VigeWeekly: Connecting Ideas, Photos, and Friends

Thanks to everyone who came out for last night's Social Media Club DC event hosted here at the Lab.  Unfortunately, SMC conflicted with RefreshDC, so I wasn't able to venture into Arlington for that event this month. Maybe I'll see you at the TECH cocktail conference in Chicago on May 29, where Corey and I will tell the story of how Squidoo went from an idea to profitability.  It's a good one.

The big news at Viget this week was that Tom joined us as our new design director.  I haven't even worked with him a full week yet, but I can already tell why people told me he'd be a great fit.  Welcome, Tom!

VigetAdvance (Strategy)

I kicked off the week encouraging you to open-source internal discussions.  Why?  Because your ideas will either earn praise, inspire feedback, or be shot down early.  Any way you look at it, it's a better situation than had you kept your ideas a secret.   Emily then reviewed Andy Rutledge's take on what traits a client must possess in order to be considered "an ideal client," and then flips it to note that creative partners (i.e., vendors) need to exhibit the same traits for a business relationship to really work. She boils them down to two main characteristics -- clarity and trust -- and then notes that service providers need to add expertise to the mix to be effective.  It's a good reminder that the client-vendor relationship often feels like a tricky balance, but really can (and should) be quite simple if everyone is "explicit and accountable," as Emily puts it.

VigetInspire (Design)

Want to pull your Flickr feed with jQuery?  Keith pulls back the curtain and tells you step-by-step how we did it with Viget Inspire.  Later, Rob tells us how to organize our stylesheets using CSS Edit. pulling back another curtain to reveal how we handle stylesheets here at Viget.

VigetEngage (Marketing)

Josh continued his admitted crush on Google when he previewed Friend Connect, Google's social media platform that allows a web site to "get social features up and running without programming."  Stay tuned for a review once he's had a chance to play with it more.  He later gave some insight on decision paralysis, particularly the notion that offering too many choices can negatively impact marketing efforts and hurt conversion rates.

Assuming it stops raining for a day or two around here, we'll be trading blogging for softball on Sunday, when we play in our first game of the season.   Wish us luck!