Not everyone consumes information the same way. Some people like to surf web pages, some people still read these foldable devices made from trees called “newspapers,” some people have a chatty Aunt that seems to be in on everyone’s business, etc. For those on the more online side of information, we’ve got a few new ways to keep up with CD updates and news.
There’s always this site, which if you’re reading this, you’ve managed to find it at least once.
The Need for Feeds
We also have the Collective Detective RSS feed. Feel free to plug this link into your favorite feed reader (like Google Reader); you’ll know every time we make an update.
Follow Us on Twitter
Gearing up to share more news about Collectivus, we recently added Collectivus on Twitter. Twitter is a highly-addictive site for telling everyone what nonsensical thing you’re currently doing. It’ll be more interactive in the future; right now it too will let everyone know when there’s an update to this blog.
FriendFeed
We’ve also added both Collectivus and Collective Detective to FriendFeed, a great new social aggregation site. These too will alert you to updates on this blog and share information in other ways in the future.
Portable Comments
Lastly, we use a commenting system from a great start-up called Disqus. Disqus allows you to use a single login to comment across blog and track discussion updates across the ‘Net.
Information Sharing Made-to-Order
We’ll continue to add additional resources to keep tabs on all CD activity, even though things are pretty quiet now. We want you to be able to find, friend and follow us your way. In the future, when someone asks about “Collective Detective,” you’ll be able to say: “I’ve been following them for years!”
Voting begins today for the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival Panels in Austin, Texas. We are fortunate enough to be involved with total of three sessions which have been accepted for the Panel Picker. Voting goes through Friday, August 29th; we need your help!
If you’re not a SXSW alum, please fill out a quick sign-up over at the SXSW Panel Picker. You don’t have to be planning to attend SXSW (although you totally should) to sign-up and vote. It only takes a minute!
Please vote for our panels and any other topics you find interesting. There are a lot of great session ideas worth checking out. If you’ll be in Austin next March, we’d love to meet-up with you!
Here are the panels we’re involved with:
Thank you for the support!
So in this era of new domain extensions and mobile Internet surfing, a few of the things one looks at when launching a web property is the the domain and the URL people will see and use.
In “web 1.0,” it used to be that it was important to prefix the website with “www.” because otherwise people would be confused. (Mind you I’m articulating this from a layman’s point-of-view, the system admin-side of me knows exactly the reasons for doing these things.)
“Web 2.0,” brought with it a trend of dropping vowels out of names (flickr) and leveraging creative uses of TLDs to overcome the lack of decent, easy-to-remember dot com names.
I’d been toying with formally using “http://collectiv.us” for the official domain name. It was shorter and “in.” That was essentially the reasoning. With yesterday’s relaunch of Delicious (formally del.icio.us), the Yahoo-owned bookmarking service, I’ve realized that their logic is sound and mine was bad. When possible: Stick to the basics when it comes to your domain names!
From the Delicious Blog:
So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.
Another good reason to keep it simple is that most browsers will attempt to tack on a “http://” and “.com” when you just type a word into the location bar like “delicious” or I dunno… maybe “collectivus” and hit enter. It’s the browser’s helpful way of saying: “Is this what you meant?” Making it easy for visitors to find your site is pretty important stuff. Why complicate it even a little if you don’t have to?
So when we go live, the official URL for Collectivus will be http://collectivus.com. We’re pretty sure it’s safe to leave the “www.” off these days; we’ll make sure all of the other variations still work though.
I created the original Collectivus logo in 2003. The cube in the logo was designed around the concept that individual connections could combine to make something bigger and greater.
There were two designs used on the site: one of just the block of cubes with a small cube off to the left-side, the other a circle of cubes surrounding the larger block. The latter was also used in a project called “Collective Effect,” which applied the power of collaboration to raise money and awareness for charity and a satellite effort of CollectiveDetective.org
The font for the Collectivus logo is “Murray Hill Bold BT.” I hacked together some of the letter alignment; the “v” especially was raised much more than the other letters. I’m not sure what I was thinking regarding the colors.
I knew I still wanted to use all these elements for our new web application. With a few more years of experience screwing around with graphics under my belt, I took a crack at revising the logo for 2008. Being a lean start-up, there’s still a lot of DIY; I don’t claim to be any great designer. There were a few issues I wanted to address:
- Alignment of the letters
- Moving the single cube to also represent the “dot” in Collectiv.us
- In the old version, the individual cube didn’t have anywhere to “fit in.” So I made a slot in the block of cubes.
The style guide is still not locked for Collectivus, so for now I’ve just applied the same color palette used here on Collective Detective.
Here’s the updated logo:
So that’s the short story of the Collectivus logo. I’m happy to hear your feedback or suggestions.
My development experience has been that collaboration, iteration, and communication lead to better products. To that, we’re going to chronicle a lot of the happenings and progress of Collectivus, with some flashbacks thrown in for color.
Quick back story: the Collectivus name was first used as a meta-blog talking about many “hive mind” related topics. I ran from 2003 to early 2005 (I think). It was also an effort to diversify the interests of the site beyond the online mysteries and applying collective brainpower to other subjects.
