Free Rise

The new dead-tree edition of Wired describes how CNET bought and then killed parents community site UrbanBaby. How’d they do it? By redesigning. (Sorry, the article isn’t available online yet.)

Of all sites, community sites bear the greatest risk of redesign failure. When you change the flow of conversation, you change the site’s raison d’etre.

According to the article, after CNET redesigned UrbanBaby, users revolted, and two of them created a site that essentially cloned the earlier version. That site now gets 3x the traffic of UrbanBaby.

So this begs a question? Why hasn’t anybody developed a better Craigslist? It still looks like the kind of site you’d pop up on a Mosaic browser in ‘95. It’s success is partially due the power of its brand and user network. But mostly it’s because Craig has steadfastly avoided f***ing the site up.

It’s no great revelation that design-by-committee is a mixed blessing. Sometimes you get the iPod.

And sometimes, you get Olympic mascots.

From today’s WSJ:

Here’s Another Olympic Sport: Skewering the Mascots

BEIJING — If the Beijing Olympics’ five cuddly mascots go down in history as a dud, their creator wants no part of the blame.

After China’s Olympics organizers gave him the assignment, folk artist Han Meilin initially sketched out five children representing the traditional Chinese elements of fire, wood, water, gold and earth. Then the bureaucrats got involved. “There had to be a panda, even though you’d think the public would have had enough of them,” says the 72-year-old artist.

Games officials faxed one request after another to his studio for other national images, such as a kite, a sturgeon and ancient cave drawings. So Mr. Han gave them Carmen Miranda-style oversized hats to help hold all the symbolism. As part of the quest to find something for everyone in a country of 1.3 billion, he drew some 1,000 different models, including a dragon and an anthropomorphic rattle drum.

What happens next? Five mascots, a lot of merchandising, and deafening apathy. But it’s the Olympics, in China. Could their be a less likely event to represent individualistic design?