Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

“Thus, a major virtue of Personas is the establishment of empathy and understanding of the individuals who use the product. It is important that each Persona seems real, allowing the designer to ask, “how would Mary respond to this?” or Peter, or Bashinka?”  Full Post >>

These bugs aren’t necessarily fatal. The are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first.  Full Post >>

This is a screenshot from the Holland Sentinel’s website this morning:

I’m not sure which is worse—the fact that the Sentinel’s web folks have gone down the route of using the overly-intrusive and user-abusive floating ads known as “shoshkeles”, or the fact that Westshore Mall is spending money on web advertising rather than facility improvements that would keep people coming back to the place. 

While the mall was a popular place to go 10 years ago, recently it has lost major anchors such as Sears and Steketees while adding losers like Dunham Sports (sporting goods at twice the price).  The hot spot for retailing in Holland is now north of the mall, where big box retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Meijers are locating.  If it’s an enclosed mall you want, Crossroads in Grandville is 20 minutes up the road.

How bad is it?  Westshore is dark, outdated and just generally slimy feeling.  But here’s the real indicator—there hasn’t been a coffee shop there for at least 4-5 years. 

A mall with no coffee?  Westshore Mall is doomed.

But we are not a blog: we embrace multiple points of view from multiple authors, we are edited, and topical. All we share with blogs, other than software, is chronological organization. And that has led us to the desire to really stand tall with other magazines who put the same editorial love into their bodies of content as we do. And by re-designing we wanted to strongly message ; “we are a magazine”.  Full Post >>

Is it just me?  I’m noticing some eBay / Microsoft “closeness” that makes me wonder if MS is going to announce soon that it’s purchased eBay.

Some datapoints:

Microsoft offers employees eBay stock instead of own:
http://www.denounce.com/archives/000020.html
(This one is false - thanks to Frank for pointing that out.)

Joint development efforts:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18201992

Marketing and Communication Alliance:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jul03/07-10MSNeBay2003PR.asp

Office/eBay Integration:
http://doc.advisor.com/doc/13767

A UK “partnership” :
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/community/aboutebay/news/ebay_and_msn.html

Note the current eBay URL structure:
http://cgi.msn.ebay.com/ebaymotors

And note the MSN Banners on eBay auctions (looking for all the world like the first step in global navigation changes):

I might be all wet, but sure looks like the two are inching towards a merger.  Well, OK, not a “merger” pe se, based on this quote from the article linked to above:

Whether or not Microsoft will acquire eBay, currently worth over $36 billion, is not known. Microsoft could buy eBay for cash and still have over $10 billion in reserves, Wall Street analysts pointed out.