User>Driven

Well, I went and did it. I created a User-Driven T-shirt at Zazzle, one of a number of design-your-own-clothing sites. I designed a simple brown T with yellow lettering to match the color scheme of the site, ordered one for myself, and then offered the shirts up for sale on Zazzle. Anyone can order one and I will make a small royalty on it (10% of what you pay).

I haven't held the actual product in in my hands yet to tell you whether the yellow and brown look good together, but you can customize the color, style, size, etc on zazzle to your liking. You can even order a hoodie, henley or polo. Just be sure to change the text color to something darker if you choose a light-colored background.

I created a hoodie with the word "vintage" on it as well (in good old courier) in honor of how ancient I have become. Nothing fancy but it has a simplicity to it that appeals to me. Check that item out as well at the gallery of the merchandise I've created. I've added a link to the gallery on the right after the "about" paragraph.

Zazzle has a flash widget that shows the products in your gallery in rotation. I tried to put it up here but it's too wide and doesn't take kindly to being squashed or cropped. 

It took over a year of blogging, but I've finally gotten the attention of spambots. I removed about 3 dozen spam comments and references posted to the site over the last 24 hours.

I apologize to everyone who has been or will be kind enough to offer their comments on my posts or make references to them on their own sites, but the spammers have forced me to turn on moderation of comments and references for unregistered visitors.

This means if you are not registered and logged in, you won't see any comments or references you post right away. Assuming they are legitimate, they will appear when I have a chance to review and approve them. I get email notification when you post things, though, and I will try to turn them around quickly, usually the same day is my hope.

Registered users can post without my review and approval. Take a moment here to register and this doesn't have to concern you. You'll also get the benefit of email updates on (legitimate) posts to any page you subscribe to on the site.

I wish there were a better solution to spambots. Better yet, I wish the people who create them would just stop. The posts are so obviously absurd I have a hard time believing they pay for the effort involved. I imagine they must work to a degree, though, or no one would employ them. The lousy thing is the damage they do to free expression.

I regularly receive comments about User>Driven and suggestions of interesting things to post. People see things they like or don't like and, for whatever reason, think of this blog and send me a link. I feel bad when I don't get around to posting things quickly enough. So, rather than be a bottleneck, I've decided to experiment with being a facilitator.

I've expanded the Forums section of User>Driven to include 4 separate discussion forums. The first is for posting just these kinds of neat usable or frustratingly unusable things people tend to send me. It's called, simply enough, the Usability Forum. There are threads there now about turn signal, spacetime, and the iPhone. Please visit and post your thoughts to get the ball rolling.

The second new forum is for product managers. Many PMs I know are lone wolf sorts. I think it comes with a job where you have to be the spokesperson/expert on your product, where your department is usually small, and where neither engineers nor marketers think of you as really part of their group. So I am hoping to provide a forum for PMs to compare notes, give and get advice, and enjoy the company of other PMs. It's called the PM Exchange Forum. If you're a PM or have an informed opinion about such things, you can jump into discussions about compensation and product management vs. product marketing right now.

I've also created a forum for a pet interest of mine (and one that I write about often). The Productivity Forum is for discussion of the tools people need in today's business world to be productive and manage their day. If you have 30 seconds now, jump in and tell me what tool(s) you use now to manage your "do do" list.

The main forum has been retained as a forum for comments on User>Driven itself. Check in here to see what changes are happening on the site, to give feedback and to make suggestions. This is the place for making User>Driven user-driven.

Forums are not useful without participants and the hardest part is overcoming the initial inertia to get a critical mass of activity. So please take a moment to drop in and post in the new Forums section right now while you're here. Thanks. 

Today I'm happy to relate some traffic and ranking firsts for User>Driven. Thanks to you readers, User>Driven recently hit the following milestones...

> 1,000 hits in 24 hours on March 5th

> 100 RSS hits in 24 hours on March 5th

Quantcast site rank < 1 million out of 20 million+

User>Driven's Technorati Rank is still a lowly 1.7 million, but moving up slowly (started at 2.6 million)

I'm not interested in traffic for its own sake, but I hope this is an indication that I'm providing worthwhile commentary and a useful forum for discussion of product development issues. Thanks for reading.

Please let me know what you like or don't like about User>Driven and what you'd like to see here by leaving a comment below. 

I use a service called Squarespace to host User>Driven. It's reasonably priced and the interface is highly customizable. I can organize the blog, forums and other content however I like. They take care of the RSS feed and even provide basic traffic stats.

Squarespace recently added User>Driven to its "best of" example sites under Design, citing its use of "brown space" instead of white space in the layout.

Incidentally, one reader suggested the font might be too small on the site. Any feedback on that or other design or layout issues from others? 

Links:

http://www.squarespace.com

http://examples.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=975583&categoryId=86338