(photo by Irini Soulki of flickr)

Jeff Jarvis says that as Google makes search more personalized, search engine optimization will be less relevant.

"What does that mean to brands? The world gets confusing once more. But I think it means that true relevance becomes more important than SEO tricks"

James Robertson  says it has been irrelevant for awhile.

"Trying to "optimize" for Google (et. al.) is a game whose relevance is vanishing."

I agree, it has always been irrelevant if you were  actually providing useful content for your visitors.

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(photo by dcjohn of flickr)

Jakob Nielson writes about the issues facing designers who want to design Web user interfaces that are easy to use. He promotes user testing and defines 3 levels of a designer-user continuum. The first is where the user is the designer; the second, where the designer understands the product or domain; and the third, where the designer is unfamiliar with the domain. He then gives some examples of projects and problems that could occur.

There is one example that I did not quite understand. He mentions a Web site selling suits and says the designers were too close to the people who make the suits, instead of the people who wear suits. It seems to me, you could probably find a designer who could, at least, pretend he wanted to buy a suit while designing the user interface. Of course, you have to remember to do this.

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(photo by by Davb)

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(photo by acidcookie)

What to do when faced with a 40+ page RFP that has been clearly written with proprietary vendors in mind?  Have other open source vendors faced this? Usually, we are just too busy to play a very time consuming lottery ticket.  Is there education we can do for procurement people that will make it easier for them to find an open source solution that might be a significantly better deal?

I have found one excellent blog post on the web: http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-open-source-meets-procurement.html

I recently had to decline to bid on a project that was trying to confederate a large number of state schools that could quite likely save a significant amount of money by using open source.  Here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote declining to bid:

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