I love this picture:

It comes from a Contradance Page…. I like it because it shows regular people in regular clothes having a great time. MWSD needs images like this.

And here’s a picture from the Dance Flurry 2000:

More regular people in regular clothes having a great time.

Well, USDA did it: they replaced their page of links with a database of links, putting the responsibility on webmasters to make sure their sites are listed. There are obvious advantages to this for USDA’s webmaster, although the webmaster has had to enter a few links to make sure some important sites are included. However, from a usability point of view, it suffers. First, of course, links just aren’t there; it’s not very effective to put a notice on the page of links that it’s going away and webmasters should enter their site in the db. Also, to enter a site in the database, one has to register yet another user name and password. Yawn. Second, I find the listing hard to read. The format means that not very many sites can be listed on a page and also makes it difficult to scan the links to see what’s there. Third, if you just ask to see all the records, they’re not in any kind of logical order.

I think a database is a good way to store links. However, they need to be displayed in a user-friendly way that makes them easy to read.

I have the same comments on the caller database. So far, there are only 10 entries in the database, so it’s not real popular (compare with Vic’s database, which has entries for 566 callers). Also compare the ease of scanning through the listing generated by Vic’s as opposed to the listing generated by the USDA’s.

For those of you following the National Folk Dance thing, here’s the USDA’s page on the subject: National Folk Dance Campaign. It outlines their campaign for next year’s Congress, including attempting to obtain a professional lobbyist (on a volunteer basis).