We just helped the fine folks at Helsinki Design Lab launch a major new piece of their site: Dossiers.

From the HDL blog:

We needed the ease of use of a blog, where content is stored in a database and easily manipulated, with the flexibility of a sketchpad, where the presentation is freeform and maleable. And since this is a tool that we intend to use in the daily course of HDL's work, it needs to have a sense of history as well. It needed to be able to keep track of time by allowing versions which the user can then "scrub" back and forth between.

Posted 10 days ago by Ben Brown.

Today, we are releasing SendTab, a Safari extension that lets you send tabs from your laptop or phone to your living room computer.

We live in a connected household, where laptops and iPads outnumber residents. Our living room TV is connected to a Mac Mini, which we use for all of our media consumption - we stream a lot of video from all over the web. However, we do most of our browsing and discovery on our laptops and iPads, and right now, the process of sending something from a laptop to the big screen is really annoying.

That's why we built SendTab. Now, with a single tap, the current tab we're viewing will appear within seconds on the big screen. Any page can instantly be sent from Safari, Firefox, Chrome and any iOS device to the big screen.

Of course, not everyone has a computer connected to their TV. SendTab is handy for all sorts of other things:

• Quickly send a tab from one browser to another...
• Send tabs from your iPhone or iPad to your laptop...
• Send tabs to your girlfriend!

SendTab also has an easy to use API, so developers can send tabs from within their apps. Neat, eh?

Download SendTab

Many thanks to XOXCO's #1 intern, Damien Bell, for his hard work on SendTab, and to all of our talented designer friends who helped us design the SendTab button, and to our computer-tv having friends who helped us test. Thanks, dudes!

Posted 13 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include sendtab clickables launching

Preparations for SXSW seem to start earlier and earlier every year. No matter, for we love the festival that brings the world to our door step every March. The panels featured at SXSW are chosen in part by the votes of the audience. That's where you come in.

Ben has proposed a panel called Behind the Scenes of Online Communities. Vote for this panel here. His pitch:

Join real people who run real communities to learn what it's like to run a site with thousands or millions of members. Building a loyal community is a key component to the success of your website, whether you're running a content site, a web application, or something in-between. They may not have a voice on your site yet, but the community is out there, talking amongst themselves. We will discuss the practical realities of opening the doors of your website to member participation - how, when, and why. When "users" become "members," you are sharing the ownership and management responsibilities of the site with them. Your most loyal members will be with you on launch day, they'll help you through redesigns, and they'll mourn the passing of each feature that doesn't quite make it out of beta. We will discuss the risks and rewards your community will bring.

Katie's panel, which she will theoretically moderate, is called Tales of the Future Past: Web Pioneers Remember. Vote for this panel here. Her pitch:

This year, millions of people will start their first blog. Millions of people will write their first tweet, join their first social network, or post their first picture to the Web. Welcome to the future, guys, but some of us have been at this for nearly two decades! Join a panel of industry veterans who rode the waves of the first boom and lived to tell the tales of the '90s Internet. Featuring practical stories of life lessons learned online as well as fond (and not so fond) memories of bygone sites, startups and memes, this will be a great panel for those who lived through it, and those who wish to learn from the hilarious and heartbreaking mistakes of others.

Let the beautiful democracy of SXSW panel voting begin!

Posted 21 days ago by Katie Spence. Topics include sxsw

The very nice folks at Web Content 2010 have posted high quality video of my entire presentation! Strap yourself in and get ready to learn about online communities!

My slides from this talk, as well as some Twitter highlights, are here.

Posted 23 days ago by Ben Brown.

I presented this week at Web Content 2010 in Chicago. My presentation was about the practical issues you face when building online communities.

I have been building and working with web communities for a long time. For this talk, which was to an audience primarily consisting of content strategists and web editors, I wanted to distill as many of the lessons I've learned into a few solid pointers they could actually apply to their work.

Based on the things that people tweeted during my session, these are the big ideas worth repeating:

• If you have an audience for your content, you already have a community. They may not be posting on your site yet, but they're out there, talking to one another.
• "User generated content" is something a drug addicted robot poops! Think of the stuff that your audience creates as "member created art."
• Community isn't made up of software components - it's made up of people, and they really want to talk to one another.
• You should start simple, and build community software to enhance what your community is already doing.

You can pretend you were at my presentation in Chicago by stepping through my slides, embedded below - worth it if only for the amazing user loyalty graph Heather and Jon shared with me from Dooce.com.

Posted 85 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include presentations community speaking

The local press in Helsinki, Finland have taken notice of Bryan Boyer and the launch of Helsinki Design Lab.

From We Are Helsinki:

Designer-architect BRYAN BOYER, originally from California but now settled into Helsinki, is puzzled by the misuse of terminology. "Strategy often gets mixed up with planning. To be strategic, you have to also make difficult decisions and produce results," ponders the Harvard graduate, who has been working on Sitra's Helsinki Design Lab project since the fall of 2008.

Read the rest here.

Posted 106 days ago by Katie Spence. Topics include HelsinkiDesignLab clients press

It's been a busy time here at XOXCO. I am very happy to announce our second launch of the month, Helsinki Design Lab. It was our first time working with an organization on another continent, but HDL's Bryan Boyer and his nightowl tendencies made it easy for us.

HDL's mission, in part, is as follows:

We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working - we call it strategic design.

HDL is collecting case studies of strategic design projects to be featured on the site and at their conference later this year. Applications for inclusion to HDL are accepted through the site.

We wanted the website to do justice to the beauty of HDL's identity and collateral, so we partnered with Andy Pressman at Rumors Studio, who did an excellent job of creating the website's design.

We're especially proud of bringing to life the special features around the site:

• Subtle animation effects in the case study and around the site highlight portions of the content.
• Case studies "come to life" as they are created using the submission tool thanks to tons of fancy CSS and jQuery magic.
• Each time the page is loaded a randomized version of the logo appears!
• "Exquisite" PDFs are generated through a custom javascript-based pagination function.
• Behind the scenes, all of the editorial tools feature autosave!

Of course, PeoplePods is providing the community components necessary for running the intense multi-user creative and editorial process Bryan and his internationally distributed team use to craft the case studies they feature. Thanks to Bryan, Andy and their teams for their hard work on this!

Posted 129 days ago by Katie Spence. Topics include Launch

Today we helped launch MediaBugs.org, a website that aims to 'fix the news.' When Scott Rosenberg approached us for this project, his goal was to create a space where the average newspaper reader could submit a "bug" - or an error in reporting - that they'd spotted in their local paper. With the local news organizations participating, a conversation between the audience and the journalist responsible could then resolve the issue.

We built the site using our own PeoplePods software. It was a perfect fit for the type of interaction between readers and news organizations that Scott envisioned. Mignon Khargie designed the logo and branding, which was carried into the look and feel of the site with the help of Courtney Patubo.

For the launch, Scott and Mark Follman are focusing on Bay Area media, but eventually their plan is to expand nation-wide.

Posted 135 days ago by Katie Spence. Topics include Launch mediabugs

We'll be launching in just a few days, but if you'd like a preview of our latest project, check out the video below.

Posted 167 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include mediabugs

For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:

Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.

As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.

Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.

But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.

In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.

We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.

Posted 219 days ago by Ben Brown. Topics include hdl weeknote dooce mediabugs neighborgoods