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THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !

Last Updated: October 30, 2004

[February 28, 2003]

Marcus Haid: Starting a Career in User Experience - "This article is based upon my own experience transitioning from a career in corporate-world project management into the field of user experience design. With dedication, some talent, a few classes, and a healthy dose of self-promotion, the transition was fairly easy, very enjoyable, and took about two years."

Monster.com warns job seekers about ID theft - "Internet job board Monster.com, acknowledging a growing problem for online career sites, is e-mailing millions of job seekers, warning that fake listings are being used to gather and steal personal information."

The Detroit News: "Ford Motor Co. is slashing its information technology budget by $300 million a year, or 20 percent, as part of the company's cost-cutting efforts."

[February 25, 2003]

"OOS (Occupational Overuse Syndrome) also known as RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is an injury that is becoming more and more common in today's computer intensive world. OOS/RSI can be very painful and debilitating if not treated early. With this in mind, the best cure is prevention, though if the injury already exists, it requires strict work methods to allow recovery. Break Reminder can help achieve this."

Web Design for Dyslexic Users

[February 24, 2003]

ScienceDaily News Release: Has Your Computer Talked Back To You Lately? New Software Translation Tool Can Communicate - "OPCAT, a new software translation tool developed at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology enables those not versed in the languages of computers to communicate with them either verbally through spoken or written language, or graphically through diagrams. When one chooses the verbal route, OPCAT translates the user's input into diagrams; conversely, if one inputs graphics, OPCAT translates them into natural spoken language. This allows even average users to make programming changes themselves [...]"

Gerry McGovern: "Credibility and trustworthiness are major issues for people searching for information."

Lorrie Cranor on privacy, online voting and Internet censorship.

[February 22, 2003]

Jeff Lash (Digital Web Magazine): A User-Centered Approach to Selling Information Architecture - "What people do want is a way to decrease abandoned shopping carts, to increase inquiries gathered through the Web site, to reduce calls to customer service, to increase ad impressions, or to provide information to help employees become more efficient. Almost all of the time, people want things that will lead to increased revenue or decreased cost. Having a Web site, and having information architecture involved in that Web site, is just a means to an end."

"You may have asked yourself: What is a portlet?, What is a portal?, What is a portal server? Here, we present a summary answer for each question, and tell you where to find more information if you need it. Once you have a good understanding of what portlets, portals, and portal servers are, you'll be equipped to make an informed decision about using them for your projects."

"I can't get you a drink. I don't have a Palm Pilot."

Word 'bursts' may reveal online trends - "[...] The approach could also be applied to sifting through other types of information. Identifying word bursts within email messages sent to a company's customer support address might help maintenance staff spot a major new problem."

SAP Design Guild: Branding - From the Point of View of a Usability & Design Consultant

[February 18, 2003]

James Robertson (Step Two Designs): Is it Document Management or Content Management? - "These two types of systems are very different, and serve complementary needs. While there is an ongoing move to merge the two together (a positive step), it is important to understand when each system is appropriate."

Mark Deuze, OJR: The Future of News - "The online journalist has to make decisions on which media format or formats best tell a certain story (multimedia), has to consider options for the public to respond, interact or even customize certain stories (interactivity), and thinks about ways to connect the story to other stories, archives, resources and so on through hyperlinks (hypertext)." The Internet and its Journalisms, Part I: A Typology of Online Journalism

Jewish World Review: Yeast protein could make new computer chip material

[February 15, 2003]

"The days of Web users randomly 'surfing' to sites is ending. Now, more than ever, people know exactly where they want to go on the Web," said Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for StatMarket. "This does not mean search sites or other Web links are now less important, because users still have to initially find a site before they can bookmark it. However, having a site worth returning to is becoming increasingly important to businesses."

David Weinberger (Joho the Blog): Moral Implications of the Web's - "Now look at the Web's architecture. Links come first. Every time I put in a link to a site, I am sending people away from my site, a little act of selflessness and generosity. The Web is characterized by generosity throughout. The Web is a shared world created out of shared interests. It is fundamentally connected, sympathetic and moral."

David Weinberger - "What's the paradigmatic thing of the Web? A page. It's meaningful. It speaks to us. It was created by humans. It only is a page on the Web insofar as it's linked to other pages."

[February 13, 2003]

Intranet Journal: "Let's take a closer look at the benefits of an intranet pilot:

InfoVis.net: The Catastrophe of the Space Shuttle - "The sad accident of the Columbia Space Shuttle has triggered the creation of many charts in order to explain what happened. We review the importance of Visualisation in this accident and, especially, in the catastrophe of the Challenger in 1986. [...] The correct visualisation of information usually makes a difference. Sometimes in a tragic way."

Jared M. Spool: 5 Things To Know About Users - "The user's intentions, context, knowledge, skills, and experience are the essential things that every designer needs to know. Without this, the team is going to design something that seems useful, but they'll never know if it actually helps the user. [...] Unfortunately, these five things are beyond what normal market research can tell us. Market research can tell us age groups, income levels, geographic regions, even purchase behavior. But it can't tell us the key things we need to know."

Yuri Engelhardt: The Language of Graphics

[February 10, 2003]

Usable Help - "Examining documentation and help systems for software and consumer products."

Rita Mae Brown, US author and social activist - "One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory."

[February 9, 2003]

SiliconValley.com: Is PowerPoint the devil? - "[...] But PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but - inevitably, it seems - your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn't stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience - which is at the mercy of your presentation. [...] PowerPoint may be an easier, spiffier way to present information, but is it a better way?"

Bandwidth Place, Speed Test

[February 8, 2003]

Garry Kasparov on Chess Computers - "This kind of competition brings to the scientists the best field for investigation and comparison between human intuition and creativity and the brute force of a machine's calculation. Here is a short history of chess-playing computers and my views on their playing characteristics."

[February 7, 2003]

Usability News 5.1 Issue, February 2003 - Inside this Issue:

Amazon Browser - "A tool for browsing the mass of literature, music and film contained in the Amazon database, by exploring links between related items."

Jay Small (Small Initiatives): "I don't hate Flash; I just hate what it does to designers"

Peter-Paul Koch - "The continuing professionalization of the Web site industry will convert print and other designers to Web designers and will weed out the few obstinate ones who refuse to understand the medium."

Interactive Data Visualization (via Anitra Pavka)

John Gabrieli, Stanford University - "Most of the stuff we think of as smart is based on experience."

[February 6, 2003]

Symantec Security Response: Cyberterrorism and the Home User (about 73K as .PDF file) - "When people discuss the threat posed by cyberterrorism, one of the biggest problems encountered is that there are many different definitions of the term itself. If you ask ten people what cyberterrorism is, you are likely to get many different descriptions. In all of these descriptions, however, there is a common thread: the computer is firmly ensconced as the target of cyberterrorist attack. [...] Although the issue of Cyberterrorism sounds daunting, it really does not change a great deal for the home user. Being responsible in the way we use our computers is simply that: being responsible. If you take care of your machine, this complex issue is very unlikely to affect your home computer use."

Health Management Technology Online: Healthcare's Last Mile: Linking Disparate Information Systems - "Healthcare organizations have spent billions in recent years on information technology, but we still are not having a sufficient impact on patients and the quality of care they receive. We have not gone the last mile. The reason: a myriad of disparate systems that cannot talk to each other. Too often, the information is stored in silos, legacy systems unable to talk to each other."

[February 5, 2003]

Geek.com: Your password is about to expire - "[...] It is my feeling that the password situation will only get more confusing before we simplify it with biometrics or voice recognition."

InfoVis.net: Visualising Social Interaction - "Social interaction provides us with visual patterns that help us to situate ourselves in our environment. In Internet, however, this doesn't happen so easily. Some visualisations are appearing to remedy the problem."

[February 4, 2003]

Poynter Online: Graphics Front and Center - "The large infographic helps to give context to the story by explaining some of the basic facts on everyone's mind."

Stephen Downes (NewsTrolls): Copyright, Ethics and Theft - "If the objectives of those who defend copyright were really to stimulate creativity rather than monopoly and control, they would throw off the fetters of intellectual property legislation and embrace the opportunities a genuinely free market of ideas would provide. But they are not willing to do so. And so, we all lose."

Solid wood computer peripherals

[February 3, 2003]

New Scientist: "Distributed computing may finally become a useful tool in complex problem solving thanks to research in the US that appears to overcome its biggest drawback - how to distribute the problem in the first place."

Chess Visualisation Training - "People tend to lose 'sight' when calculating the moves in their heads. When making a search for 'blindfold chess' on the internet you soon find information that one of the most important advances in your chess life is to master the art of visualisation. That's why there is this website."

Lao Zi [Lao Tze] - "Without going outside, you may know the whole world!" (Classic Chinese Quotations)

[February 2, 2003]

"The US space agency's (Nasa) spacecraft and satellites could soon have their own net address. [...] Nasa is keen to use standard terrestrial techniques to route data to and from satellites and spacecraft to cut costs and make off-planet resources easier to manage."

Imagination at Work!

[February 1, 2003]

Colonel Ilan RamonBBC: Israeli astronaut carried nation's dreams

BBC: Columbia's crew - "Pen-portraits of lost astronauts"

Columbia Breaks Up During Reentry; NASA Fears Crew Lost - "Contact was lost with Space Shuttle Columbia at 9:00 AM EST as Columbia was passing over Texas at an altitude of 200,000 feet, travelling around 12,500 mph (Mach 6) at that time contact was lost."

Israeli News Agency page on Ilan Ramon

Update - Infographics: Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster (via NewsTrolls)

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