I haven’t done a site review on my blog for quite awhile, in part because often now I simply write a tumblr post to point the site out. However, I just read about HowISpentMyStimulus.com and decided to make an exception.

First off, I read about this site in the Columbus Dispatch. It was developed as a not-for-profit site for people to post pictures and stories about how they spent their $600 or $1200 economic stimulus check. The site is very low-tech; people fill out a form, upload an image or provide a link to youtube. The site maintainer manually reviews each submission (weeding out those that are deemed inappropriate) and posts them. The site looks and feels like a blog: there are posts, categories to filter by, “featured posts”, and ways to comment and share posts.

It’s simple, timely, personal and engaging. The economic stimulus check ties together many of us who live and work in the US. Here is a simple way for us to further connect with that community.

The maintainer isn’t looking to get a chunk of anyone’s check through paid submissions or advertisements, and the low-tech nature of the site (the FAQ tell anyone wishing to make changes just to email him) makes it feel authentic. This isn’t a slick site only for the best written stories: this is for every man to be able to tell his story.

Exactly the sort of site I love and hate at the same time:

http://www.dontclick.it/

Extremely innovative, it forces the user to change how they interact with the interface. There are some simple activities for the user to perform (in addition to navigation), and occasionally the user is asked if they ‘miss the click’. It’s interesting to see how engrained the activity of clicking is in our web experience. Do we need it? Maybe not…

And of course, on the flipside — this is a very rich, non-linear experience. How would a screen reader handle this interface? What about users who cannot navigate using a mouse at all, or have difficulty keeping their hands from shaking? Perhaps there is a reason why we are accustomed to forcible action-reactions: if I click, it’s because I intend to elicit a response. Users are starting to get used to hover effects on the web, and sometimes they are useful in surfacing unexpected information, but we need to ensure we do not disregard the benefits to the existing model..

I’ve decided to post some ’stream of consciousness’ posts on various sites/services I’ve come across. The posts may or may not be lucid and linear, but hopefully they will be thought- and comment-evoking…

Sputtr - http://www.sputtr.com

I’ve always been interested in ’search’, or perhaps I mean information retrieval/categorization. When I was a volunteer editor for dmoz, I ran copernic to try to find EVERY link related to a given subject. Occasionally I’d check out dogpile as a backup.

Once google came along, the model shifted. It was a matter of going one place and getting all relevant data. The pagerank algorithm helped bring back a single results set, so browsers (people, not user agents) did not need to sort through and remove duplicates, or look through ALL results for the most relevant/significant.

As time has gone on, however, and the content on the web has ballooned, there has been a trend towards custom search engines. To run a google search on, well, pretty well anything, returns a huge results set. The challenges involved with information management are no longer in finding results, but rather in sorting through them. Who doesn’t use bookmarks extensively anymore, be it within the browser, or via delicious or even digg? These latter social networking sites also help us find new information from a network or community, further aiding us in sorting out what others consider valuable or reliable information from the ‘less-so’.

Oh yes, back to sputtr. Users pick the ‘engine’ they want to search on, essentially performing source selection prior to searching. Is this an ‘extra step’ for the user to take prior to getting results back? Yes, but the way can choose their source and execute their search in a single click is elegant and non-obtrusive.

And yes, it has big fonts and it’s in beta. So it must be cutting-edge!