I am now blogging over at th1nk so if you wish to follow what I’ve been doing, please go there. Thanks!

It is always interesting when you take an outsiders perspective. In terms of traditional American retail businesses, this means stepping back from the rat race of cost of goods sold and market share and taking a look at the current way in which business are run.

The view of what an American business had to be to succeed has changed in the last century. Such an image used to consist of strong work ethic, morals in business, and the will power to succeed. It was the American dream to start such an American company, in this land of opportunity.

Times has affected this idea. Now, the image of an American business is one that is based and operating in America, but whose actual production occurs in Asia. This is the norm. Budding new entrepreneurs dream of establishing such enterprises of volume and cheap labor so they they may reach the pinnacle of capitalism.

But the time has come where a counter-culture to this business structure is beginning. American business has come back to its root in the form of revolution.

A highly publicized and praised company, American Apparel has set a precedent of morals and quality in wholesale clothing. The company operates out of one factory in Los Angeles, but is able to produce a staggering quantity of clothing at competitive prices. All workers have full benefits, and the average pay is twice that of the national minimum wage. But this is no charity operation. The company netted $211 million in revenue in 2005 with a healthy profit of blank and is growing rapidly. It is good solid business practices and an excellent product that allows this type of success.

This is a far cry from the world of extreme cost cutting found in many of the most popular apparel companies of today.

37Signals had a great set of diagrams for user experience and development in general. Check out the post.

There is a PDF copy of the first one here.

*I’m now blogging over at th1nk dot com along with my associates. I’ll continue posting the same things over here for awhile, but if you like what is here, you’ll love what’s over there.*

Max Kiesler of IdeaCodes has put together several invaluable resources:

mHub – “mHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), blogging, Ajax, Ruby, Rails and open source developments.”

DesignDemo – “DesignDemo is a constantly updated blog and resource of next generation web interface and interaction design. Unlike previous design review sites, DesignDemo will feature online demo movies of working interaction design, UI elements, and trends and best practices in web 2.0 user experience.”

Common mistakes made when developing and using AJAX in your UI.

http://swik.net/Ajax/Ajax+Mistakes

Website analytic tools like Google Analytics and Mint help webmasters track how many people are visiting their sites and from where.

But these really don’t help analyze usability. Luckily for us, there is a new entrant into this usability analytics playing field:

CrazyEgg

Basically, you set up a tracking session in your control panel at CrazyEgg, and it gives a short bit of javascript to insert into your site. Once you do, it tracks every click on every link on your page automatically. It outputs its findings in two ways. One is the overlay, which simple shows you where and how many times people have clicked. The other is the heatmap, which is simple one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Basically, it does the same as the overlay but shows clicks as a heatmap, making highly clicked areas more intense and leaving unclicked areas black. Google Analytics tries to do some of this, but CrazyEgg’s heatmap is much more accurate in that it tracks the exact location of the clicks over images and text links and such.

I was lucky enough to have gotten into the beta of CrazyEgg and set it on another site just to mess around. But you can see examples of what CrazyEgg does by viewing these screenshots they provide of the overlay and heatmap.

CrazyEgg is brilliant. It checks input boxes, radio buttons, everything a person might click on and use. It’s perfect for mapping how people use your site. I highly suggest you apply for the beta.

I hate to drop another video on you guys, but this clip of Digg’s soon-to-be comment system is excellent.

It includes threaded discussion, time based editing, the ability to digg/bury comments, and highlighted comments by your “friends.” This is good stuff, and the best commenting/threaded discussion I have seen. It really is usable. Digg is on a roll with respect to usability, and no doubt will have continued success if they keep this up.

Check out the video here. (Apparently some people are having problems with FireFox crashing trying to play this Quicktime mov. Right click and “Save link as…” and then open the video in Quicktime. Worked for me.)

Yes, yes, I admit it! But it isn’t by my own choice. This WordPress theme “Simpla 1.0″ has no link to the feed for the blog. Thus, only those with browsers which auto-detect feeds (FireFox for example) can subscribe. That’s annoying, at best.

And unfortunately, Simpla is not one of the themes that the WordPress.com team has implemented Sidebar Widgets into, so I can’t ADD a link to the RSS feed directly. I could add it too my “Interests” section, but it would be lost in the clutter.

So I did the best thing I could and made a page for the feed, which you can see over there somewhere near the top. —————–>

I’ve used FeedBurner for other things so I figured this would be as good a time as any to start using it for this blog.

For those of you too lazy to click the the link I just mentioned, here you go:

So here is my FeedBurner managed feed, enjoy:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PeterOliver

I suppose I could make a stretch and somehow tie this video in with usability and such, but why bother? It speaks for itself, so just enjoy.

Edgeio launched today. The reason this is big news is that one of the founders is Michael Arrington, the guy behind TechCrunch. So of course, TechCrunch has a very in depth post up about what exactly Edgeio is, and I suggest you read it.

Edgeio is very usable. The design is excellent (on my browser and on my machine at least. Let me know if you guys have problems) and everything is explained clearly without being confusing. Right now they are focused on blog listings so some of the language is fairly technical right off the bat, but they say it will expand to include other types of product/job listings quickly. I’m not sure I buy it. I’m not sure I buy Edgeio at all. I’m not sure it is useful. I think they can do something very big, but I do have doubts. My number one concern is spam. They are going to get slammed. Suddenly every splog using affiliate programs or contextual advertising will include the word “listing” and flood Edgeio. They are going to need some really smart people working on that quickly.

Let’s see how they do.