Intense Debate is a Boulder, CO based company that provides tools to facilitate conversations online.

The good folks at Campain Monitor have just updated their guide to developing and using CSS in emails.  A Guide to CSS Support in Email: 2007 Edition - Campaign Monitor BlogThis is a great guide, in light of MS' decision to get rid of IE as the email renedering engine.

I haven't been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen in the past (given the lack of data that seemed to accompany his suggestions).  However, this is a good article on the top ten usability changes to make to increase constituent loyalty.Here's the summary:"Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased
customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority
when updating your website."Link to article.

This week on Weekend Edition Saturday, I heard a solid interview with New Yorker staff writer, Malcolm Gladwell. As summarized by the NPR site:

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell tells Scott Simon the homeless problem could be solved -- with a net savings of public funds -- if assistance were provided to a small number of permanently homeless people.

Gladwell makes the case in this interview and a recent article that a very small number of the chronically homeless folks cost a disproportionate amount of public health resources. So we currently pay tons of money for Chronically-Homelesss-Joe with his alcohol addiction and mental illness who falls down three times a year drunk, gets complicated pneumonia and needs to go to the hospital never multiple times...never to pay his bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gladwell suggests that we could avoid having to pay for this recurring emergency room cost if we would just proactively invest in Chronically-Homelesss-Joe by paying for supportive housing and personal assistance to ensure he's got his meds straight, addiction in check, and a place to sleep. We're going to pay something as a result of Joe's circumstance - why not just pay the lesser of the two bills?

This one straddles the design and research category. I've been asked to suggest an on demand webanalytic tool for a couple of clients. In case you're not familiar with the on demand model, it's an ASP delivered service that folks can use to track page views, path's through the site, and a ton of marketing info. The technology works by the website administrators including a piece of JavaScript in the head of their HTML documents that shoots a beacon back to the ondemand provider. The website administrator then logs into the on demand provider's dashboard to configure and read reports related to their website.

This item on slashdot refers to a a new bit of research on online consumers. The articles suggests that:

Some have argued that the instant nature of shopping from home over the Internet leads to quick purchases while others have contended that easy price comparisons on the Web allow buyers to do more research first.

Well, no kidding. I contend that consumers use the internet primarily as a research tool and secondarily for making actual purchases. I've got no research to assert my claim, but that's what this type of research suggests, and, without any data on which of these "pensive" consumers made purchases online as well as off, this doesn't really refute it.