IBM/Ease of Use/Business View:
“What is this all about? It’s about business – your business! Look, we’re all sold on pleasing our users, whether they are customers, business partners, or internal users. This is a sure way to contribute to our organizations and to the bottom line. But how do we ensure we not only satisfy, but also delight them? How do we increase our return from them? And how do we differentiate ourselves from our competitors? Reasonable questions. Read on. There are answers.”
easyPilot: make a prototype, user test it and then generate documentation automatically from the prototype. Coolness.
“The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers.
This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love. “
Share your weblog log files at Weblog Kitchen: Audience Size.
Weblog Kitchen: “Welcome to the Weblog Kitchen, a Wiki about research in weblogs, wikis, and related hypertext technolgies. “
peterme.com is doing some crazy interviews. Check them out if you haven’t already and have an interest in data visualisation.
Is TrackBack really a two-way link as envisioned in the original hypertext theory, where both sides know of the existence of the link (as opposed to an HTML link where only one side knows)? People have been trying to emulate that idea by tracking referrers. With some success, but always limited by the nature of referrers: someone has to click, not exactly a two way link. If this is so; very cool. Too bad about the complexity of implementation though.
ZX VIEWS: “Text is a crucial part of documents, and needs to be viewed both separately and in more built-up and glamorous contexts. We need to be able to see the text and its connections with or without fancy effects and packaging. – However, just for the flavor, let’s start with the fancy effects and work our way back. ” (The Xanadu successor?)
Trackback Yum, I’m gonna shell out for MT now. And I don’t even really understand it yet!
NBS: The Salon: Victor recommends the Salon – I can heartily agree.
Practical design of outlines and site maps (via the ever excellent and useful IAWiki)
Swift Kick – The Semantic Argument Web: “I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web.”
We’re having a go David, we’re having a go. I am betting that loosely coupled metadata (not centralized control) could turn out really useful.
Check out Simon Willison’s Weblog. Good Stuff.
Not sure if I linked to this before. OTHER media 2002 – Why you need your very own taxonomy.
XFML seems strangely appealing to Spanish and Portuguese blogs. Vacano!
An interesting blog I didn’t know: wiremine.
drop.org and NetworkWorldFusion on XFML. By the way, expect some good XFML stuff coming out in about 10 days.
a wiki on hacking cheap robot dogs: TWiki . Experimentalproduct . FeralRobots (via Matt)
A simple but efficient function – I remember proposing this for a client a while back: NavCode: “Find the product you want fast! Just enter the NavCode in the box located to the right of this text. You will land on the corresponding product page […]”
Semant-O-Matic: “This site indexes the contents of eleven weblogs over the period March – June 2002 ( a total of 1440 posts ). The goal of this search engine is to demonstrate a fuzzy-search technique called latent semantic indexing. “
The science of persuasion (Economist.com)
“His main insight into omega strategies is the idea that resistance is in some sense a thing, and that it can thus be used up and replenished, rather like water in a tank. Such changes in resistance level are not necessarily the result of logical or rational argument. Once the level drops, the tank is topped up gradually until it is full again, rather as a water-closet cistern refills itself after it has been flushed. The task of the persuader is to drain the tank. That of the consumer is to keep it full enough to resist undesirable changes.
[…]
Another powerful part of decision-making is anticipated feelings of regret. This is why people are, for example, reluctant to trade lottery tickets – they think about how awful they would feel if their numbers came up.
[…]
In an experiment a few years ago, students posing as beggars found that they received small change 44% of the time that they asked directly for it without specifying a sum. If they asked for a precise sum that was a single coin (25 cents), they got it 64% of the time. But if they asked for an apparently arbitrary number (37 cents) they got it 75% of the time. The more precise and unusual the request, the less people were able to resist it.”
OpenOffice.org: working from home? Don’t want to shell out for MS Office? Get this: polished and free.
My name is Peter and I read marketing blogs. “Hi Peter!”
Star Wars episode -6: it’s for real (check the video’s)
Christina points to: Improving Usability Guideline Compliance: “Over the last 1.5 years, the average compliance with established usability guidelines increased by 4%. If we can sustain this level of improvement, we’ll reach the ideal of 90% guideline compliance in 2017. ”
The ‘kob looked at 15 sites this year, 20 (different) sites last year, and concludes the Internet will be fixed in 2017. He presents this crap as serious statistics. I checked the URL because it looked as one of those Jakob spoof sites. Is the man doing bad drugs? Believability down 93.4%!
A nice IA process description: “The approach I describe here can therefore impossibly tell the whole story of what I do, but is instead a description of the methodologies and techniques I use most consistently. They are neither unique nor groundbreaking, rather what I’ve found works best for me, culled from my time in the trenches of project development, and from endless reading of books, websites, and other information resources. “
BBC News | Being wired helps you connect: “The social impact of new communications technologies is a greater number of social ties, more diverse social ties, more support.”
Peter Van Dijck 