Able Parris, the new minister of office culture here at Newfangled NC, has inaugurated a new tradition that is sure to spread like wildfire among mid sized marketing services firms across North America. This is the kind of thing that brings Robert Scoble to tears, makes Jeff Bezos jump out of his seat and proclaim that the world will never be the same... this, my friends, is BLING Day.

A few weeks ago Eric and I attended the ReCourses/Win Without Pitching New Business Summit in Nashville. David Baker's events are great for us; the attendees are often times principals of mid-sized agencies and, since our shop is structured a lot like a mid-sized agency, his advice is almost always directly applicable.

During one of the sessions, David was talking about specialization, and how you need to be an expert in a very unique niche. For example, being a "marketing" expert is not enough, and it is sort of a fallacy. Being an expert at marketing equestrian products to mid sized farms in North America, now THAT is a specialization. David asked an open question to the audience, "What are some examples of specific knowledge that you have as a result of being an expert in your field"? I'm not particularly afraid to speak up in a crowd of people, so I raised my hand.

Newfangled specializes in working with agencies on their and their client's websites. I cited the example that we have learned over the years that when agencies don't let us have direct access to their clients, the communication breaks down and the project doesn't go well. This was the third response to David's question. After my somewhat appropriate, but not spot on response, he looked a little flustered. Eric then chimed in and said something like "Newfangled has learned that without proper prototyping, communication about a web development project is flawed".

UGH! Humiliation! Of course, It's the PROTOTYPING, stupid! I knew that. I could have said that, but no, my moment in the sun was squandered on explaining some low level detail that didn't really engage anyone, and Eric triumphed by stating our old party line. But man, it is a really good line. It is so tightly integrated into what we do, it is so central to our universe, that I forget that most web projects managed by other firms never even see an interactive, web-based prototype. I spend hours ever day telling our "clients to be" (to borrow a phrase from Blair Enns) about how prototyping is the bedrock of Newfangled, and it really is. Sure, we have a great CMS, we are hyper devoted to great and conscientious customer service, we have a lot of smart people that build and design excellent websites every day, but the prototyping is our real differentiator. It is at that stage, which for us is the very first stage, that we truly shine as brightly as we can as web developers.

The main reason for this is freedom. Prototyping gives us and our clients the freedom to suggest anything, and try everything. Because the prototype tool is based on our CMS, it has no visual design elements (hence the Grayscreen) and we are just basically mocking up functionality without actually programming it out, we can have changes made to the prototype within hours of a brainstorming session. That kind of quick turnaround fosters a lot of brainstorming - and we love it. Imagine that, entering a web project with every possible option available to you. It should sound wonderful and very scary, which brings me to my second wonderful attribute of prototyping - consultation.

Again, prototyping is the very first stage of the project, and it is also the stage that has the most Newfangled eyes on it. On average, seven different people here, including most all senior staff, take part in the prototyping process. I'm not much for numbers like this, but that is the equivalent of over 60 years of 7 different and unique perspectives on web development! The Grayscreen Prototyping stage is our opportunity to take advantage of our collective experience and use it (via internal debates, sometimes lots of them) to basically take the most educated guess possible as to what your site should be doing.

Once the prototype is done what we have is analogous to the blueprint of a house - it is a very detailed, mutually agreed upon set of plans. This seemingly needless and time consuming phase that many other developers plain skip actually ends up accelerating the overall time line. That is because the design, programming and copywriting can all take place simultaneously after the prototype is done, because everyone is playing from the same rulebook.

Not taking our own best advice, we strayed from prototyping a few years back on some projects that were so simple, we thought they didn't need it... that will NEVER happen again. Prototyping is here to stay, and I believe it is the most essential part of Newfangled. 

On the subject of defining things, commoncraft has done a great job at describing the who, what, where, and why of blogging. They've also done the same for Google Docs.

As a company whose foundational philosophy is to make complex things simple, Newfangled salutes commoncraft for absolutely nailing it! 

How did I hear about commoncraft you ask? Naturally, I found it through my Google Reader feed for Smashing Magazine. 

What, you don't know what Furl Digg Stumble del.icio.us Diigo Permalink Technorati Twitter Stumangati and Ficklewink are?!?!?!?!

Yeah, me neither - here are some definitions to help us... 

Here we have a few brief, simple and generalized definitions of some populare web2.0 tools. Each of these tools probably do about 1,000 more things than I mention here, but my interest is to give you the gist of it. If there is anything that I've gotten plain wrong, comment and tell me about it!

Permalink: This is a URL that sticks with blog entries even after they move into the archives from the blog's home page.

Digg: Digg is basically a popularity index. Users can submit online content which is then ranked by the Digg community. The most popular content bubbles to the top of the list.

Diigo: Diigo is a social annotation tool. Users can share comments with each other about web pages by tagging them with the online equivalent of a sticky note.

Furl: Furl is a lot like del.icio.us, except not nearly as used. So, I'm going to stick with del.icio.us.

del.icio.us: is the dominant social bookmarking site. The main value of it is that people can see what you've bookmarked and tagged. As most of the best of these tools, it is all about sharing.

Technorati: Technorati is a blog indexing tool. They are continually scouring the "live web", organizing blogs and ranking them by their popularity. You can also use it to keep track of blogs, like you would do with Google Reader.

Stumble Upon: is a site that allows you to post your favorite web pages, blogs, videos and photos. You can also create a profile and gather fans, but the point of it is to organize the parts of the web you like most.  

reddit: well, they say it best: "reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!"

Google Reader, to me, makes web2.0 possible for me. When hearing about people that kept up with many tens of blogs that each had tens of posts a day, I always wondered - how do they find this stuff? There are other questions that pop up after that one is answered (of which you'll see a few below), but for me, finding it was the first mystery.

I started with seeing what my peers were doing. Google Reader let's you not only easily peruse the blogs you want to keep up with, it lets you see what blogs your friends are reading and which ones they have specifically designated as share-worthy. Starting with Chris and Eric's blogs, I quickly spidered off and found others that I am interested in. Here is an excerpt from a Google chat between Chris and me last night: