Simplicity, usability and the joy of use

Other examples

Blogs are many things, but at their most basic they are just incredibly easy to use personal publishing mechanisms. One of the reasons people liked them is that they could just start writing and get their content online very easily.
It is not a coincindence that Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis, called them "the simplest online database that could possibly work"

This point will come up again but...

it is no coincidence that these systems which have excited educators about their potential use were also built by people who were already using the network as a large open learning environment
and this extended past just technology to "look and feel" issues as well
- while it is wrong to talk about a specific web 2.0 aesthetic (and as this talk argues, looks are far from all that's going on here) it is no coincidence that people do look at sites and say "that looks Web 2.0" or that doesn't, because the turn towards user-centric design and usability (and the techniques to accomplish this well) were part of both the learning explosion and the technology innovations of the past 5 years that have enabled Web 2.0 to occur

Are there other things about ease of use you'd like Scott to discuss? Please add in ideas below