On May 3, I hit the Shut Down button on Flying Dutchgirl and joined Adobe Systems as a senior technical editor. My group is a kind of SWAT team for help and support content for Adobe software and Adobe.com. It’s interesting and fun to be part of the company that changed so much by putting digital tools into the hands of designers and artists. I’m extremely pleased to be working with some very smart and talented people.

My cubicle (it’s a really nice cubicle) is at 7th and Townsend in San Francisco, in the stunningly redone Baker & Hamilton building that Macromedia moved into before Adobe acquired it in 2005. Now on the National Registry of Historic Places, and built in 1904 for a steel and hardware company, it was the building that established the neighborhood as a manufacturing and warehouse district. Read more history in John Dowdell’s post about the building. It’s the second pre-1906 building where I’ve worked in San Francisco (the first was the Call Building at Third and Market).

In Adobe’s ground-floor atrium, a post milled from an ancient Douglas fir

Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning, music, arts, science, and technology; this little sculpture was a gift from a friend who went to India, and she sits on my desk (Saraswati, not my friend) watching over my work

Recently I edited Building Web Reputation Systems by F. Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass, to be published by O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press this March. Think of a star rating for your favorite consumer product — that’s a familiar example of a reputation system at work. But star ratings are only a small part of the story that a reputation system can tell.

Through artful construction of algorithms that process combinations of data types, it turns out that you can uncover surprising and powerful information about users’ motivations and intentions and the quality of user-contributed content on a social media site.

As an example, suppose that you’re managing an online community for parents, and you notice that in the last few days, you’ve had to delete a growing number of posts that are just advertisements or rants unrelated to the topic threads. The posts come from a number of different users, and you’ve banned some of them (the technical term for them is “trolls” ), but the problem persists.

By itself, the user ID — one type of data about people using your website — probably won’t tell you much about what’s going on. But suppose that in addition to the user IDs of the trolls, you also know the IP addresses of the computers where users are signing up for the site. When you look at the IP addresses alongside the user IDs, lo and behold, you discover… the trolls are all using the same computer! You shut down all access to the site from that computer. The problem goes away.

That’s a simple example. Through iterative design and testing, it’s possible to design complex, powerful reputation systems to handle many kinds of business problems. Depending on their purpose, these systems may have obvious, public user interfaces, or they may sort, prioritize, and act behind the scenes, unnoticed by the average user.

Author Randy Farmer, one of my colleagues at MSB Associates, coinvented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. Bryce Glass works on Internet community products and platforms with well-known brands. Both were on the team that developed Yahoo!’s reputation platform. Read chapters of the book at buildingreputationsystems.com.

The Cascadia Community College website won a bronze award at the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations District 7 conference in October. The NCMPR is an association for marketing and PR professionals at community and technical colleges.

Read more about my work on the Cascadia.edu website redesign.

I worked with Lisa Galley to decide what keywords to include in page titles and navigation on the redesigned Galley Eco Capital website. Here’s an example of those keywords at work in the outside world:

Lisa’s post of May 20, 2009 , on her blog Our Green Journey, links to a post on sustainability as investment at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG).

On the 1BOG post, look for the phrase “commitment to sustainability,” which we identified as a keyword phrase during the redesign of the Galley Eco Capital site. The 1BOG post links that keyword phrase back to a page on Galley Eco Capital site titled — what else — Our Commitment to Sustainability .

This keyword loop increases traffic to Galley Eco Capital’s site, improves search results, and enhances the site’s usability (by reinforcing phrases that are relevant to the site’s audience).

» More about website strategy for Galley Eco Capital

Community colleges have more audiences than 4-year colleges: not just college students but students who will go on to 4-year colleges and students who won’t; people who want PowerPoint classes and yoga classes; businesses that want employee training; ESL students; people who want a high school diploma; etc. Working on the Cascadia website, we found this beautiful site we all wanted to emulate, for Santa Clara University, but it just wouldn’t have worked for us. The homepage does a great job of blasting messages at one particular audience — see the main area with the message and gorgeous photo (on the live site, both change every few seconds):

Santa Clara University homepage

Live page at:
www.scu.edu

The homepage provides all the categories of information that this audience needs — see the discreet little columns of links below the photo.

But you couldn’t use a layout like this to communicate with college students at the same time you were trying to reach business owners and people who want to learn ballroom dancing.

For an example of a homepage that targets multiple audiences, see Homepage design for Cascadia.edu.