or so said BusinessWeek about Wallstrip.

New Yorkers seem pretty non-plussed as Lindsay Campbell, the show’s host, found out (but very tongue in cheek). More an insight into New Yorkers, maybe?

Thanks to Tony for the link.

No, not that nasty browser malware, but an edgy-ish ad. agency inspired (I expect) home page takeover on Diesel.com

It certainly makes those Economist £12 for 12 issues splashes look rather tired, but would it work for any of the Group’s sites?

Well, I guess that its’s something for us to consider starting Monday, from when we’ll be updating this blog at least once a day so you can keep up to date with all that lovely Red Stripey-ness.

As Rafat Ali points out in his excellent e-mail newsletter (well it would be woulnd’t it), e-mail’s still got it. You can read his post yourself, but it’s interesting what Jeff DeBalko (ex-eLogic) says in the BtoBOnline article.

In fact, we’ve been unsubscribing (non-)readers (those that don’t open e-mails regularly) at Economist.com for years (which is what Prescott Shibles, VP-online development/new media at Prism Business Media says they do in the article, but a bit more agressively).

I suppose, though, that you need to know what you’re trying to do with your e-mail newsletters in the first place. Economist.com have two types (as do many others) - one that can be read and makes sense by itself with the other encouraging click-throughs to the main site to get the full story.

The first of these could live as a commercial product by itself (with paying advertisers) whilst the second is essentially a traffic-driver or value-add (as with the WSJ alerts). You wouldn’t want to unsubscribe someone from alerts if they are designed to be useful without the need to even open them.

But I guess that’s obvious.

Over at Economist.com, we’re using Movable Type to power our blogs, the first of which is Free exchange. We did a comparison of the features of the two foremost blogging products (the other being WordPress) and plumped for MT. I started out with MT here, but changed to WordPress (Yahoo! Small Business has both available and it’s pretty easy to trash one and start again). The main reason has been lost in the mists of time, but as I type this into the WordPress GUI editor, I realise just how clunky these editors are.

I had to edit some HTML yesterday and boy oh boy does it mess up when you try and do a mixture of  HTML and GUI editor. Tags get put in all over the place, non-standard HTML gets created and you just end up with a mess. I started to clean it up but in the end I just parked it for now.

The lesson: don’t edit the same post with the GUI editor and in plain HTML.

I had to hack up some PHP so that this blog at https://projectredstripe.com/blog could be browsed to via the domain name (i.e. without the directory). Not too hard in the end, but (as you may know) I’m no PHP guru, so how did I do it?

Well, Tim O’Reilly, who spoke at the AOP conference last week, could tell you (if you had the chance to ask him). He talked about the way that his company did not have the competitors one might have expected if you’d have looked into the future a few years back.

So who’s his competition?

Google.

And that’s how I learned enough PHP to put in a redirect to a directory. You can view Tim’s keynote (courtesy of Savvis) in full here.

The annual AOP event had keynotes from Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly and Web 2.0 fame.

if you’re scared of screwing up you’ll get nowhere

McCall outlined five challenges:

• brands and people (it’s key that you know what’s being said about your brand online)
• community (although she insisted on calling her readers users, she highlighted the need for a two way dioalogue)
• innovate (”if you’re scared of screwing up you’ll get nowhere” and “you can’t suffocate it by judging it on normal rates of return”)
• excel at software development (”having the best developers is as important as having the best journalists”)
• drive digital revenue growth

She prefaced these by saying that she’d thought of a sixth - vision. She cited GMG’s attempts to make a go of a UK version of Wired magazine as the point (in 1994) when some of the (now) senior people at GMG were first exposed to new media. This experience had stood them in good stead.

Now I call that luck rather than vision, but I take her point.

I’ve discussed her point about software developers (I’m sure that she’s include all technologists) with some people in the past and although she was backed up by other speakers, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. You need the vision to use a framework for people to work in. If it’s there, then talented developers can certainly make a difference, but they need to be given that freedom and like the relationship between a website and its readers there needs to be a two way dialogue.

Tim O’Reilly took this point one step further by talking about “computer programming as journalism”. His theme was all around community and he outlined ways to foster this:

• get volunteers (as in a wiki)
• use self-interest (as CraigsList does)
• architect for participation (design for network effects like flickr does by defaulting to public access)

His computer programming as journalism thought relates to Chris Anderson’s long tail theory - the point he was making was that with all your content in a database somewhere it’s the ability to get at it in a super-easy way that will make the difference. I’d say it’s more like computer programming as sub-editing, but I guess that wouldn’t get as much attention.

Of the other speakers Tim Weller of Incisive made a great point when asked about sites that he likes. Speaking about the Telegraph’s navigation he seemed to be thinking out loud when he said “creativity is good, but plaigarism is quicker”.

Not suprisingly, he also said that vertical search would be big for media organisations like his.

PaidContent.org has more coverage.