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The Macromedia DevNet opened
up eight issues ago, and so far there have been dozens
of articles linked here. When Macromedia staffers
examined page stats recently, the front pages were
getting a steady increase in hits, but the inner articles
apparently weren't viewed as often as expected. I'd
like to check that we're getting the material you
want, and that you can actually find the material
you need. If you could take a minute, please drop
us a line in our feedback
thread .
When this Center started there were a couple of guiding observations:
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Nobody knows it all ... there are too many specialized
areas of knowledge in this field to expect one
person to have it all wired. You're always in
the position of having to learn something.
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People inside Macromedia don't know it all either.
People inside the shop have certain specialized
knowledge, particularly about how the applications
are supposed to work, but the knowledge for applying
these applications is dispersed in the world.
People like to share knowledge. Establishing a reputation as an
expert, and enmeshing yourself in the community, return practical advantages
in referrals and satisfaction. Anything that Macromedia could do to reinforce
that trend would benefit everyone.
There are great sites out there, with information that people inside
Macromedia could not realistically discover and publish on their own.
Reinforcing the sustainability of independent sites would also benefit
everyone.
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In addition to Macromedia's possession of certain
internal knowledge of the applications, the other
unique attribute it possesses is that every customer,
by definition, knows of Macromedia. It is a central
locus ... everyone in the community passes through
here. We have a responsibility to connect knowledge
experts.
There's tons of knowledge out there, but the main difficulty people
have in using it is in navigating it, and evaluating it. For navigation, we
have rough topic areas set up, but it doesn't feel exhaustive or scalable to
me yet. I think it's still very hard to discover the range of materials
existing on the web. For evaluation, many people definitely want materials
"blessed" by Macromedia. It can get expensive to read or try
everything available on a subject, so pointers to "the best" are
useful. (Look at the Macromedia Exchange, where the official Macromedia
materials are consistently in the top downloads, for a vivid example of the
desire for such branding.)
So, what do we have so far?
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There have been eight issues of the Designer
& Developer Center. Although all the articles
are still available on the site, sometimes I want
to use visual memory to find something I looked
at before, and the navigation path does change
once an article enters the archives. I haven't
heard comment on the lists from people on this,
and so I'd appreciate hearing any tales of re-finding
articles here, thanks.
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The five Application Developer Centers—for
Flash, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Macromedia MX Studio, and Java—are portals looking into this content pool
from different applications. I think this may
be the most practical way to navigate the resources
published in DevNet, but I'd be interested
in hearing how these portals work for you.
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We don't yet have a search engine specifically
for this content, like there is for each of the
Macromedia Support Centers. If you're searching
with Google you can append the qualifiers "inurl:macromedia
inurl:desdev" to a search to restrict results
to this Center, or if you're using the site's
own Atomz search then add the quoted term "Designer
& Developer" to return only articles from
this part of the site. I'd be interested in hearing
more comment on how searching here works for you,
thanks.
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We don't yet have a way to navigate and evaluate
resources which may not be on the Macromedia site
... so far the emphasis is mostly on writing and
commissioning articles to bulk up DevNet, instead of surveying the
field and finding where the existing resources
actually are.
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There are "Topic" listings, but these
are high-level rather than granular, and link
into different types of pages—the "Java"
topic links to the Java Application Development
Center, the "Database" and "3D"
topics link into article listings from DevNet and a few TechNotes, the
"Security" and "Accessibility"
topics link into existing sections of the Macromedia
site. The next version of the Macromedia site
will have improved taxonomy services built into
it, so it may be possible to efficiently increase
the strength of such categories in the near future.
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You can easily find the newest listings through
the resource feed. This was put together by Mike Chambers
and you can see varied uses at DW FAQ, Lingo Park, Timber Fish and
more. So far this is a very linear mechanism ...
the feed only contains the current issue's additions,
with a simple categorization mechanism so individual
displays can strip away subjects they're not interested
in. It's also updated only with each issue, instead
of continuously through the workday. I'm hoping
we can eventually implement a model where various
trusted sites can submit their entire set of categorized
resources for aggregation on the Macromedia site,
where it can then be filtered as desired by individual
Macromedia customers.
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The Tips application
is a way to bring little snippets of valued information
to you on a continual basis, but it's just starting
up and doesn't have a wide range of content yet.
This is also a new type of delivery format, so
it's still a matter of exploration for whether
this becomes part of everyone's daily habits.
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The Answers
Panel in the Macromedia MX applications is
another new type of ability, where small amount
of text content can be pushed directly to the
application. The ability is built into the latest
apps, but it hasn't really been deployed yet.
I've seen lots of excitement over the potential
for this type of delivery.
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The blogs
offer a different way of looking at current information.
By default this only brings you a very subjective
impression of what's important *now*, but if you'll
look at Mike Chambers' blog you'll see that
there are some automatic categorization methods available, so you can pull
up all "code examples" or some other
particular types of content. In the Dreamweaver
community Waldo Smeets has started up his own blog ... the Flash community
already has independent blogs available from CHris, Guy, Jarle, David, Branden, Eric, Sam, the ActionScript group, and
many other fine folks ... by the time this column
hits the web I expect there will be a dozen or
two additional new blogs online. Things get interesting
when you apply categorization and aggregation
to your own list of preferred editors ... it would
be great to say "Here are 20 people whose judgment
I trust, so tell me immediately when any of them
has something to say about "ColdFusion and charting"
or "media but not StarWars" or whatever.
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To my mind, the Team
Macromedia members have a role to play here
that we haven't really explored yet. These are
the people who know both the subject area (pure
and applied), and who know the audience, who know
what people really want. Some have already created
their own FAQs, some have created their own Wikis, and of course the Macromedia Forums would not exist
without their expertise and contributions. But
are there additional structures that Macromedia
could set up that would let them shine further,
help more people? That's another area that still
feels like it's in the early stages.
So, talk to us a little bit here. Are you seeing the types of things from
us you want? What are your viewing habits ... when you
come to DevNet, which pages do you look
at, where do you go, when do you bail out and why?
What types of navigation methods do you use, which
would you prefer? Our success here at the shop is based on making
it easier for you to succeed ... to connect
you with the materials you want, when you want them,
efficiently and easily. Could you give us some guidance
in this week's discussion
thread on this? Thanks!
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