THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[September 29, 2003]
Viswanath Gondi (SitePoint): Making Rich Web Application Architecture Usable - "Users have certain basic likes and dislikes with various types of interaction. They are valid not only with human-computer interactions, but also in real life. Removing what users don't like and concentrating what they do like is the first step towards improved user satisfaction. Listed below are 10 things that users hate [...]"
Dan Cederholm (via Brainstorms & Raves): SimpleQuiz - "The objective is to ask some questions about markup and generate some discussion about preferred methods."
Peter Seebach (IBM): "What can users do to glean wheat from the chaff of bad software design?" (via Tomalak's Realm)
[September 28, 2003]
Dan Northover (Executive Creative Director, Global Beach Group via .net) - "Sure, the beauty of online is the flexibility and spontaneity of the medium, but as the industry matures, the time has come for online design to change and begin truly taking responsibility for the things it designs. [...] Fundamentally, profitable, successful Web projects require smart design. So, don't be afraid to re-use existing design elements from other mediums. Greater levels of Object Orientated coding using .Net and XML, will mean that successful design is less about invention and more about smart re-utilisation of both code and shared thinking."
Gerry McGovern - "A website needs to be flexible. It needs to be able to change as the organization changes. The more change within the organization the more flexible the website needs to be. Too many websites are still being designed from a print perspective; as if they were some once-off brochure."
How the Dominance of Microsoft's Products Poses a Risk to Security (about 880K as .PDF file, via Scott Loftesness) - "Most of the world's computers run Microsoft's operating systems, thus most of the world's computers are vulnerable to the same viruses and worms at the same time. The only way to stop this is to avoid monoculture in computer operating systems, and for reasons just as reasonable and obvious as avoiding monoculture in farming. Microsoft exacerbates this problem via a wide range of practices that lock users to its platform. The impact on security of this lock-in is real and endangers society."
[September 26, 2003]
Shana Tova - Happy New Year !
The Jewish New Year starts tonight. LucDesk wishes its readers a year of health, happiness and
above all, peace.
BBC News: Microsoft chat move 'irresponsible' - "Microsoft's decision to close the free, unmoderated chatrooms of its MSN internet service has sparked strong reactions. Children's charities have welcomed the move as a positive step to ensuring children's safety online. But major net service providers have criticised the action as 'irresponsible' and say it is driven by economic concerns rather than keeping children safe. Net experts have also warned it could drive vulnerable young people to other unmoderated chatrooms on the net."
W. Somerset Maugham - "People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
[September 25, 2003]
John Emerson - "Can design change the world? I don't pretend that social and political problems can be solved with technology, but tools, technologies, and techniques of communication can profoundly alter our relationship to the world, to power, and to each other."
NewScientist.com: E-paper may offer video images - "A dramatically simple idea may finally make 'electronic paper' displays a realistic prospect. If so, animated versions of a newspaper could, one day, be unfurled like a roller-blind on a flexible wireless display."
[September 23, 2003]
Peter Coffee (eWEEK.com): Simplify for Security - "No enterprise IT boss should be afraid to budget for continuing investigation and remediation of platform and application defects. It's not a confession of incompetence. It is a mistake, though, for IT buyers to continue to remedy symptoms instead of attacking problems at their source."
Dan Gillmor (Mercury News): Open source helps education effort in Third World - "In Africa, in Asia, in much of the world -- especially in the developing nations -- open source is looking like the best way to usher in the information age. Money, flexibility and plain old independence from a monopolist's clutches are a powerful combination."
Developer Utilities (Scott Hanselman's Weblog via less|effort)
[September 22, 2003]
Gerry McGovern: "The words you use make a big difference on the Internet. Carefully chosen, they can keep a customer happy. Sloppily chosen, they can infuriate."
[September 19, 2003]
"Does designing to Web standards give organizations a return on investment? Does the transition to XHTML and CSS make financial sense? Jeff says the answer is yes."
Jeffrey Veen: On Writing Short - "We need to create experiences that allow people to intuitively know what is required of them, so they can make unconscious decisions that lead them to their goals."
[September 18, 2003]
The Sydney Morning Herald: Online health sites a worldwide worry - "Holly Cardamone, a Melbourne communications consultant and qualified nurse, found that most websites with health information failed to meet basic standards, some were commercially driven and others could mislead patients. Cardamone checked the top 100 sites returned on the Yahoo! search engine in the categories of breast cancer, diabetes and depression. She found that only a minority conformed to an international standard on how information should be given."
[September 16, 2003]
Editor & Publisher: It's Time to Blog Hard News on Your Site - "It's time for increasing the speed of news sites -- to that of television news -- and Weblogs are the way to do it. And it's time to stop thinking of blogs mostly in the realm of feature and opinion content, and move the concept into breaking news."
[September 14, 2003]
Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security Inc.) - "It's crazy that Firestone can produce this tire with a systemic flaw and they're liable, whereas Microsoft produces an operating system with two systemic flaws per week and they're not liable." (via seattlepi.com)
Lawrence R. Rabiner (Center for Advanced Information Processing) - "The distinction between work life and home life will blur as we can do whatever we want from wherever we are at any time. Work will become something we do, not someplace we go." (via ScienceDaily)
[September 13, 2003]
Wired News: Are You Too Stupid to Surf? - "A lot of the bad things that happen online are preventable. Intelligent use of the Internet is the answer. But there are plenty of dopes out there who don't have a clue. Should we require Internet users to be licensed?"
[September 11, 2003]
Chiara Fox (Boxes and Arrows): Sitemaps and Site Indexes: What They Are and Why You Should Have Them - "Sitemaps and site indexes are forms of supplemental navigation. They give users a way to navigate a site without having to use the global navigation. By providing a way to visualize and understand the layout and structure of the site, a sitemap can help a lost or confused user find her way. Sitemaps are more widely implemented than site indexes, but both have their place and fulfill a unique information need. [...] As more sites adopt them, users will become more familiar with their benefits and make use of them as a navigational tool within a site."
silicon.com: 10 questions computers might ask human beings - and vice versa
The Register: Websites that crash - "Nine out of ten people have been forced to abandon an online transaction because the application failed before completion."
[September 10, 2003]
Mercury News: Password Overload - "But what else are we to do? Keeping track of an e-mail user name and password was simple enough. But then came online news subscriptions, online auctions, online banking and bill-pay -- and each of them brought a new user name and password. [...] Until authentication turns the corner into the next generation -- using biometric services such as eye scans, fingerprint recognition and voice authentication -- we're stuck with passwords."
[September 08, 2003]
Edward Tufte: PowerPoint Is Evil - "If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience."
Recent Metrics (CIO.com):
- More than 1.5 million hotel rooms worldwide will be wired to the Internet by 2006.
- By 2007, 85 percent of Sweden's population will have been online at least five years, up from 28 percent in 2002.
- E-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2003 totaled $12.48 billion, a 27.8 percent increase over the same period in 2002.
[September 07, 2003]
BBC News: Google celebrates fifth birthday - "Now Google has stopped simply reflecting the organisation of the web. Instead a high Google rank for a search now defines a page's quality and relevance."
[September 06, 2003]
Russ Cooper (Chief Scientist at TruSecure Corporation and NTBugtraq Editor): Is it a worm, a virus, or a trojan? - "I don't think it is possible for consumers to protect themselves based purely on software or hardware. They need to understand more about malware, why it gets them, what to look for."
New Scientist: Computer antivirus strategies in crisis - "Signature-based approaches should not be abandoned, says Williamson [Hewlett-Packard researcher], as they are useful for cleaning up infected computers. But to stop the spread of a fast-propagating virus, the antiviral mechanisms have to step in before signatures become available."
[September 04, 2003]
James Robertson: Drawing clear lines between information systems - "In many organisations, the intranet competes with e-mail, file shares, the document management system and records management. Information is scattered between these systems, making it difficult for users to know where to look. What is needed is a clear policy about when these information systems should be used, and what they are for."
[September 02, 2003]
Steve Outing (Editor & Publisher): With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative - "For many consumers, moving from e-mail newsletters to RSS feeds might seem daunting. It is up to publishers, then, to sell the RSS concept, and explain that it's a solution to the spam muddle. RSS really is a better way, especially for those who regularly read a whole passel of Web sites, blogs, and/or e-newsletters. It replaces manually viewing a bunch of bookmarked sites with a single aggregation pane of fresh content, quickly consuming headlines and blurbs, and clicking through to the stuff that looks really interesting. It's a big time saver."
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