cre8d design

It’s been a year since my guest post on Mashable on 10 Ways Twitter will Change Blog Design in 2009.

Looking back, I was actually pretty spot-on with them all!  Twitter has of course since added lists, which I referred to as TwitterRolls.  The integration of blog and twitter comments, Tweetbacks, was picked up on rapidly by Wordpress plugin developers and external tools such as Disqus have taken this a step further, making it easy to use your preferred social networking login when commenting on a blog and even better, pulling in dispersed reactions to your blog posts on other social networking sites.  Twitter has indeed moved right to the top of the ShareThis! tool and many bloggers have ditched general sharing tools for just TweetThis and FacebookThis.  TweetMeme has made tweet stats front and centre of many blogs.  Most bloggers now have some sort of Twitter widget on their site.

So where to next?  Here’s 4* more ways Twitter will continue to change blog designs in 2010:

1. Stop Subscribing, Start Following
   My hunch is that more bloggers will ditch promoting their RSS feed (besides, browsers do a pretty good job of alerting you to them – if you’re a feed reader sort of person).  They’ll focus on getting people to follow their tweets or subscribe to their blog via email.  Of course feeds are still the glue which automatically tweets your latest blog posts and is often used to create the newsletters. Likewise, the number of followers will be more promoted than the number of subscribers.  Facebook’s “Become a fan” popular widget which shows avatars of Facebook fans of the blog and highlighting your own friends will be rivaled by similar ones for Twitter.  (Google’s friend connect widget is another such example.)
2. Most Tweeted Widgets
   A widget for bloggers to show their own most-tweeted posts of all time (or some other time period).  TweetMeme told me last year that it was in the works but I haven’t yet heard back about the status of this. I’m surprised there aren’t more twitter analytics packages in use on blogs.
3. Latest Tweet focus
   More will become a part of a blog’s introduction or header area.  Originally tweets were relegated to blog sidebars, then integrated into the content column.  Just the latest tweet will be displayed, rather than multiple tweets. Maxvoltar is one example of this.
4. Bye Bye Gravatar, Hello the new Gravatar
   Twitter and Facebook avatars will become the de-facto official avatar online, instead of Gravatar.  More blogs will use Twitter and Facebook integrated login systems for their commenters (or switch to a system like Disqus).  As people regularly change their Facebook (and less so, Twitter) avatars, these will be more relevant to display than a hardly-ever-updated Gravatar.

* Because why make a list with a “nice” number if it just means trying to fill a list

Over the past week, New Zealanders have been protesting against the introduction of a new law which was set to come into immediate effect on February 28th. Section 92A, an amendment to the copyright act, saw internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.

The “blackout” campaign saw Twitter and Facebook users turn their avatars to black, not just those in New Zealand, but Twitter heavyweights such as Stephen Fry, Leo Laporte, Howard Rheingold, Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin and Neil Gaiman.  Websites all ran ads about the blackout campaign.

In fact, #blackout was the top term on Twitter during the week.

The campaign wasn’t merely an online one – a protest was held outside parliament with plain black placards, with wide media coverage. A petition with more than 10,000 signatures was presented to politician Peter Dunne.

The blackout protest culminated today with “thousands” of sites — including our own — taking all their content offline and displaying the following message (click to enlarge):

Merely hours later, the politicians caved and delayed the law coming into effect, a possible scrapping of the law altogether if agreement can’t be met between major stakeholders and promising a review after six months.

Today I felt like democracy really meant something. People were listened to. We changed the course of history.

As br3nda on Twitter put it, “Power to the Tweeple”.

Aside from the immense joy of knowing that the government responded to our concerns, I will always remember back to a session at Kiwi Foo Camp just over a week ago. It was an electric defining moment where a small group of people led by Matthew Holloway of the Creative Freedom Foundation got together with a plan to stop the law coming into effect. In merely one hour, ideas and plans flowed for how to stage the protests. Time before the law came into effect was short but so much was accomplished in the week which was to follow. I’m so proud to have been in that room and to have seen and experienced what has been done in the last nine days. To see the story grab the world’s attention was inspiring.

This will be seen as a case study for the whole world on what can be done online through tools such as Twitter and Facebook and cooperation between people and websites which would normally not work together.

This may be the first time in the world that the use of Twitter delayed (or possibly stopped) a law coming into effect.

Thanks to Regan for compiling this list of links about the story, before today’s breakthrough news:

Text

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/6247
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40731948387
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50627039924
http://twitter.com/stephenfry
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/foes-copyright-act-call-photo-black-out-53600
http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/42806
http://idealog.co.nz/blog/david-macgregor/a-black-day-for-new-zealand
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nz_internet_blackout.php
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/new-zealand-goes-black.html
http://publicaddress.net/5693
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/17/new_zealand_copyright/
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/isps-new-copyright-law-puts-business-gun-scrap-it-39710
http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2009/02/strike-1-against-arpa/
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0902/S00209.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0902/S00303.htm
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3682/196/
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0902/S00342.htm
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/new-zealand-goes-all-black-against-three-strikes
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10557699&ref=rss
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-270800.html
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/5330826
http://www.infonews.co.nz/news.cfm?l=1&t=0&id=32562
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/kiwi-three-strikes-law-countered-with-internet-blackout.ars
http://www.greens.org.nz/node/20605
http://blog.greens.org.nz/2009/02/19/labour-needs-to-front-up-on-s92a/
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/library/comic/s92cartoon-bw.png
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/3DFA797D6D7326CACC2575630071617A
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2009/02/why_is_national_taking_the_heat_for_a_problem_they_did_not_cause.html
http://www.jackyan.com/blog/2009/02/copyright-act-amendments-sign-of.html
http://www.lessig.org/blog/2009/02/activism_down_under.html
http://digg.com/world_news/New_Zealand_Internet_blackout_protest
http://theg33kshow.posterous.com/untitled-24090
http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2008/12/21/s92a-interim-repeat-infringer-termination-policy/
http://www.opdiner.com/2009/02/won-you-cleanse-my-soul-put-my-feet-on.html

Video/Audio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpbadsgW4Qg
http://cdn4.libsyn.com/wammo/Wammo_and_The_G33kshow.com_18_2_09.mp3?nvb=20090221050751&nva=20090222051751&t=036411b3aa508895d36f8
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/aft/aft-20090218-1510-The_Virtual_World_with_Helen_and_Chelfyn_Baxter-048.mp3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY_ExvX6OPU
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/aft/aft-20090218-1510-The_Virtual_World_with_Helen_and_Chelfyn_Baxter-048.mp3
http://www.3news.co.nz/News/Blackout-protest-over-controversial-copyright-law-reaches-Parliament/tabid/311/articleID/91933/cat/185/Default.aspx
http://twit.cachefly.net/odtv/0219-nzblackout.mp4
http://95bfm.co.nz/default,190399.sm

If your link is missing, please add it in the comments section.

Goodbye Web 2.0?

The big-text-shiny-rounded-gradient “Web 2.0 designs” will start to fade in 2009 and seem a little dated. Here’s my predictions for blog design trends in 2009.

Back to the middle

Blogs have been sidelined a little with social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and communication tools like Twitter. Many bloggers spend more time on other sites than on their own blog but as their online identities are spread out further and further, bloggers will re-center their online identity around their blog where they have complete freedom over the site structure, design, features and content. Blogs will be used to pull in social networking data like never before. Blog themes will powerfully integrate these in a meaningful and useful way – and as a permanent record all bundled together in one place.

Tweet, tweet!

With Twitter starting to really hit the mainstream, Twitter will be much more tightly integrated with blogs. See my post on Mashable with 10 ways this will impact blog design in 2009 – including Tweetbacks, Tweet Comments and more.

It’s black, it’s white

Simple, classy, black and white blogs with lots of white space are the new trend. Who needs color and clutter getting in the way when you have lots of large gorgeous photos on your blog to steal the limelight?

Made by me

The handmade and crafted look took off in 2008 and will continue to be popular this year. Look for more blog designs with handwriting, collages, paint strokes, doodles, sketches, paperclips, stitches and material.

Organic, local, sustainable and green

Even blogs will be going green and not just in color. See textures such as wood, dirt, hessian, earthy browns rise even more in popularity. Notice more fresh fruit and vegetables, insects and flowers. Designs will feature more original, ethnic and local elements rather than trying to appear completely global and vague in origin.

Stretching out

Bloggers will continue to redesign for wider screens to enable displaying larger photos and large widescreen videos. Bloggers will crop their images to be widescreen format, rather than the standard photo sizes – appreciating the wide screen look more. New default templates that come with blogging tools will also finally be wider.

Is that you, really?

Wordpress, Expression Engine, Drupal and other blogging/community tools will be used in ever increasing creative ways – to the extent that a casual visitor will be surprised to learn what the site is being run by and impressed at the ease of updating such seemingly complex sites.