THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[October 28, 2002]
LucDesk is on vacation until at least 5 Nov 2002.
The Register: Alternative browser villains named and shamed - "Banks, who are naturally financially sensitive, fail to test for alternative browsers because the cost-benefit analysis doesn't add up, we're told. The suggestion from some financial outfits that they can't be sure alternative browsers are secure is, we believe, a red herring. After all they recommend IE, don't they?"
Paula Poundstone - "I don't have a bank account, because I don't know my mother's maiden name." (via QuotationsPage.com)
[October 26, 2002]
holovaty.com: Page titles on news article pages - "First, here's my philosophy on exactly what titles on news sites should accomplish: A good news article page title succinctly explains the page's content -- and how that content fits into the big picture of the site. So how can we accomplish this?"
[October 25, 2002]
Economist.com: Securing the cloud - "Computing, in short, is in the midst of a transition from an optional tool to a ubiquitous utility. And people expect utilities to be reliable. One definition of a utility, indeed, is a service that is so reliable that people notice it only when it does not work. [...] One of the many prerequisites for computing to become a utility is adequate security."
United Press International: A simple touch display for the visually impaired soon could provide access to computer-generated images.
[October 24, 2002]
WordBiz Report: "Usability means giving users and readers something familiar, that they recognize and know how to use."
Sherry Turkle (KurzweilAI.net): Whither Psychoanalysis in a Computer Culture? - "For some people, cyberspace is a place to 'act out' unresolved conflicts, to play and replay characterological difficulties on a new and exotic stage. For others, it provides an opportunity to 'work through' significant personal issues, to use the new materials of cybersociality to reach for new resolutions."
NY Times (free registration required): Reporters Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs
[October 23, 2002]
WebWord Interview: The Dynamic Duo of Information Architecture - "Why is it so hard to 'sell' information architecture and usability? If information architecture and usability are so wonderful, why do they need to be sold at all? Are designers, project managers and even CEOs total idiots? What is going on?" (An Interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, conducted via email by John S. Rhodes)
Ftrain: Accessibility
CSS2 visual properties index
Opera Small Screen Rendering: How do we do it?
New Scientist: Prototype glass sheet computer unveiled - "A transparent computer processor has been printed on to a flat plate of glass by researchers at Sharp's Japanese laboratory. Their success suggests ultra-thin computers and televisions could in future be built entirely on a single sheet of glass."
[October 22, 2002]
Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby has put up a RSS validator. It works with RSS 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0, but it is optimized for RSS 2.0 feeds.
Hypergene MediaBlog: Online news subscription models won't work, again - "Paying for online news in it's current form does not make convincing business or strategic sense. [...] Right now, general news sites will have three options: keep things status quo, survive on a small number of subscribers or become more useful and relevant. We vote for the last one. And that we'll pay for."
Chris McEvoy: The Day Alertbox Died - "I have felt that Alertbox [Jakob Nielsen's column on Web Usability] was getting boring, and puff pieces for the Nielsen Norman Group seemed to predominate. Rather than trust my gut feeling, I decided to do some analysis on the Alertbox articles, sidebars, and readers comments from 1995 until today (the detailed statistics will be updated every time a new Alertbox Article is published). What I found seemed to confirm my fears."
Louis Rosenfeld: Evangelizing User Experience Design on Ten Dollars a Day
Eszter's Weblog: Clicking frustration - "This is just one example of the ways in which both Web site layout and suboptimally programmed components of online forms can make navigating the Web more tedious and time consuming than necessary."
Remote Clip: copy-and-paste between Palms, Windows, and Unix - "Remote Clip enables you to transfer text and files among multiple computers - such as desktop computers, laptops, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) - by synchronizing their clipboards. Synchronization ensures that the clipboards of the computers are always identical."
[October 21, 2002]
Ray Kurzweil (KurzweilAI.net): Deep Fritz Draws: Are Humans Getting Smarter, or Are Computers Getting Stupider? - "Humans, even world class chess masters, perform the minimax algorithm extremely slowly, generally performing less than one move-countermove analysis per second. So how is it that a chess master can compete at all with computer systems that do this millions of times faster? The answer is that we possess formidable powers of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition incidentally is my principal area of technical interest and expertise, and is, in my view, the primary basis of human intelligence."
[October 20, 2002]
csmonitor.com: System error, reboot mind - "New theory claims that brains catch ideas the way computers catch software viruses."
The Register: "Scottish Power has barred Linux AND Opera users from signing up to its online energy accounts."
[October 18, 2002]
Amy J. Warner, Ph.D. (via Stephen Downes): A Taxonomy Primer - "What's the difference between a taxonomy and a thesaurus? What are the various types of controlled vocabularies, and how do they fit into a Web site's Information Architecture? How do you use the various schemes to greatest advantage? Learn how to 'take control' of these dynamic and effective tools for creating navigation schemes and search systems."
Anoto Functionality: Communicate digitally with ordinary pen and paper - "After thousands of years of evolution, pen and paper is still the best way to collect, store and distribute information. With Anoto functionality ordinary pen and paper is now connected to the endless possibilities of digital communication. Anything written or drawn can be sent via Graphical SMS, E-mail or Fax from anywhere to anyone."
Windows XP From A to Z
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) - "The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." (via QuotationsPage.com)
[October 17, 2002]
Good Experience: Google Interview: Marissa Mayer, Product Manager - "The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience. It's important to differentiate between 'usefulness' and 'usability.' At Google, we make a *useful* tool, and then we put a *usable* interface on top of that. One has to precede the other. If you have usability without a useful product, you don't really have much."
Intranet Journal: "Encouraging End User Self Sufficiency - "Here are a some suggestions of how you can help users to help themselves, ease the burden on your overworked tech support staff, and ultimately save your company money."
Webmonkey: The Secret Life of Markup - "In sum, presentation is the net result of a combination of stylistic choices made by the designer, any transformations that may be done on the source document, and the capabilities of the target platform."
[October 14, 2002]
New Scientist: Software predicts user behaviour to stop attacks - "The software generates a profile for each individual on a network by analysing the specific commands they enter at their terminal. It then monitors their activity and sounds the alarm on detecting suspicious behaviour. The finished product will do this in real time."
Mantex (Manchester - UK): Web Design - Book reviews and articles
[October 12, 2002]
Jenifer Tidwell: UI Patterns and Techniques - "In essence, patterns are structural and behavioral features that improve the 'habitability' of something -- a user interface, a Web site, an object-oriented program, or even a building. They make things more usable, easier to understand, or more beautiful; they make tools more ready-to-hand."
W. Somerset Maugham - "People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
[October 11, 2002]
"Wired News has a different appearance, but the new design isn't just about look and feel. The site now complies with standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium for greater access to all users."
The Making Connections Unit: What is an accessible website? - "An accessible website is one that is accessible to machines first (e.g. a computer) and people second. With this definition we are moving away from concentrating solely on content to looking at how we package that content, i.e. how we use HTML to give structure to web documents. All access to web pages is mediated through some type of technology. This is as true for disabled people using assistive technology as it is for everyone else."
First Monday: Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why - "This paper explores the semantic and rhetorical principles underlying link development and proposes a systematic, comprehensive classification of link types that would be of use to researchers and Web production teams."
Free XML tools and software
Doug Kaye: Consumer-Centric Form-Fill and Sign-On
Multi-Media Refrigerator
[October 9, 2002]
Anders Jacobsen: What is "cloaking"? - "Of course, as we all know, creating accessible pages will imply pages that are as easily read by search engine spiders as by blind people and other disabled visitors. Unfortunately this doesn't go down well with many in the hype-cool-funky-design-webmaster world... The alternative they've come up with is 'cloaking'; a server-side hack that allows the webserver to serve different content to search engine spiders and visitors ..."
"Contrary to common wisdom, user-centered design is not a process, but a philosophy."
NetConversions: Is 5000 Users Enough? - "It seems time (or past time, really) to take a more reliable approach towards understanding the experience of users who visit a web site, and fortunately, we’ve just arrived at a time when the technology is in place to allow it. It's actually possible to do usability testing with thousands of real users. This paper examines the technology involved and some of the benefits of attending to a large number of users."
[October 5, 2002]
dive into mark: Microsoft redesign - "The new design also fails even the most basic accessibility tests; the home page contains 80 instances of images without ALT text. This is the same basic failing for which the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games was successfully sued in 2000."
Gerry McGovern: "Change and innovation have become sacred cows. It's time for a bit of slaughter."
Webmonkey: The HTTP Error 404 Antidote
World Wide Words: Cyberplague - "The root that became cyber first appeared in the word cybernetics, which was coined by Norbert Wiener in his book of that name in 1948. Wiener derived it from the Greek for steersman and the idea of control is central to it."
Timothy R. V. Foster: The Art and Science of the Advertising Slogan
All-Flash A Fast Track to Failure - "Flash can be advantageous in sites that require highly visual content ..."
[October 2, 2002]
Step Two Designs: Keeping your intranet healthy and effective - "The real challenge is to maintain the quality, consistency and value of an intranet, well into the future. This article shows you how."
Wired News: "But while the software automates many core usability and accessibility solutions, humans must ultimately decide whether a design has a usability problem."
Jared M. Spool: Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines -"A small investment in studying how users interact with existing sites can reveal a lot about what works for your users on their tasks. You could easily develop an understanding of the 'best practices' and, from that, produce your own guidelines. Because you will generate your guidelines by directly observing your users, these guidelines are far more likely to be of value than generalized guidelines produced from sites that have little or nothing to do with your work."
Transform Magazine: Content at Your Fingertips: Better Ways to Classify & Tag
Oxford Internet Institute -"Exclusively devoted to the study of the impact of the Internet on society, the OII aims to put Oxford, the UK and Europe at the centre of debates about how the Internet could and should develop."
[October 1, 2002]
Manu Sharma, ACM SIGCHI WWW Human Factors (via Stephen Downes): Dissecting Nielsen Series:1.Outsourcing Web services - "Nielsen mainly argues that US companies should not outsource web services to countries like India, Russia and China because it separates usability professionals from targeted users. A close analysis shatters this argument."
DM Review: The Essentials of Information Quality Management
elearnspace: Instructional Design in Elearning - "This article explores ID in terms of: definitions, models, and usage."
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