datacloud

Sonny Bono is Dead

From Lessig Blog:

Ok, this is very cool. AISO GrepLaw, Detritus as set up a "Sonny Bono is Dead" site, collecting samples from the works that would have passed into the public domain, but for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Sonny Bono, I am told, was a sweet man and great friend. I'm sure that's true, and his untimely death certainly robbed the world of the very best of this man. It's therefore very sad that the worst of Sonny Bono continues to echo -- this indiscriminate extension of copyrights. Congresswoman Mary Bono had some great ideas about how to make Congresswoman Lofgren's Public Domain Enhancement Act "better," as she put it. Is there a possible Sonny Bono Public Domain Act in the works?

Works that would be in the public domain now include Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust", Gene Austin's "My Blue Heaven", and Pinetop Smith's "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie".

The Sonny Bono is Dead site is actually an extension of Dennis Karjala's Subverted Public Domain list, which includes an astounding number of important cultural works that should be in the public domain.

Shop 'Til You're Dropped

A woman at the front of the line at Wal-Mart at the open hour of 6 a.m. on Friday was knocked down, trampled, and left unconscious by a mob rushing for $29 DVD players.

Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance.

A Wal-Mart spokesman call the family to apologize for her injuries and offered to hold a DVD player for her to purchase. (No, really.)

Paging Vs. Scrolling: More is Better?

Some new research on the paging versus scrolling debate in web design:

The latest research on paging versus scrolling shows it’s pretty much a toss-up, with the only statistically significant difference being the time it takes to read (where paging came in slower). These findings contradicted previous research from 1998, and is perhaps attributed to “users [becoming] more accustomed to scrolling when reading documents on the web.” Participants also commented that they found paging “too broken up,” and that they had to “go back and forth” quite a bit to search for information. Researchers conclude “viewing more of the document on a single screen facilitated easier scanning and searching.“

[via Typographica]

Unusable Web

One web designer's pet peeves

The vast majority of sites I come across have some very easy to fix problems. While I do have some usability experience, and have had quite a bit of “face time” with users, I’m not a usability expert by any stretch. What I am is a user of Web sites myself and a good observer who has seen quite a bit of actual user frustration. Here are some things almost every “business” site could do to make their site easier for me, as well as your “typical” user, to use.

Most of the advice is good, general, commonsense observation ("don't launch new windows unless there's a good reason to do so").

I think we probably could have done without the "the web is like sex" metaphor, which is probably only appropriate if you're the sort of nineteen-year-old suburban male who listens to Blink 182...). Note to Asterisk: Reread the tip that says, "Don't get too clever."

[via asterisk*]

Machines and Stories

Blackbelt Jones has some observations about the role of storytelling and presentation in early stages of design work (particularly large-scale design that includes teams).

Now - this type of work is only ever rough-scoping work, and it would be risky to base design work on it without more criticism or validation, but as it's at the top of the funnel of product or service development often. And also more often than not - it's done in 'kick-off' meets where stakeholders and project influencers who might be so heavily involved in the detailed work further along. So it can have a big influence.

Looking back, I'm wondering how much performance and storytelling influence the creation of scenarios in these situations. That is, when we brainstorm, as social animals, rather than objectively shaping scenarios for further development - how much are we looking for approval and engagement with our stories and ideas from those present?

The answer, I would argue, is that these situations have enormous influence on decisions about design of all sorts. These forms of loose narrative structure how we think and act in powerful ways. Without the creation of narratives--through scenarios or even user tests--designers lack methods for understanding how people interact with designed artifacts. To design without users in mind--which requires narrative, even micro- ones--is arrogant and frequently irrelevant.

Technology development and use increasingly relies on the construction of narratives. Designers pitch scenarios to demonstrate potential product uses. Marketing wonks spin (frequently unrealistic) visions of users' lives transformed by new products. Users engage with narratives--unrealistic or not--and insert themselves into the stories as they contemplate purchases and, perhaps, later use the product.

The recently much-discussed rebirth of design has a great deal to do with shifts in how we understand technologies, including computer technologies. They are no longer simply tools for completing tasks, but spaces in which we act--and act out stories, making them real.

[via Blackbeltjones Work]

Bad graphs?

From IDblog:

You may want to file this one away as an example of how graphs can mislead. Dave Weinberger notes that in "an otherwise balanced article on Linux's challenge to Windows," InfoWeek illustrates its points with some questionable graphics. Such as:

The casual reader may miss an important point...the scale on the two graphs. The Windows graph scale goes up to 80%; the Linux graph that appears very similar goes up only to 40%.

I don't know how the graphs were laid out in the print version of the article, though since they aren't on the same page in the online version at InfoWeek (except on the printable version), I suspect the print version is the one that caused Dave to cry foul.

The text of the article is less misleading, clearly noting that:

With Windows, 79% worry about software vulnerabilities and overall quality and 64% about high cost of ownership. With Linux, 40% cite concern about the lack of a complete and fully integrated software environment and 37% about accountability if problems arise.

[vis IDblog, who got it from vanderwal.net]

now listening

Lucinda Williams, Sweet Old World.

Acceptance Speeches for Action Heroes

At McSweeney's, Acceptance Speeches for Action Heroes:

I will cut taxes, balance the budget, and rid the world of Skeletor. Skeletor is evil. Skeletor does not believe in free trade. Perhaps my words are too moralistic, too black and white. But look at him—his face is a skull! He sits on a throne made of bones. This is an evil man, working in evil times. And I know, from various intelligence sources, including my trusted aide Man-at-Arms and my Security Adviser Generic-Noun-Name, that Skeletor has been working on a new weapon: a weapon that could destroy the nation. You in the media don't believe me. Some have cynically reported that I am using fear to gain votes. If any members of the press corps wish to find out what Skeletor is up to, they can take a trip to Castle Grayskull, expenses paid from my Mattel stock options. Any takers? I didn't think so.

[via ( blogdex : recent )]

How I learned to stop worrying

and love capitalism:

Lovemarks.com

Visitors submit stories about brands with which they feel love for. Here's one from Edward, who has a thing for Abercrombie & Fitch:

It was an epiphany that changed my life. I started wearing their clothes and it made me cool and hip differentiating me with the rest of the Gap wearing populace. Instead of watching TV at home now I was out doing things.

We've just lost cabin pressure. Can you feel the irony collapsing?

[via a host of places, including Boing Boing]

Philip K. Dick

From prescient (and deceased) freak Philip K. Dick:

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups.

I ask, in my writing, What is real?

Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.

I ought to know.

I do the same thing.

[via Blackbeltjones Work, who got it from AllAboutGeorge]

Sonny Bono is Dead

From Lessig Blog:

Ok, this is very cool. AISO GrepLaw, Detritus as set up a "Sonny Bono is Dead" site, collecting samples from the works that would have passed into the public domain, but for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Sonny Bono, I am told, was a sweet man and great friend. I'm sure that's true, and his untimely death certainly robbed the world of the very best of this man. It's therefore very sad that the worst of Sonny Bono continues to echo -- this indiscriminate extension of copyrights. Congresswoman Mary Bono had some great ideas about how to make Congresswoman Lofgren's Public Domain Enhancement Act "better," as she put it. Is there a possible Sonny Bono Public Domain Act in the works?

Works that would be in the public domain now include Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust", Gene Austin's "My Blue Heaven", and Pinetop Smith's "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie".

The Sonny Bono is Dead site is actually an extension of Dennis Karjala's Subverted Public Domain list, which includes an astounding number of important cultural works that should be in the public domain.

The Rebirth (again) of Design

SJ Mercury ">article on the increasing importance of design in high tech products:

``When everything else is commoditized, design is the one area where you can add value,'' says Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, the Palo Alto industrial design studio which has crafted everything from the Palm V handheld to Crest toothpaste tubes that stand up. ``Technology is just like clothing and automobiles. As the rate of technological change levels off, design becomes even more important.''

[via Tomalak's Realm]

From Phone to Environment

From the people of brought you Kazaa, a new p2p phone service: Skype. The p2p model differs from the central-server model of other Voice Over IP offerings such as Vonage. According to a Technology Review article, Skype is used more like Instant Messenger.

“Skype can change the way people think about communications,” says Jeff Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst. “Skype is the Napster of the phone system.”

As Foe Romeo observes, after using Skype for a while, the p2p and free nature of the software encourages different uses than standard phone connections:

We leave Skype running in the background when Matt's online in Helsinki and I'm in London. It's an easy, casual way to keep someone present when they're not. You hear the rhythms of their typing, occasional laughs or sighs or mutterings, and you can break into conversation when you feel like it. You can have conversational spurts, rather than one big download. It's casual, background conversation rather than a focused IM exchange or time-pressured telephone call.

[via foe romeo]

Data Mobility Growing Up

Information is caught in a double-bind: it wants to be free, but it wants to belong to someone. (Are hard-drive crashes a symptom of such dysfunctional relationships?)

Popescu-Zeletin and his colleagues in research labs around the world are more interested in what will happen in the next decade. They don't know precisely what will emerge from a technological standpoint. But many of them envision what Popescu-Zeletin calls an individual-centric model, "intelligent enough to adapt to the individual, wherever you are -- anytime, any place and according to your personal preferences."

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Dreaming

There's something odd and fascinating about this: RapidEyeMovement, a website that hosts dream journals (and allows other visitors to add their interpretations).

In this dream My husband and I are computer repair and sales people. We get a phone call from a customer who bought a computer from us but is having problems with it. SO i agree to meet him and help sort the problem out....

I'm not a fan of dream interpretations--bizarre imagery is interesting for its own sake, though.

Linux Desktop?

Joho points to and analyzes an Amy Whol article about linux for the desktop. As Joho says,

Usability? Hah! If you want to see the barrier to desktop Linux's acceptance, watch over my shoulder one day as I try to use KDE or Gnome to do ordinary tasks such as keeping my MP3 player running if any other sound is emitted (oh yeah, guessing which processes are audio ones so that I can then manually Kill them hoping that I got the right one is reaaaal user friendly) or downloading and installing a new application. Fabulous end user experiences. Lord love Linux and godspeed to it, but desktop Linux is so Windows 3.0.

Linux folk still don't seem to get it: although everyone claims they want the ability to "hack around" in their desktop systems, their perceived needs are about as genuine as people in Manhattan driving Hummers: They don't need that much power, and they're probably endangering themselves and others by demanding it. Customization and open systems are great, but what most desktop users really need is relatively simplicity and, above all, consistency. When most users talk about customizing their OS, they're talking about being able to add a new icon to their taskbar, or change their wallpaper, or changing which application opens a specific filetype. They're not talking about configuring their own kernel or even writing cron scripts. And while those affordances aren't all that linux offers, the linux field seems to spend the majority of time developing elegant hacks to obscure problems rather than making the desktop and productivity applications more consistent, stable, and usable. Of course, that doesn't mean linux's hype won't propel it to some measure of acceptance: look at how far Windows was able to get with the hype about Windows 3.0 versus Mac. (Note: I'm not writing this from the sidelines. I spent most of last year with Linux as my primary OS for writing, web development, email, scheduling, and presentation, among other things. Although there were things that I really liked about the OS, I eventually moved over to a PowerBook running OS X, which gave me most of those features coupled with a usable interface.)

"Instead of Mass Media, Think Cluster Media"

Ashley Benigno offers an invitation to grid blogging on December 1, 2003:

Grid blogging aims to investigate the potentials of a distributed media production model spread across blogosphere nodes. It seeks to ignite attention on specific topics at set times through variegated voices. A kind of decentralised flash mobbing for the mind, if you like.

Decentralisation is key here. Unlike single collaborative blogging structures that unite discussions under the same URL, Grid blogging is about synchronized guerrilla publishing attacks carried out across a series of online locations. It respects and heightens the individual voice within a media-wise choir. It allows for idea-jamming and mosaics of diverse perspectives to emerge unfettered.

Temporary in nature, the first grid blog is set to happen on December 1. The topic is the "brand". Interpret it as you like, from the comfort of your own blog. As critique, as recollection, as original content, as link-fest or visual interpretation. Whatever. Join in and help us discover where we can lead this dance.

[via JOHO the Blog]

Web Design Client Quotes

Client Quotes from a Design Forum discussion thread at Dreamless. Some are extremely funny (Can you please put a landlord's hat on the landlord. ), but others seem to be more designer issues than client issues:

So I'm working on this site and when I originally met with the guy he like drew out the front page as a big block and broke it into sections and told me where to put things (basically he was playing designer for me). So I do the front page and I try to make it look nice and sort of edgy. This is the feedback I got from them a few hours later.

"please follow original instructions. we don't want this page to look tricked out or computer generated..."

fucking brilliant.

Can anyone beat this comment?

I seriously doubt it

Um ... maybe the client has seen some websites they liked and was trying to pass that info on to you? Maybe they didn't want "edgy"?

"We don't think it's communicating the message effectively, maybe if it said _______."

[...]

('So now you're a copywriter,' [I] thought.

Isn't it useful to get feedback on the client about what the site might say?

Identify how many of these are actually the designer's arrogance, inability to help the client learn webdesign vocabulary, or refusal to understand the sort of site appropriate to the client's purpose, image, and audience.

Discussions like this remind me of teacher's-lounge (or forum) discussions, where everyone trots out their "Can you believe how dim this student was?" quote. They're frequently hilarious, but they also frequently reveal unacknowledged biases and egos.

[( blogdex : recent )]

Top Ten Internet Fads

From Kuro5hin, the Top Ten Internet Fads: Number 3's my favorite:

3. Digital Acronyms (B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C, P2P, etc.)

The sociologists will tell you that one sign of "in group" behavior is the use of special language, words and phrases only understood by members of the crowd who "get it."

Whatever.

All I know is that these stupid acronyms with the number 2 standing for the word "to" drive me up the wall.

There was a time, around 1998 or 1999, when every VC PowerPoint contained at least one of these acronyms on every slide. Sometimes several. Anyone who invented a new one was a true visionary.

No wonder so many venture-backed startups failed.

Thankfully, I'm seeing these less and less often.

Knowing Your Market

In The Emperor's New Code Ole Eichhorn dissects Microsoft's Longhorn PR blitz. MS has put an enormous amount of effort into selling the ways that the new Longhorn OS will make programmer's lives easier and more efficient. Eichhorn, though, notes that

The most important thing is not how easy it is to build code, the most important thing is how well the code runs once it is built.  This concept seems to have escaped the Longhorn developers, and from this viewpoint Longhorn and its underlying technologies are pretty unexciting.

Remember, the audience for the PDC was professional developers.  We build code that other people pay to use.  It might take five people six months to build an application that thousands of people use every day for years.  What's more important, the experience those five people had for six months (and the fact that it took them six months instead of four), or the experience those thousands of people will have for years?

Microsoft knows what really drives decisions about Operating System choices. As with much of the IT world, the users have little to do with it: programmers and managers are the ones making the real decisions.

[via ongoing]

Chez Google

Googlehouse is a flash-based house (viewed Sims-style, from the top and roofless)--built with walls made of randomly collected googled images of various rooms ("kitchen", "bedroom", etc.). Odd.

Zoom Interface

Jeff Raskin's THE (The Human Interface) Team has released a Shockwave-based working demo of a zooming interface

Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces.

This corresponds to something I've called the "surfacing of information" in interface design (see entry for "Postmodernism and Interface Design" on my Read page). Although we've talked about living in an information society for decades, the location of information has shifted gradually: we want information on the surface, in order to manipulate it, move it, and connect it up to other pieces of information. In addition, users are no longer as willing to dig into sub-menus to find information about possible operations: they want palletes, toolbars, etc. All of this has come at a cost: the interface is now immensely crowded. Although people are, in general, getting better at working with such dense information displays, we need better methods for navigating these spaces. Zoom UI and Apple's Expose (among other things) are a partial solution. [via Brad Lauster]

"Instead of Mass Media, Think Cluster Media"

Ashley Benigno offers an invitation to grid blogging on December 1, 2003:

Grid blogging aims to investigate the potentials of a distributed media production model spread across blogosphere nodes. It seeks to ignite attention on specific topics at set times through variegated voices. A kind of decentralised flash mobbing for the mind, if you like.

Decentralisation is key here. Unlike single collaborative blogging structures that unite discussions under the same URL, Grid blogging is about synchronized guerrilla publishing attacks carried out across a series of online locations. It respects and heightens the individual voice within a media-wise choir. It allows for idea-jamming and mosaics of diverse perspectives to emerge unfettered.

Temporary in nature, the first grid blog is set to happen on December 1. The topic is the "brand". Interpret it as you like, from the comfort of your own blog. As critique, as recollection, as original content, as link-fest or visual interpretation. Whatever. Join in and help us discover where we can lead this dance.

[via JOHO the Blog]

Cell Phones and Places

Metropolis Magazine on cell phones and our declining sense of place:

But the cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes and computers and e-mail because of its ability to intrude into every moment in every possible place. When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not on the street sharing the communal experience of urban life. You are in some other place--someplace at the other end of your phone conversation. You are there, but you are not there.

This has always been a tendency with synchronous communication technologies (and perhaps asynch, to some extent), in that they require participants to engage in the construction of a mutual space that's technically nowhere, or a weird amaglam of here and there. Cell phones are the same, but more so. [via metafilter]

Epson Demos Tiny Copter

Epson demonstrated the world's tiniest flying robot on November 17: Weighs around ten grams and includes bluetooth for remote control. Unfortunately for those who've bookmarked Epson's page for their holiday wish list, Epson claims this is a prototype only and will probably not reach market at any point in the near future. In addition to the slashdot article and discussion and the main Epson page, The Inquirer has some info. [via /.]

Creative Exclamations

The Unh! Project collects guttural moans from comic books such as the Mad Mongol's girly-man cry when he was punched once by Young Miracleman: "Ouch! Ow! Ooh! Ah! Mercy! Oh! Ooph! Ooder! Ow! Yaroow!" (11-18)

[via Cruel Site of the Day]

Secret Stories: Fairy Tales for Homeless Children

Stories of neon angels, Bloody Mary, and other creatures inhabiting the worlds of homeless children in Miami, from Miami New Times:

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories." The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

[via notes from somewhere bizzare]

RFID Surveillance in Wal-Mart

a creepy Chicago Sun-Times story.

Shoppers in a suburban Tulsa, Okla., Wal-Mart were unwitting guinea pigs earlier this year in a secret study that two of America's largest corporations never expected you'd know about.

In the study, uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, shelves in a Wal-Mart in Broken Arrow, Okla., were equipped with hidden electronics to track the Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers stacked on them. The shelves and Webcam images were viewed 750 miles away by Procter & Gamble researchers in Cincinnati who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and could even watch consumers in action.

[via Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Now Listening TO

Death Cab for Cutie at CMJ on KRCW's Morning Becomes Eclectic archives. (The last link will take you to the good stuff.)

Happy 20th to Virii

The Computer Virus turns 20. An article at Silicon.com marks the event:

In November 1983, US computing student Fred Cohen created the very first computer virus as a proof of concept project during his studies. Little could he have known just what a can of worms (pun fully intended) he was opening with this discovery. This week marks the 20th anniversary of Cohen's work on the Unix platform. To celebrate the occasion silicon.com threw a virtual birthday party and invited some seasoned campaigners from the anti-virus industry to discuss their thoughts on the previous two decades of malware.

[via ACM Technews]

Verisign and Stealth Ads

When I was checking renewal dates for some domains on my Verisign account, I received the two error messages below from Apple's Safari browser. I assume they're just pop-under ads with a mangled URL (note the doubled "http" in the URL), but my first thought was "adware". In any event, is anyone else getting tired of these exit ads? When I leave a site, I don't want it to turn into a long process of detaching myself from some clingy kid who's wrapped itself around my pant leg. Just let me freakin' exit. (And I particularly hate it when it's a site I'm already paying money to.)

Reuseit.com Winners Announced

Built for the Future has announced the winners of their Reuseit.com contest. The challenge: Redesign web design guru Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com website, which many have commented looks a little, well, unusable. The winner's Mike Pick's entry, but some of the other entries are interesting as well.

"Colour number 10 is brilliant."

Photos by Matt Stuart [flash warning] - the weird and wonderful around London.

[via metafilter.com]

Greatest Album Covers (That Never Were)

The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were:

Conceived by music archivist Michael Ochs and graphic designer Craig Butler, this project takes album cover art to a whole new level. One hundred established graphic and fine artists were approached to create the definitive album cover of their favorite recording artist. Each chose an iconic musical subject from the 1940s to the present and from the genres of rock, blues, jazz, country and soul music. The result is an original and highly creative collection of contemporary art.

Artist Art Synder's take on a Lou Reed cover.

[via a whole bunch of sites]

RFID Surveillance in Wal-Mart

a creepy Chicago Sun-Times story.

Shoppers in a suburban Tulsa, Okla., Wal-Mart were unwitting guinea pigs earlier this year in a secret study that two of America's largest corporations never expected you'd know about.

In the study, uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, shelves in a Wal-Mart in Broken Arrow, Okla., were equipped with hidden electronics to track the Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers stacked on them. The shelves and Webcam images were viewed 750 miles away by Procter & Gamble researchers in Cincinnati who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and could even watch consumers in action.

[via Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

E-Voting: 144,000 votes, 19,000 voters

The Indianapolis Star reports on a recent e-voting fiasco that involved 19,000 voters and 144,000 votes cast.

[via /.]

Metacritic

I just stumbled over this site (via google looking for something on Frank Black for the previous entry): metacritic. Compiles reviews of movies, videos, dvds, music, and games gathered from all over the web. Search for an entry such as Frank Black's new CD, Show Me Your Tears, and you get a list of available reviews, with quick summaries, links to the original reviews, and numerical scores, and an overall ranking. I skip the overall rankings, but combing through a couple of reviews usually gives me the info I need, even if I don't happen to agree with any single reviewer. The Austin City Chronicle's review of Joe Strummer's posthumous release, Streetcore only gives the CD a 67/100, but adds, "improves on such hit-and-miss affairs as 1999's Rock Art and the X-Ray Style." I thought Rock Art was great--I listened to it for five solid hours during a drive from Detroit to Upstate New York via Toronto last summer. If Streetcore's even better, I'm picking it up.

Now Listening To

Frank Black and the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears

Merriam-Webster 0wnz0red by McDonald's

A well-researched article on Blind Höna documents McDonald's (partially successful) attempts to censor Merriam-Webster's inclusion of the popular term "McJob" in new editions of their dictionaries.

In its most recent, eleventh, edition, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary included the word "McJob", defined as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement ".

McDonald's CEO has protested and called this "an inaccurate description of restaurant employment" and "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women" who work in the restaurant industry.

M-W has apparently already pulled the term from their website (image via craphound):

And from Boing-Boing's comments (which linked to the material above):

Jonas sez, "It appears that dictionary producer Merriam-Webster's has yielded under pressure from McDonald's. Yesterday, the word 'McJobs' disappeared from their web site's page with "new" words in the new edition. I have links to the google-cached version with the word still there - and a pdf-print of it - , and to the 'cleansed' page (and the code)."

Link

[via Boing Boing]

The Web as an Infinite Number of 3x5 Index Cards

On Boxes and Arrows today, "Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet":

In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a mechanical desk that would let users search, read, and write their way through a vast database stored on millions of 3x5 index cards.

The first paragraph sounds eerily like a description of my own office:

One rainy afternoon in 1968, a young Australian graduate student named Boyd Rayward stepped into an abandoned office in the Parc Leopold in Brussels, Belgium. Inside, he discovered “a cluttered, musty, cobwebbed office into which the rain leaked—and one day flooded—causing the attendant then on hand to have a kind of epileptic seizure.” Piled high to the ceiling were dusty stacks of books, files and manuscripts: the intellectual flotsam of a seemingly disorganized old scholar.

Open Source Ideas

"Why Not?": An Open Source archive for ideas.

When we are on-board of a commercial jet, sometimes the pilot would announce through the PA system, "Folks, here is a nice view of the Hoover Dam on the left side of the plane." But that view is only for those on the left side to see. How about the rest of the passengers?

Airlines have installed cameras to show takeoff, approaching and landing. Why not make that camera show the area over which the plane is flying, continuously?

Mostly simple ideas, some a little wonky, sometimes a little unfeasible ("Burn down spammers houses"), but all offered up by site contributors to anyone who wants to develop them.

[via lessig blog]

What Social Software Are You?

Apparently, I'm a well-intentioned but apathetic political activist. Big surprise.

Find out what kind of social software you are.

[via Blackbelt Jones Work]

Sisyphus Gets an Email List

From BumpList, dedicated to a singularly odd activity:

BumpList is a mailing list aiming to re-examine the culture and rules of online email lists. BumpList only allows for a maximum amount of subscribers so that when a new person subscribes, the first person to subscribe is "bumped", or unsubscribed from the list. Once subscribed, you can only be unsubscribed if someone else subscribes and "bumps" you off. BumpList actively encourages people to participate in the list process by requiring them to subscribe repeatedly if they are bumped off. The focus of the project is to determine if by attaching simple rules to communication mediums, the method and manner of correspondences that occur as well as behaviors of connection will change over time.

Making Computers Harder to Use

Apparently, all that graphical interface goop that makes computers easy to use (at least sometimes) has apparently been a mistake, according to a column in the Guardian:

Things can only get worse. As our society becomes ever more dependent on information technology, the gulf between those who understand computers and those who don't will get wider and wider. In 50 years, perhaps much less, the ability to read and write code will be as essential for professionals of every stripe as the ability to read and write a human language is today. If your children's children can't speak the language of the machines, they will have to get a manual job - if there are any left.

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

Next up: How to remove the steering wheel in your car and steer by directly manipulating the tires with your feet.

[via Listera, on the SIGIA list]

Terrorist Disclosure Form

On a grant application my institution just submitted, I noticed this text in six-point type, at the bottom of the form we're required to use:

By submitting this form you certify that no person or entity who provides materials or financial support for terrorism or directly or indirectly associated with terrorists will benefit from this gift.

"They Myth of Discoverability"

At UIWEB.COM, Scott Berkun gets it:

The myth of discoverability, in concise form : The belief that all good user interfaces make all things in the website or product utterly and extremely discoverable, and any design that makes an element (button, link, etc.) less than extremely discoverable, can’t possibly be very good, and should be thrown away, to the embarrassment of the designer. [...] All things can not be easily discoverable because everything is limited. You have limited screen real estate, users have limited attention spans, and abilities to perceive or understand things.  Therefore, all design for people is a zero-sum game: tradeoffs must be made and priorities must be set if there’s any hope of a good outcome for customers.

There's tendency in the article to assume that the designer can know what the user does most often, and least often, and can generalize those things across populations in order to priortize screen-design elements most frequently used.

This is generally true, but it will become less so in the future, as people gain more experience in dealing with overloaded interfaces (which we might call "rich" interfaces in order to remove the stigma of "information overload"), and as users become interested in taking more control over interfaces. In the long run, we're not going to look for interfaces that are predictable and consistent, in many cases, but for interfaces that challenge and respond to our work, helping us track and rearrange information while also pushing possibly related (or contradictory) new information at us. Sort of postmodern creativity: nothing new is created, but things are moved around.

Still, Berkun makes a useful start.

[via Tomalak's Realm]

After the Keyboard

What happens as data become spatial, not simply in the old fashioned, immersive VR way, but in a ubiquitous -- but not invisible -- computing environment that responds in systematic ways to movements within space? Some ideas from Hiroshi Ishii's MIT lab (reported in Business Week):

It would be easy to mistake Hiroshi Ishii's lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a day-care center after all the toddlers have scampered through. Listless pinwheels hang above a cubicle. A sandbox sports a huge crater, as if Big Foot had visited. Projectors dangle from the ceiling at precarious angles, and small wooden houses lie strewn across tables. [...]

Now, Ishii is getting a chance to test-drive one of his most talked-about gizmos. Called IP Network Design Workbench, it aims to make it easier for engineers and nontechnical execs to collaborate in designing telecom and computer networks. It does this by letting team members sit around a "sensetable" and rejigger components of the network -- routers, servers, storage systems, fiber optic pipes, and the like -- and examine the results of their experiments in real time. [...]

How will the table help? The power is all in the user interface. A big-ticket purchase like a network -- or even a network upgrade -- often requires an O.K. from a company's chief financial officer, CEO, or both. These execs typically aren't comfortable using computer-aided design programs running on workstations to grasp the merits of what they're buying. Tanaka thinks that if the customer can sit at a table with Comware engineers and see how changing the number or location of network routers and servers will effect performance and costs, they'll be able to settle quickly on a design and close the sale.

[via ACM News Service]

Icon Design

Guide to Common Home Laundering and Drycleaning Symbols.

Good example of designing for a very specialized, captive audience. Although there seems to be a logical structure to some symbols, others (like triangle="bleach") are learned. Once learned, there's a relatively consistent logic. (And contrary to popular belief, most icons are learned, to some extent. Intuition is based on experience and context.)

[via ( blogdex : recent )]

Wishing for Nostalgia

A former Wired UK writer offers up a search on all the things that Wired Magazine has termed "a thing of the past" (including hyperlinks to sources):

Good sound will be a thing of the past
Needless pain and surgery may be a thing of the past
Fixed pricing is a thing of the past
Modern warfare will soon be a thing of the past
Twenty years from now paper will be a thing of the past
Writer's cramp is soon to be a thing of the past
Editors [will] be a thing of the past
The home user buying a personal computer will be a thing of the past
Burnt toast is now a thing of the past

I thought Wired was about selling the future, but apparently, like most technological movements, it's about selling a vision of the past, or creating a prospective nostalgia--most of these things aren't even close to being "a thing of the past".

[via Boing Boing]

Users Redesigned Software

A Technology Review article covers WYSIWYG Word Processor pioneer Charles Simonyi's quest to invent software that endusers can easily redesign:

Even as software collapses under the weight of its own complexity, we’ve barely begun to exploit its potential to solve problems. The challenge, Simonyi believes, is to find a way to write programs that both programmers and users can actually read and comprehend. Simonyi’s solution? To create programming tools that are so simple and powerful that the software nearly writes itself—in much the way that Excel automatically adds columns of numbers or Word automatically formats our documents.

“Software should be as easy to edit as a PowerPoint presentation,” Simonyi asserts. That means giving it just as intuitive an interface.

I first read this as an attempt to simplify interface design (which I think is a mistaken question), but Simonyi's after something much more powerful here: making program logic follow interface logic, rather than vice versa:

The kind of software Simonyi envisions will not only relieve tomorrow’s programmers from the need to behave like machines; it will also enable experts in a given field—insurance, accounting, health care—to make their own changes to their software, easily and without the constant aid of a programmer. Suppose you are a corporate accountant using custom financial software, and a new tax law is passed, Simonyi posits. “You can edit the description of what you want to do on your own, and now you run the generator again. You don’t involve programmers again. The generator runs at computer speed, about a billion times faster than human, and a billion times more precise, and you get your change.”

[via Tomalak's Realm]

Just Think of the Usability Testing *Lab*

Somewhat like the sayings on the caps of bottles of Sobe, on Magic Hat Brewery provides little sayings on the caps of Number 9, Blind Faith, and other varieties:

Don't Eat With Your Feet

and

It's Good to Be King

Although the Sobe sayings seem a little wittier, my guess is that usability studies of Magic Hat drinkers showed that it was important to keep the sayings very, very simple.

Posted by johndan at 08:56 PM | TrackBack

Knowing Your Market

In The Emperor's New Code Ole Eichhorn dissects Microsoft's Longhorn PR blitz. MS has put an enormous amount of effort into selling the ways that the new Longhorn OS will make programmer's lives easier and more efficient. Eichhorn, though, notes that

The most important thing is not how easy it is to build code, the most important thing is how well the code runs once it is built.  This concept seems to have escaped the Longhorn developers, and from this viewpoint Longhorn and its underlying technologies are pretty unexciting.

Remember, the audience for the PDC was professional developers.  We build code that other people pay to use.  It might take five people six months to build an application that thousands of people use every day for years.  What's more important, the experience those five people had for six months (and the fact that it took them six months instead of four), or the experience those thousands of people will have for years?

Microsoft knows what really drives decisions about Operating System choices. As with much of the IT world, the users have little to do with it: programmers and managers are the ones making the real decisions.

[via ongoing]

We Thought It Was Faking

From Yahoo News: The Dead Sea is Dying.

Radiohead, via Fifth Grade

After noting that the media cloud surrounding everything Radiohead does has made it difficult (or impossible) to form a coherent opinion about their music, Rob Harvala proposes a little experiment:

[I]n order to solicit an honest, undiluted opinion about Radiohead, you'd have to find the proverbial People Living Under Rocks. As People Living Under Rocks are unavailable, let's use fifth graders. Specifically, Mitsi Kato's fifth-grade class at Roosevelt Elementary in San Leandro. Mitsi has consented to a simple experiment: We will play a career-spanning selection of Radiohead songs; the kids, equipped with Sharpies and blank sheets of paper, will simply draw whatever the music suggests to them. We don't even give them the name of the band. They don't know anything about Radiohead, the mountain of criticism, the mythology. Their thoughts and interpretations are pure, unsullied, literally unique. They are also extremely bizarre. The kids consent to this experiment, if only because Mitsi tells them to. They do, however, immediately request that we play Sean Paul or 50 Cent instead. "This is not hip-hop," Mitsi says. "I'm not asking if you like it." She doesn't have to ask. They don't.

[via boing-boing]

Knowing Your Limits

Matthew Sturges is blogging his wife's labor and the birth of their child, via wireless internet "hotspots" in the hospital:

Unfortunately, the hotspot petered out just as The Wife was about to start pushing, and she was oddly unsympathetic to my bodily contortions as I wheeled around the room trying to get a signal. So, I had to wait. THEN, we got into the Post-Partem room and no hotspot at all. Sooooo punk.

Earth to Matt: Turn off the computer.

[via boing-boing]

Ambient Intelligence

EETimes carries a story on an upcoming symposium on "ambient intelligence", a new field involved with creating an environment of "enabling technologies in a friendly non-intrusive way by conspicuously hiding the technology behind the intelligence emanated by the technology." The main themes covered--ubituitous computing, context awareness, and intelligence and natural selection--are all critical avenues for creating spaces that better support information work and communication. I'm hoping they spend less time on the "friendly" face and more on designing interfaces that support complex work (by, for example, allowing my notes to travel with me, across displays wherever I happen to be. Or through easier to program bots that I can send off to find and filter information. Many of these issues are (technically speaking) trivial problems: the trick is in the interface. Faking it with AI usually just ends up looking, well, fake. Interface designers are frequently better off letting the user supply the intelligence. (Clipply rarely helps when I really need it.) [via ACM News Service]

A Footnote on Camper van Beethoven

The following is a footnote on the "Everything" piece on tech comm posted previously. Like many post-punk groups, Camper van Beethoven (from whom the "Everything Seems to be Up in the Air at This Time" lyric comes) viewed the rapid rise and fall of punk music in the 1970s as the opening of a network of movement. Punk broke apart pop and disco genres, chewed up the fragments, then spit them back at a howling audience. The collapse of punk, though, ironically brought about a new freedom to inhabit previously unavailable musical spaces. Like other post-punk groups, Camper van Beethoven careened from polka to waltz to pop to folk without mocking them, a sort of engaged-but-flattened postmodern irony.

David Lowery's current band Cracker recently toured incognito under the name Ironic Mullet playing Merle Haggard and Dwight Yoakham songs in biker bars and honkeytonks and was apparently dropped by their label Virigin Records. The songs, including covers of "Okie from Muskogee" and "Up Against the Wall You Redneck Mothers", among other outlaw conutry standards, are clearly not satires or take-offs: they're full-fledged attempts to achieve the spirit and content with which the songs were intended. Fragmentation and occupation.

Everything Seems to be Up in the Air at This Time

the first draft of the preface to an edited collection about tech communication I was asked to co-author

Everything seems to be up in the air at this time Everything seems to be up in the air at this time One day soon, it’ll all settle down Everything seems to be up in the air at this time - Camper van Beethoven, “Ambiguity Song” This sounds like a sad song, though it’s not meant to be that way. - Wayne Coyne, introducing The Flaming Lips song, “Superman”

There’s something frightening and wonderful about being in technical communication as we claw our way into a new millennium. The end of the twentieth century witnessed an explosive growth in the field of technical communication. Three distinct phases marked the development of technical communication (or technical writing) during the last century. First, the gradual professionalization of engineering and technology disciplines brought with them a need for academic instruction in writing about technology, which contributed to the initial development of technical writing courses in academia for students who would write about technologies for some small (but significant) component of their jobs. Second, the increase in complex military technologies during the cold war era (not the least of which was the rise of computer technologies) demanded specialists in technical writing and communication. Third, the relatively surprising growth of the computer industry during the last decade of the twentieth century spawned the need for people who could write about computer technology. Perhaps just as importantly, the degree to which computer use became integrated into a wide range of activities—work, home, school, entertainment, travel—meant that technical communication itself was becoming enmeshed within the fabric of our collective cultures. And then the bubble burst. Sort of. And that ends up being a good thing. Everyone said that the Internet boom would finally bust, and eventually it did. In some ways, this bust provided important opportunities for technical communication. Almost without anyone noticing it—including ourselves—technical communication was now a ubiquitous activity. As many cultures have moved from industrial to information ages, they rely ever more heavily on the skills of technical communicators. Although one could easily make the case that cultures are enmeshed in technology since the rise of fire or or literacy or industry, rarely have people understood their lives and work and learning as intertwined with technology use. Technologies are no longer tools to users; they are environments, spaces, worlds, and conversations. And the dot.com bust was not a total collapse. While certainly sudden unemployment has caused much hardship, the collapse was not total. Instead, the bubble did not so much burst and collapse as coalesce and fracture. Where there was once a terrain of apparently free and limitless movement, we now have something much more like a network (structurally speaking). And across that network, in the multitude of fragments and strands, people are engaged in technical communication. In nearly every walk of life and every space you can now find work that could be called “technical communication”. To be sure, in many cases people whose very success depends on technical communication do not even know that there’s a discipline that calls itself by that term. But the opportunity is there. Everything seems to be up in the air at this time. Rather than a lament, the lyric sees opportunity. Like many post-punk groups, Camper van Beethoven (from whom the lyric comes) viewed the rapid rise and fall of punk music in the 1970s as the opening of a network of movement. Punk broke apart pop and disco genres, chewed up the fragments, then spit them back at a howling audience. The collapse of punk, though, ironically brought about a new freedom to inhabit previously unavailable musical spaces. Like other post-punk groups, Camper van Beethoven careened from polka to waltz to pop to folk without mocking them, a sort of engaged-but-flattened postmodern irony. - 30 -

bug in comments

The "comment" feature on posts occasionally gives an "internal server error" message. This is usually due to Clarkson's mail server being down: the blog notifies me via email when comments are posted, but Clarkson's email server is sporadically offline due to campus virus/spam issues, or the Lotus Domino server just coughing up a hairball, or both. If you get the error message, reload the main page and see if your comment has shown up. (Let me know the results one way or the other via email (johndan@clarkson.edu) if you do get the internal server error message, so I can continue to debug it. Thanks, Brad!)

Freedom vs. Choice

In a Christian Science Monitor article, Barbara Curtis builds a perceptive critique of the difference between Freedom and Choice. Beginning from a relatively mundane rant about the exploding number of choices one is forced to make in supermarkets:

Between leaving my empty van and returning to fill it with our family's food supply, I walk at least a mile, browsing aisles brimming with an assortment of food fit for a king: a dozen varieties of apples, a hundred imported cheeses, scores of pasta possibilities, frozen foods galore, an astonishing assortment of breads, and an increasingly outrageous array of ice creams.... The more options Americans have, the more our need for self-determination is sated by ridiculous choices like stamps and mustard and rings - the less fire we have for the choices our government continues to withhold (school vouchers) or begins to take away (gun ownership, religious expression).

Which, of course, is the danger of the Web: so much out there. Are you doing something with it?

Review of Design Books

LA Times has a useful review [archive version] of mass market books on design, a good entry point for thinking about design (of all types).

Ordinary things have long held their appeal in literature as catalysts for the familiar, but where do the things around us come from? Our lives are filled with myriad objects that collectively inform our actions, reactions and interactions: from cars to computers, toothbrushes to telephones, doorknobs to diaper pails, steering wheels to shopping carts. The list is inexhaustible, and each item's unique provenance is perhaps equally so. Arguably, to deconstruct such objects is one way to better understand the world around us. How do they respond to and reveal our personal narratives? How does their design tell us about who we are or who we might become? And why are such questions worthy of our attention or even relevant at this point in history?

Design continues to be overlooked in most product design. Users and customers fail to understand how difficult good design is. People who build things are frequently blind to how important good design is. Corporations foist bad design on the world in the midst of this confusion. We need to take examples of great design and figure out how to apply them to our experiences in general. (See another Design Observer piece on the interaction of design and Golden Gate Bridge jumpers.)

Included are reviews of Petroski's Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design, Lienhard's Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins, te Duit's The Origin of Things, Postrel's The Substance of Style, and Molotch's Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are.

"Where Do I Find the 'Any' Key?"

Compaq Support Library has help for users who can't figure out how to respond to the instruction to "Press any key to continue." [via IDBlog]

Getting to a Human

CNNMoney provides tips for escaping automated response customer service trees and actually talking to a person:

• American Express customers can hit zero to bypass the automated menu, but be patient. It will ask for your 15-digit card account number, which you may ignore. It will then say "We do not recognize your input," which you also ignore, and you will soon be connected to a live operator.
• For Hewlett-Packard say "agent" when you're first prompted to speak.
• Bank of America's escape code used to be hitting zero twice, but they may be on to us. Now you must hit zero three times.
And many more. [via boing-boing]
Posted by johndan at 09:53 AM | TrackBack