The bubble burst. The air spread?

Tiffany Shlain, who founded the Webby, has her own special take on what happened when the Internet bubble burst, writes Deepak Mankar.

Published on: Jun 22, 2006, 22:43:00 IST

PTI | By Anonymous

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Who doesn't want to succeed? Virtually nobody. If it happens in Hollywood, so much the better. That's why I respectfully draw your attention to Ben Stein's 'How to Succeed in Hollywood -- and Anywhere Else' finance.yahoo. He's the guy who went west in 1976 with the intention of returning home in six months or at most a year. As it happened, success hit him and kept him in Hollywood all these years. "But for many years, I worked in Hollywood as a writer, producer, and actor. I got to see what works in terms of success here and what flops.

Comparing that experience with what I've seen of journalism, finance, government, and sales, it's clear to me that what helps you make it in Hollywood is pretty much what helps you get ahead generally in any business," he avers. In a two=part article, he gives a few tips gleaned from his and producer Al Burton's '26 Steps to Succeed in Hollywood, or Any Other Business'. Their first tip is "Learn a Useful Skill" like script writing, applying make-up, lighting a stage or catering a crew's lunch. Tip No.2: "Make Yourself Invaluable" by doing whatever you're hired to do with such zeal and quality that your employer wants you around all the time. Tip No. 3: "To Serve Is to Rule". "The agent serves the client. The writer serves the producer. The hairdresser serves the star. The producer serves the studio -- and most important of all, the studio serves the audience. 'Everybody's got to serve somebody,' as Bob Dylan, the greatest poetic genius of our era, sang. If you serve well, you eventually become the boss." Other success secrets: "There's No Quitting Time." "Connections are everything." (As my friend, Deep Bisen says: "Networking works, boss.") "There's No such Thing as Being Too Likable." More tips are coming our way in the next instalment of Stein's column. Watch out for them.

Usability wins. Every time.

In his talk with Technology Guardian, world-renowned usability guru Jakob Nielsen posits "good usability" as the prime mover "to make interfaces reactive, to have as fast response times as possible". "Many of these Web 2.0 things" (as he calls them) are in his opinion "just a programming technique for achieving these goals. …now you can view the browser more like a programming system or a programming language almost, and … your browser [as] a support platform." About net advertising, he feels "some …is working and funnelling money back to the search engines. But …most advertisements work so poorly on the web, the advertisers are yelling more and more loudly and … getting more garish and being deceptive. …it damages credibility…" To him, people's use of the web seems "very search-dominated. You go to your favourite search engine, type in two words and click on the first few results. Users spend one or two minutes and then decide where to do their business." Moreover: "Search has changed from being something that's somewhat useful to being something that works surprisingly well. People do tend to only type in two words, and two words is a very minute and impoverished description of a human need. But search engines can - most of the time - pick four or five sites that you actually want. Because people have experienced that it works, this has become their number one behaviour." Also: "Good design is about problem-solving under constraints - design has to have a goal of achieving some purpose." Finally, he cites a study done at the Open University which "found that in elementary schools, for every £100 spent on books, students grades improved by 1.5% - and for every £100 spent on computers, grades improved by 0.7%. So books are twice as good as computers for this ... So it's not necessarily that I should study history by clicking on some web pages, but that we should teach about these electronic media forms and how to use them. The value of that education would be immense." media.guardian. The full list of his interviews is here: useit.com.