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Weblog news
Some usable Web stuff
Articles from SURL's Usability News that we can really use. Found at webword
- Where should you put the links "Although no significant objective differences were found, the consistent results of the subjective perceptions of link navigability, as well as general preference, suggest that the Embedded link arrangement is perceived as being the superior format for online documents within a single frame."
- Criteria for optimal web design (designing for usability) Covers many important design questions from a human concern perspective. How should information be positioned in a typical website? How can I make my website's structure more navigable? How can I effectively use images on my website? Are frames ever appropriate?
- What is the Best Layout for Multiple-Column Web Pages? Fluid, center fixed-width or left justified fixed-width? They didn't find any actual usage differences but they did find that subjectively, the "left-justified layout was consistently the least preferred condition."
Random things found on the Web
- Somebody really ought to write this book - Distributing Clue to Users
- Net Traffic shrinking? "In the past two months, the number of active Internet users declined 1.6 percent and the number of people with Net connections stayed flat, according to data from Nielsen NetRatings" Probably caused by layoffs or maybe are getting back to work at work.
- Trend World Virus Tracking center Real time maps of virus data.
- Linotype's Identifont It identifies a font with a series of questions. Seems to work but only tried it with a few typical faces that I knew anyway.
- The Physics of the Web "One thing is clear. While entirely of human design, the emerging network appears to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than with a Swiss watch. Many diverse components, each performing a specialized job, contribute to a system that is evolving and changing at an incredible speed. Increasingly, we are realizing that our lack of understanding of the Internet and the Web is not a computer-science question. Rather it is rooted in the absence of a scientific framework to characterize the topology of the network behind it. " Found at peterme
Science news
- Monster hurricanes could hit U.S A major shift in the climate has taken place that has brought about an increase in major hurricanes. MSNBC has an article on new forecasting techniques
- Chillies fiery mystery solved The mystery of why chilli peppers are hot has been solved - the answer is for the birds. US scientists have found evidence that the chilli's bite may have evolved to repel animals who are ineffective at dispersing its seeds and encourage the more effective seed spreaders, like birds.
Chicago Blogs
With Lake Effect still on hiatus, greasyskillet on a break and a few others here in Chicago stopping or slowing down (me included - only 6 posts last month), I thought I'd update my list over there on the left since I've been missing out on a few good local blogs. Brad's in town this weekend and he's managed to organize a few of us to get together. Here are the additions, some of which should've been noted a long time ago. Also I should note the Chicago Stories project, in its building stage.
I know there's plenty more, but these are ones that peaked my interest with a mix of smart content and local interest.
More Web Things
- Too Much Flash on the Brain "Lynda Weinman preaches the Web Aesthetics gospel and Pamela Pfiffner shouts Hallelujah" Outlines a few trends in Flash design with good examples.
- 10 Ways to Meet Journalists' Needs Online "Most of the journalists I know tend to get remarkably peeved by Web sites and other online operations that waste their time or that make their job more difficult. A peeved journalist can wreak considerable havoc." I recently attempted to fact check a travel story about Las Vegas that was written from current press materials and Web site grabs. 8 out of ten attractions/events listed no longer existed.
Code Red
Code Red hits the White House, White House side steps by changing to a back-up IP address. The National Infrastructure Protection Center reported "Upon successful infection, the worm will proceed to use the time thread and connect to the www.whitehouse.gov domain. This attack consists of the infected systems simultaneously sending 100 connections to port 80 of www.whitehouse.gov" Microsoft offered a patch a month ago calling this a "serious vulnerability". Slashdot holds contest to predict what Friday's headlines will be. (This is my first slashdot link in almost two years.) They also point out where the hacker went wrong - "whitehouse.gov simply sidestepped its IP address (the stupid worm author hardcoded it instead of using DNS)"
Other Web stuff
(Unless Bush shuts the internet down for National Security reasons ,God forbid if the world would be denied seeing the photos of the president, his wife, dad and brother at a tee-ball game on the south lawn.)
- The Smart-Ass guide to NY
- 405 A Web based action driving movie that doesn't include a BMW - an airliner lands on a jeep. Not to put down BWMfilms, the latest and last is one of the best of the series. Obviously the directors had quite a bit of control, especially since this last one includes an anti-yuppie line of dialogue.
- I can't believe dancingpaul.com won the personal site award at the Webbies. Even worse was MicroSoft Windows Update winning as for technical achievement. On my Mac with MSIE 5.0 I got a blank page, no errror, no nothing (My theory is an ActiveX-to-Mac script error). In the source is an error instruction on how to minimize your security settings on a PC with ActiveX so you can view the page. Also I should mention numerous tag errors abound including attributes without quotes and various formating tags left open.
Web Things
Fibonacci and Phyllotaxis
Phyllotaxis - an interactive site for the mathematical study of plant pattern foundation. Phyllotaxis - "the study of the arrangement of repeated units such as leaves around a stem, scales on a pine cone or on a pineapple, florets in the head of a daisy, and seeds in a sunflower." "The number of spirals in the two visible families of spirals are almost always successive elements in the famous Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.... where each number is the sum of the previous two." Lots of info, some fun-to-play-with but very complex applets, and a great tutorial on the math behind spiral plant growth. The theories make sense but the math goes way over my head, really fast. This link picked up in the real world from my cousin-in-law who is one of the creators of this site. Another site with lots of visual models of interactions between plants and their environments can be found at Visual Models of Morphogenesis: A Guided Tour. Don't miss the animation section.
KIPlog back
That's a bat that shared my room in Lake George, NY. I'm finally back from vacation and I'm managing to get back into things after chasing porcupines in upstate NY and crawling around in the dark hallways of an abandoned WWII bunker on the Jersey shore. I've been back for a few weeks, and it was a little difficult to get back to blogging. While I've never really been concerned about whether or not I'm updating, I did notice I've lost track of quite a few things that I wanted to note down. Also since I haven't been blogging, I haven't been reading. I was going to make a list of the essential blogs you would need to catch up on things if you were away, but I've already done that - it's over there on the left. The fastest way of course is metafilter.
For now, here's a list of 2 weeks' worth of stuff everybody should know:
Web stuff
Science
KIPlog on vacation
That's a picture of me leaving Chicago. I'm on the east coast for a week. When I get back I'll have to post the 30 or 40 things piling up in my bookmarks.
Smart tags
I'm away for a week or two, but I must comment on this smart tag thing. ALA has the best overview of the battleground forming over this assault on the web.
Even if smart tags don't violate copyright or deceptive trade laws, they still violate the integrity of the web. Part of the appeal of the web is that it allows anyone to publish anything, to take their thoughts, feelings and opinions and put them before the world with no censors or marketroids in the way. By adding smart tags to web pages, Microsoft is interposing itself between authors and their audience. Microsoft told Walter Mossberg "the feature will spare users from 'under-linked' sites." Microsoft is in effect deciding how authors should write, and how developers should build, websites.
Only Microsoft would have the balls to force their influence on the entire content of the web. Every Web page, from doctoral dissertations, to intelligent Weblogs, to some teenagers angst filled journal, to the multi-million dollar ecommerce sites are under seige. There will be preference checkboxes, meta tags and other ways to disable a monopoly's influence over our content, but by the time developers and clients have to spend millions adding code, and independent publishers have to let their readers know how to tell which links on their own pages are not endorsed by them, it will be to late. Hopefully this stupid, useless "feature" will go the way of Bob, Push, Clippy and the CueCat.
Dogs in Elk
Dogs in Elk "It's like that childrens book out there - dogs in elk, dogs on elk, dogs around elk, dogs outside elk. And there is some elk inside of, as well as on, each dog at this point. " via notsosoft, one of the funniest blogs on either side of the Atlantic.
Web-related links
I'm starting to get into the bad habit of letting other Weblogs find my links for me.
- Then, Now, Next: Five Perspectives on the Web Development Industry I would never have thought that Zeldman and Nielsen could fit on the same page. via wood s lot
- Dirty Tricks for Adult Webmasters You would figure a list of scripts for p0rn sites would include the tiny pop-below window, the on_close - new window, the place-seventy-cookies script, etc. but these are actually pretty tame. The only pop-up script is a first time visitor only script which alot of "legit" commercial sites should be using for their useless pop ups. This site actually looks semi-responsible with their shit list of adult sponsors and hosters that play dirty, and net nanny page which urges Webmasters to keep their sites blocked to minors and provides advice on how to do it. via Antenna
- Tomalak's Realm, which I've had over there on the list on the left for over 22 months, is going away this week. Linking 1-2-3 is his outdated but still timeless description of the link-gathering process. "It's an interesting process to track down links using several different methods and to see how it fits in with how sites are built and content published. "
- As a tribute to Tomalak's Lawrence Lee, I'll filch one last link from him - Information Waste "It's time to start treating customer data like it matters." There's plenty of other good stuff at this month's Darwin, including "insights into corporate espionage, project management, searching the Web" and a reporters account of spending a day in NY with a PDA and the wireless Web.
Knowledge
Knowledge Management - Emerging Perspectives A primary source for figuring out what knowledge management really is. "In an organizational context, data represents facts or values of results, and relations between data and other relations have the capacity to represent information. Patterns of relations of data and information and other patterns have the capacity to represent knowledge. For the representation to be of any utility it must be understood, and when understood the representation is information or knowledge to the one that understands. Yet, what is the real value of information and knowledge, and what does it mean to manage it?"
Included is an incredible list of links about the subject. Knowledge Representation Needs the Web from the
Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University is on the list. I found Reusable Ontologies - A Key Enabler for Electronic Commerce on KSL a few days ago - and found it a little sad that such valuable knowledge on knowledge representation was represented in Powerpoint.
Kurzweil's world
KurzweilAI.net "focuses on the exponential growth of intelligence, both biological and machine, and the merger of the two in a post-humanist future." Ray Kurzweil hosts articles by "leading visionaries" from Marvin Minsky and Sherry Turkle to Ted Kaczynski and Swami Vivekananda. Continually updated, this site comes complete with its own avatar/agent/chatterbot and a search engine with an effective, dynamic, visual map of the relationships between all concepts discussed on the site.
Weblogs
Telling A Story
The Weblog As A Project-Management Tool Jon Udell back-pedals on an earlier statement that Weblogs are a passing fad: "Blogging as a form of mainstream Web entertainment, with its star performers and its popularity ratings, may or may not be a passing fad. What will endure, in any case, matters more: a powerful new way to tell stories that refer to, and make sense of, the documents and messages that we create and exchange in our professional lives. " He goes on to describe the concept and features of a Project Weblog stressing that the "tools aren't the story". "The weblog I've shown here is made using the equivalent of stone axes -- ftp and a text editor." I've been using project Weblogs in one sort or another since I saw the examples in David Siegel's Secret of Successful Websites three or four years ago and they've always served me well, for communication, approval process, deadline compliance and CYA documentation.
Also in Weblog news is Weblogs: A New Source of News Blogs will supplement, not supplant, traditional media, Part II of JD Lasica's look at Weblogs as a medium. It includes a good list of publications featuring Weblogs and some good observations from the likes of Dan Gilmour, Doc Searles and Dave Winer.
Random links
This week's bookmarkdump.
Sulfnbk.exe hoax
Interesting email virus hoax going around - Sulfnbk.exe
The interesting part is that I recieved 5 emails about it all from people:
- that knew I have a Mac, and therefore have no exe's,
- that rewrote the apology part about accidentally sending it,
- that at least were kind (and smart enough) not to send the email as a giant cc: list of everybody they emailed within the last year.
Read more about the virus, its uncanny resemblence to the Honor System virus and a funny list of lines emailed about this virus at VMyths. And next time you get something like this, check it out again. Remember to arm yourself with knowledge out here folks.
Blogging
Some blogs and blog-related links. Just to be prove that the blog world is not going under.
Older stuff
See the archive
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