We’ve been thinking a lot lately about being healthy, being more concerned about the world around us, and making the lives of ourselves and our friends better. I started reading the ReDirect Guide the other day, and noticed that there weren’t any web designers listed in the publication. And I started to wonder why.

For those of you not familiar with this yearly publication, the ReDirect Guide is a “Local Healthy & Sustainable Lifestyle Directory.” So what exactly would that mean in the context of web development? How would a company like Needmore Designs get to feeling like we were fulfilling those criteria, and feel justified in asking to be listed in their publication? For you see, web design just doesn’t seem like something that would go in that book. But let’s look at this word-by-word.

Local. The majority of our clients are Portland-based, and we’ve found ourselves leaning more and more toward doing work only for local businesses. At first, we were worried that there wouldn’t be enough work if we stuck to the Portland area. Now, that seems rather absurd. Sure, it’s nice when someone from California or New York tells you what their budget is! But frankly, we’ve never been in it for the money, and that’s a fact. So we could very well become 100% local in our work.

Healthy. As people, we certainly are healthy these days. But beyond that, there are a lot of ways to make a website I would consider “healthy.” It should be accessible to people with disabilities. It should be as free as possible of proprietary technologies like Flash or Windows-only video files. And the websites should be only for good, positive causes. Not, for example, selling alcohol, tobacco, or Republicans.

Sustainable. During the day, we eat food delivered by Organics To You. We bicycle to our meetings. Our office uses only Green Energy, only high-efficiency flat-screen displays, and only the most efficient computers you can buy. But for a website, sustainability might also mean something that a client can keep up and running, well-maintained and current, for years to come. That’s a sustainable website. And that’s how we build most of our websites already.

So what do you think? How can one best meet the criteria for supporting “local, healthy, sustainable lifestyles” as a web design shop?

Seth Godin has compiled an exhaustive list of web 2.0 sites and their traffic and trends. Regardless of how you define “Web 2.0,” the list is an interesting one in terms of taking the pulse of the modern Web.

Yet Tim O’Reilly disagrees, in today’s Why Seth Godin’s Web 2.0 Watch List Misses the Point post. He feels that the criteria for “Web 2.0” as used by Mr. Godin is completely wrong – primarily by not including companies like Google and eBay.

I think the crux of this argument is the idea that the term can be defined any number of different ways. You could argue that projects are 2.0, or services are 2.0, or just the sites themselves. You could argue that if someone has been around for longer than the term has, they don’t make the cut. Or you could argue that someone as old as Yahoo! fully qualifies, if you look at the garden of services they offer.

Good point. I wonder if we’ll ever agree on a definition at all.

The main Scriptaculous site relaunched today, most notable for the amazing and lovely little intro animation you see when you load the home page. Neat trick, and it’s just HTML and JavaScript!

Also, check out the neat russell+hazel website. They really just sell office supplies, basically. But what office supplies! That stuff makes being in an office look like a whole lot more fun. You can even shop by color! (via 43 Folders)

Natalie Salminen is an amazing artist and surely one of the most awesome clients we’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, as well! We just received an encaustic piece, made just for us here at Needmore, and it’s just about the loveliest thing you ever did lay your eyes on.

In Social Networks are Killing Email, Joshua Porter writes about college students who no longer bother to check their email accounts because they so frequently use social networking websites, such as MySpace and FaceBook.

When I was in school it was all about email. You’ll have an alumni email account for life, I was told. There was an assumption that I would need an email account for life.

How true. Maybe it has something to do with my aversion to the social networking sites mentioned above, but I have five or so email addresses! To me, the myriad benefits of email outweigh its inconveniences, and there are a lot. I have copies of some emails going back a good ten years. I don’t believe that living in a digital age means sacrificing one’s own personal history to a third party, which is exactly what you do when you entrust someone like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to your very communications. What will happen when those kids want to read their old “letters,” fifty years from now?

The fact is, growing up I used to love books of letters. I remember fondly a particular book of correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. I thought it was some of their best writing! Sure, we’re not all writers, but just as I meticulously save and backup every digital photograph I take, I hope to do the same with much of my online correspondence. Just the other day, I wanted to listen to some recordings I’d made a decade ago. Sure enough, I still have copies of them all. I’ve even kept a copy of pretty much every website I’ve ever made, dating back a decade as well!

My point is simply that there is a very critical thing missing from those social networks, and that is ownership of, and control over, the content you create. But just as surely as the Internet’s early years were marked by sharing, openness, optimism, and almost hippie-ish ideologies, once its population reaches a certain threshold it becomes commercialized, balkanized, spam-saturated, and the subject of “two tier Internet” schemes designed to let its carriers “double-dip” and take obnoxiously unfair advantage of their near-monopoly positions.

Or am I being a bit too skeptical?

Now get some more interesting views of Digg than Digg Spy can offer. Digg Labs has launched today, and it includes Stack and Swarm, two Flash-based visualizations that foretell some of the neat stuff you’ll be able to do with the Digg API, soon to be released. Great use of Flash!