THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[March 27, 2004]
Joan Silverman: "Reading online is a great way to gulp information. But for the sheer joy of sipping and savouring words, there's nothing like the real thing."
More about RSS
Check Any Site's Yahoo! WebRank: "What is this good for? Maybe you simply want to check your Yahoo WebRank without needing to install the Yahoo toolbar. Or maybe you are not running Windows with IE 5.0 or higher, so you can't install the toolbar."
[March 25, 2004]
Volvo: "We learned that if you meet women's expectations, you exceed those for men."
D. Weinberger: "The Jewish Journal points out that a search for 'Jew' at Google puts a site for Jew haters at the number one position. It sure seems to me that's Google been gamed by anti-Semites. At least, I hope that's the explanation since the alternative is pretty grim. I admit that this is a tough - and interesting - case, but I'd like to see Google move the site down since Google's aim is to provide us with good information. And, sure, I'd say the same thing if the first hit for 'Catholic,' 'Black,' 'Arab,' or 'Mel Gibson' were hate sites."
[March 24, 2004]
Didier Hilhorst: "Colors and design are direct interface features. In my opinion the level of attractiveness directly affects ease-of-use, enjoyment and usefulness. A good website, as opposed to just a usable website, should seamlessly blend accessibility, usability and aesthetic quality. Exclusively addressing usability is not enough - it will, unfortunately, not make your website de facto attractive, useful or enjoyable."
Wired News: Tell It What You're Searching For - "Web surfers may be able to talk to their computers one day using a browser announced Tuesday by Opera Software. The new browser incorporates IBM's ViaVoice technology, enabling the computer to ask what the user wants and 'listen' to the request. [...] The voice technology could open up the Internet to users who are physically unable to use a keyboard."
[March 23, 2004]
E-Commerce Times: "Despite Security Flaws, Internet Explorer Resists Decline and Fall"
D. Gelernter, Machine Beauty, Basic Books, 1998 - "Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones."
H. Mills - "Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes."
[March 20, 2004]
Joe Clark: High accessibilty, high design - "Anyone with good graphic-design skills can use Web standards to produce attractive Web sites that function adequately for nearly all viewers and very well for most viewers - including people with disabilities. This article will explore a few details concerning the interplay of accessibility and Web design."
[March 19, 2004]
Michael Boyle: Syndication and me - "I hate reading weblogs through their feeds. For me, the words on a website aren't really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site - the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons - I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner's work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like."
SuperfluousBanter: "To keep this post focused and simple I will assume that websites have two layers: design (UI/presentation) and code (technology/mark-up). Which layer is most important in building a succesful website? [...] It's not a matter of 'or', it's a matter of 'and'. We need both. I focus on design, not code - it's what I do and talk about. If you want to change the industry put your money where your mouth is, but don't tell people to stop doing what they love."
Quick and easy CSS layouts: RuthsarianLayouts, CSS Creator. (via)
Simple CSS - A Free CSS Authoring Tool
[March 18, 2004]
Steve Yelvington: RSS: Smoke or fire? - "I still do not have any evidence that there is a powerful reason to spend a bunch of time and attention on this. The numbers are very, very low, and there is not much evidence that RSS is effective at creating loyalty or commercially meaningful traffic (i.e., eyeballs we can sell ads against). Anybody who knows me knows that I've been a longtime supporter of RSS syndication -- in theory. It's the practice that I'm struggling with. Where's the beef? RSS headline distribution may make it easier for consumers to feel like they've kept up with the news -- but in reality perhaps it's just making it easier to not read the stories."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention, HarperCollins, New York, 1996 - "... creativity does not happen inside people's heads, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systematic rather than an individual phenomenon." (via)
[March 17, 2004]
BBC News: "Office workers are exposed to more germs from their phones and keyboards than toilet seats."
Kuro5hin: "In the past, blogging was an interesting pastime. Now, with the advent of the ridiculously popular weblog package Movable Type, the Web is in risk of drowning under a tidal wave of morons who throttle search engines with writing that has no purpose and such PageRank-destroying features as 'TrackBack'. [...] PageRank was not designed for this sort of linking where each in a series of a thousand pages links to all of the other 999 pages."
Andrei Michael Herasimchuk (Design by Fire): An open letter to Jakob Nielsen - "The manner in which you write, the lack of relevant evidence missing in many of your Alertboxes, the apparent lack of understanding about what it means to design something well from the point of view of the designer -- these things do nothing to promote better design in the future."
Evolt.org: "10 new ways to speed up download time"
[March 15, 2004]
The Register: The perils of Googling - "Google is in many ways most dangerous website on the Internet for thousands of individuals and organisations, writes SecurityFocus columnist Scott Granneman. Most computers users still have no idea that they may be revealing far more to the world than they would want."
Update - Information Today: Fiddling with File Types - "Using file type limiters, it is easy enough to pull up all the files in a certain format, as long as you know the search engine's syntax." (via Inter Alia)
Processing: "A programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook. The software is currently in a prerelease stage, but bug fixes are being made as we head toward a more complete '1.0' release. Processing will be free to download and available for Mac, PC, and Linux." (via things magazine)
Common Craft: "RSS is not about increasing page views- it's about keeping people engaged."
[March 14, 2004]
Seth Finkelstein: RSS/Atom Wars - Peace In Our Time? - "How can you route around big media, revolutionize society, create new forms of participatory democracy, solve deeply complicated social problems ... when 'we' can't even agree on a format for web site content syndication?!"
Rocketinfo: A Free Personal Web-based RSS News Reader (RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom Compliant)
[March 13, 2004]
Danah Boyd: What I want in an RSS tool - "First, I want to be able to choose to watch an entry, a topic or a person. I don't want to be forced into a person only; this unit of view is way too big. Following a person should be like now - I see everything in their feed. [...] I don't want automated recommendation systems. I want tools so that my friends can do what they already do - pass on information that they think is relevant. But I want to make it easy for them. And perhaps have a mechanism to say 'THANK YOU!' As more and more people blog, RSS is going to break on the social/attention level. In many ways, it already has for me. I've started interviewing bloggers and I'm fascinated by how hard it is for them to consider adding something to their RSS. Overload. Overload. If anyone wants to know why the early players get all of the attention, it's because RSS feeds focus on people, not ideas, and the early players are too overloaded with following the other early players to consider new people."
Research Center for Semiotics, Berlin: General: what is semiotics? - "Semiotics is a science concerned with signs. It deals with all processes of information interchange in which signs feature. Human beings talk, write, blink, wave, and disguise themselves. They put up signposts and erect barriers to communicate messages to other people. They produce and interpret signs."
Martin Ryder's collection of links on semiotics (via Peter Lindberg)
Creativity and Innovation Quotes
[March 11, 2004]
Tristan Louis: "The world wide web, as it was used pre-RSS is becoming an archival medium and RSS is becoming the updated world (as a side note, this is going to have a huge impact on web-side design and marketing as one has to rethink how to reach reader in a space where all entries look alike)." (via Nova Spivack)
Nature Science Update: "Quantum computing gets a step closer"
Creative Research Systems: "Tips on creating questionnaires and designing a successful survey research project."
Esther Dyson, chair, EDventure Holdings: "Google means that I no longer have an excuse to be ignorant. You can't go into meetings unprepared anymore! I have a Google sticker on my computer that, when I go through airport security and take out my PC, the security guys see and act like I have a cute baby or something: 'Ooh, Google!'" (Googlemaniacs)
[March 10, 2004]
Photo Matt: Code is Food - "HTML is the ingredients and CSS is the world-class chef that takes the ingredients and arranges them in an attractive, delicious way. [...] Sure some people don't care about whatever markup is behind the web pages they visit. Out of site and out of mind, right? (Very apathetic American.) But I care, and it's because of people who care that the web has moved beyond the near-unusable mess it was 5-7 years ago. On one level I care about the health of the web, the long-term viability of the sites and pages and documents that are shaping our culture and society. On a deeper level I hold a number of principles that the web should be efficient, standards-based, and accessible. No site is perfect, but some try and some don't."
[March 09, 2004]
The New Atlantis: Romance in the Information Age - "In a world where men and women still claim to want to find that one special person-a 'soul mate'-to spend their life with, what role can and should we afford technology and, more broadly, science, in their efforts?"
Stephen VanDyke: "How News Travels on the Internet"
[March 08, 2004]
EContentMag.com: "RSS has the added benefit of providing a clean, clear way to subscribe and unsubscribe, something that is not always true with email newsletters." (via Scripting News)
Alvin Toffler - "What do networks want? The redistribution of power!"
[March 07, 2004]
Christopher Allen: "We need to leave the whole business of fear behind and instead embrace a new model: using cryptography to enable business rather than to prevent harm. We need to add value by making it possible to do profitable business in ways that are impossible today." (via Ian Bicking)
The Eyes Have It: "A weblog devoted (mainly) to visual communications in the pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare sectors. Edited by Lee W. Potts."
[March 06, 2004]
Randall Balsmeyer, designer (from Becoming a Graphic Designer by Steven Heller and Teresa Fernandes) - "The best design does not come from knowing 2,000 typefaces and six Macintosh programs by heart. It comes from having a life and being observant and involved in the world at large." (via HOW magazine)
[March 05, 2004]
Wired News: "The most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas, say researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs. Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution. These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that 'infect' large populations."
Blog Epidemic Analyzer (via Magnetbox)
Search Engine Watch: "The quest by some to improve their Google PageRank score seems to have reached the point of sheer madness."
R. Buckminster Fuller, US architect and engineer (1895 - 1983) - "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
[March 03, 2004]
New Scientist: Magic cube conjures virtual reality kid's tales - "A novel interactive way to relate children's stories has been developed by researchers in Singapore. The Magic Story Cube uses augmented reality technology, in which computer graphics are superimposed on the real world, to overlay an animated version of a story on top of a child's traditional 'magic cube'."
fontBROWSER: "FREE online flash application that allows you to preview the fonts active on your system."
Mossad website 'hacker' walks free: "Presiding judge Abraham Tennenbaum: Internet surfers who check the vulnerabilities of Web sites are acting in the public good. If their intentions are not malicious and they do not cause any damage, they should even be praised."
Xah Lee: Algorithmic Mathematical Art - "With the inception of computers, there starts a movement of mathematical computer art. In the beginning, they are merely visualization aids in the study of matehmatics. Gradually, the complexity and artistry of the images becomes a means itself. In this exposition, I try to exam the various methods of algorithmic mathematical art, and indicate the various states of the art and possibilities." (via leuschke.org)
Dr. Linus Pauling - "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
[March 02, 2004]
Mark Nottingham: RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters
Dave Beckett: Redland RSS 1.0 Validator and Viewer
[March 01, 2004]
Yarone Goren: Conflict in HCI Field: Computer Science vs. Psychology - "HCI is unfairly weighted into the realm of Computer Science. Instead, it should be leaning more towards the world of Psychology. Computer Science students do not know what HCI really means. Their curriculum and professors push them towards the process of 'coding.' The ongoing 'crisis' of consistent failures in the software industry will continue until computer science professionals stop thinking, myopically, in terms of software all of the time. What we need are Software Engineers, whose first and foremost goals and obligations are to understand the dynamics of the work domain. Secondly (and less importantly) they must know enough about the different implementation strategies in this world in order to make good technology decisions."
NewScientist.com: "First robot moved by muscle power"
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