Eli Robillard's World of Blog.

There are several reasons why the concept of personas is so useful to design, and a few are touched on in Alan Cooper's recent “Origin of Personas” article. One point not covered is this simple fact: When you design with specific people in mind, and help these people improve their quality of life by easing their daily tasks, you create champions for your product.

To confirm the dead simple sexiness of the new DotText UI, check out the centerfold below. Design kudos to http://scottwater.com/blog/ and http://xl8.net/. It's enough to make a man wanna blog again, I guess the hiatus is over. Bluntward ho!

My brain is full and happy. Now to decompress.

This is a placeholder, I do plan to write a bit about Tuesday and put up a few pictures fromthe conference but at this point I'd rather jump straight to today. To be updated...

Day one was pretty groovy. The best part about a gathering of wired-folk^*  is putting faces to the names and running into old friends and acquaintances. Marcie and I are staying with at Chateau Swienton this week -- Stephen is a co-lead of the Fort Worth .NET Users Group, on the board of the ASPInsiders, and a terrific developer. We've known him on the lists for a couple years but only met during the ASPAces summit just over a year ago in Redmond. It was good to finally meet his family and giant dog.

Arrived this morning, looks good. Checked out Don Box's "Don of Web Services" first. Good speaker, good talk. Rather than an educational spout ("here's how you do this"), it seemed a demonstration that things finally work the way they should ("it now does this"). That's a bigger turning point than it looks in print.

Since losing its monopoly as a domain registrar Network Solutions has steadily hemmoraged customers and they wonder why. Beyond a history of oxymoronic "customer service" they also suffer from lousy CRM.

From Simon Fell #: