brightly colored food

I ran across the latest story at Fray, and to my suprise it was about Michael Hedges, the greatest guitarist ever (I’ll save that digression for another time). He’s one of those musicians I kept like a secret, like Cassandra Wilson or early Keb Mo or even MeShelle Ndgeocello before each got big or boring, so I was confused as to why there was a story about him.

The story itself is pretty good — it’s about Hedges having a brief dalliance with the author of the story, an interesting way to picture your idol. There were some great posts to the question that ended the story: “who do you remember?”. There was a post from someone at artifakts, so I checked it out. The tagline at artifakts is “found things. lost pieces. glimpses into other lives.” Here’s how they describe their site:

each day, you will be shown an artifakt upon the front page. it is yours for the day. every visit to the front page on a given day will display this single artifakt. others visiting the page will likely be shown a different artifakt. on rare occasions, when a particularly good and/or timely artifakt has been submitted to the site, every visitor on a given day will be shown this single new artifakt.

if you would like to view more than one artifakt a day, you may dig deeper. you will be allowed to view a certain number of additional artifakts, after which point you will be asked to submit an artifakt of your own for the priviledge of continuing to dig.

What makes this site compelling and unlike any other site that could list random found objects (admittedly already a compelling idea) are the rules that are imposed upon visitors: you’re each being shown different artifacts, and if you want to see more, you must contribute. It makes them want to contribute by provoking their curiosity — a strong but subtle motivator, and the hallmark of many great designs. What are the others seeing? What else is there? What can I contribute in order to see more? Artifakts provokes contribution and involvement in an empowering and creative way, and for that I commend them.

How many websites today can provoke that kind of curiosity or compel you to do something?

I’ve been doing lots of evaluations of webapps as of late. So much wrong, so far to go.

I’m going to BayCHI tonight. You should go too.

And yeah, I’ve been a bit delinquent around here. I had a birthday (#24) and a great suprise party attended by Brad and Elan, among others. I also went to Mexico with my coworkers — whee. I’m sticking with the minimalist approach around here until I can lock in the style of the weblog itself, and then build out from there. I’ll be better about posting…