The link above takes you to a page headed, with a little ambiguity, "Jon Udell | OSCOM 2003 | Introduction." In context, with Jon standing in front of his audience at Harvard last week, you'd know his slide wasn't an introduction to him or to OSCOM. The importance of titling things was just one of the points he made, and his slides are a record of the best of several excellent presentations I attended at the OSCOM 2003 Conference.
Should any of my Digital Culture or journalism students wander back into this summer weblog, I hope they notice similarities between Jon's "webpage titles" issue and my classroom rants about the same thing... along with the related topics of writing clear, accurate and interesting summaries, from document names and Web menus to headlines and lead paragraphs, or simply the "Subject" lines on personal e-mail. But Jon has a lot more to say, so follow that first link to his talk; you also might want to bookmark his own weblog.
Another OSCOM high point for me was Wendy Seltzer's intro to the Openlaw project, which I'd love to see extended to an "open legislation" project to help people find things in the annual orgy of content-making on Beacon Hill. (And if that link doesn't get clicked, I'll be surprised.) We can't blame Web designers for all of the navigation problems -- there's more history than clarity behind formal names and legislative procedures in a "Commonwealth" that calls its legislature the "General Court."
9:16:59 AM 
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