My very good friend Levi’s family is working through some heavy family medical stuff around the birth of his and Tammy’s first child - beautiful, lovable little Quinn. I’m testing services that we can use to help them to raise funds on the web.

I am testing two services: ChipIn and fundable. Both payout and pay in through PayPal, though fundable also can cut a check (or accept checks for a $10 fee).

fundable

The Tammy, Levi & Quinn Fund On fundable. They charge a 7% fee on collections (i.e. $210 for a $3000 amt.)

Chipin

They’ve got a widget! I like widgets. ChipIn does not charge any fees to organizers and contributors of events. For these two reasons, I am partial to chipin.

So I’m an information designer and I’ve read and considered quite a few theories about ‘information foraging’ and ‘usability’. For example. Jared Spool - a great man and thinker - has built a very profitable consulting practice around his theory of Designing for the Scent of Information. And guess what, hello! Computer information design is a big business! We’re talking hundreds of thousands here.

I propose an alternate paradigm : web pages are like faces, and links are blemishes on that face. This is why aesthetes go on and on about “page white space” - pure beauty.

However, a page that has no blemishes invites gazing admiration but not interaction. So if you want users to touch your page (with their creepy white-gloved hand - is that really Mickey Mouse’s chopped of right hand? Morbid!) you need to give them something to pick at.

And what’s more visceral than a pimple? The more red and angry you make a link look, the more likely that someone will want to go and pop that pimple. This is why marketing folks go on on on about removing whitespace. More page interaction.

picking = clicking

No blemishes, no clicks! Make sure to put a whitehead or some other sign that the link is ripe for picking if you really want users to go nuts on your link zits.

Great problem to have - too many comments.

Digg - Digg: Your Feedback on the New Comments System

With Yahoo’s new social networking app, I find fascinating the way you can vandalize every one else’s pages. It inverts the idea of a profile page ‘by me’ to ‘by others’. It’s disorienting at first - it feels like the development team accidentally gave everyone administrator privileges to edit everything.

After playing with it for a few days, it’s becoming clearer to me that this app is better suited to those web socialites who are at the “enough about me, let’s pimp your profile now” stage of evolution, or who were never really into tooting their own online horn. It holds great promise for humor and more sincere online giving and exchanging of social encouragement.

But I could see one or two bad experiences with others messing around with my identity and I might abandon it.

If you aren’t part of the beta crowd yet, leave me a note and I’ll invite you.