CogBlog

While I'm on the topic of Meyer & Liechty (from last time) I wanted to share this neat little tool they've created called the M&L CultureMap. It maps Geert Hofstede's (you know him right? I mean who doesn't these days. I especially liked the second track from his last album.) cultural dimensions on a cool little flash map. It is very interesting to compare the people of different countries with respect to things like individualism, and uncertainty avoidance.

I noticed how much differently the US and France are with respect to uncertainty avoidance, they being much more averse to uncertainty. That really seems to correlate with our respective country's approach to things like the Iraq conflict.

Here is the link to the CultureMap on M&L
http://www.crossculturaldesign.com/portfolio/culturemap.shtml

Here is a good explanation of the Hofstede dimensions on WikiPedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede

I was speaking yesterday to Christopher Liechty about cross-cultural design. Christopher is an expert in this field. His company Meyer & Liechty helps businesses translate their brand, products, services, and communications to other cultures. We were chatting about a COGBOX client that offers multiple language versions of their website, and occasions where mis-understandings may arise by using literal language translations without consideration of the broader cultural perceptions and values.

Christopher had a great example of just this kind of thing. He speaks fluent Mandarin, and pointed me to the site of a Chinese advertising agency that may need to re-think their positioning for the English-speaking markets.

I'll let you enjoy it for yourself, but apparently the toilet is held in very high esteem in China.
http://www.meikao.com/english/index-e.asp

(and BTW this is a very well-respected agency in China)

A couple weeks ago we launched a new site for Art Works for Kids:

http://www.artworksforkids.org

Besides looking great, an interesting thing about this site is that it is 100% CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), not tables. In short, this means that the actual html documents that make up each page of this site are much smaller (faster download) and can be easily configured to look completely different depending upon you're audience's platform. For instance, we could easily apply an alternative stylesheet to this site that would make it suitable for viewing with a mobile device like your phone.

Another nice benefit of this type of development is that the pages of your site are essentially well-formed XML documents, that are standards compliant and perfect for natural search. Because the code is not cluttered with a lot of layout information your actual content will be more prominent from a search perspective, and the document structure will make it easy for a search algorithm to match user queries to the pages of the site--a longer way of saying the site will do well in natural search.