Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Old news I’m sure: AltaVista Testing “Paraphrase” Tool: the tool suggest related search queries. It’s about time. I have always loved the accuracy of Google’s “Did you mean …”, but that is really a spell checker. The queries the new Altavista tool suggest (as far as I could find out) don’t seem releant enough yet to make it worth the space they take up (especially in that space-eating altavista design, com on guys, get a designer to clean that baby up), they are simply derived from the titles and descriptions of the page one results.

But suggesting queries is definitely a brilliant idea, and the way forward for search engines, since most people don’t refine queries.

By the way, I’d never seen Google do this before until today:

Petervandijck dot com and dot org (I already had dot net) have become available, so I ordered them at my favourite registrar joker.com. (Don’t use Verisign)

They: excuse me, my name is xxx, I live here down the road

Me: Hi

They: I am going to that shop over there to buy some milk for my baby, I just need a few dollars, nobody wants to talk to me

Me: (What a hard life!) Not today man.

They: I just need another dollar, what am I going to do.

Me: OK I’ll give you a dollar, here you go, take care.

Next day:
They: Excuse me, I’m going to buy a turkey-cheese sandwich in that shop over there.

Me: Sorry man.

They: I’m not asking for money man, I’m hungry and I just want a sandwich.

Me: You can have my (non-eaten) bagel here.

They: No thanks, I just want a turkey cheese sandwhich to take to the shelter.

Me: (What do I do?) Next time man.

Next day:
They: So where are you from?

Me: Belgium.

They: I like Belgium! They speak French, Flemish and German, right?

Me: Yes.

They: Yeah, I visited Belgium a few times, it’s a great city.

Me: It’s a country!

They: Yeah I know, but I always think of it as a city - it’s really one big city isn’t it?

Full-on rantmode.

Gratuitous Graphics and Human-centered Website Design ( jnd.org ): this is just annoying. It’s not fun. If this is Don Norman’s idea of good use of graphics and animation, I’m sorry.

I can appreciate Don making a much needed case for graphics and fun, but at least he could have used something that was interesting for anyone else than a complete web newbie and for longer than, say, 3 seconds. Something that didn’t disctract from reading? There is a lot of good graphic stuff being developed. Sometimes the NN guys just portray this cluelessness about the web that is hard to understand from such clever people. Get permalinks Jacob! It’s not hard.

What’s more, IE popped up a message telling me the script was causing it to run slowly. Sigh.

Note to self: Interesting blog about research on Learning and Performance.

I’m listing nr.4 on page 1 on Google search results for cheap plane flights and nr. 13 (page 2) for cheap plane tickets. Google love!

Figure drawing: Basic Pose and Construction. Now this is a nice and simple page: just enough decoration to brand it nicely, all the focus on the content, not much navigation. (the link to the homepage could be clearer though). And fun.

I found Bizquick.org through a textad at Metafilter. Business news for non business people: nice.

Other nice business blogs:
Alex Rubalcava’s blog
Business blogs at Business2.0
Xplane’s bBlog

Adam Curry blogs on the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a very right wing politician who had a good chance of winning the upcoming elections. He writes:

“If I was a Dutch citizen, I would have voted for him.”

That’s kindof scary: I saw an interview with the man on TV and he was very charismatic - and had very right wing ideas (that I don’t agree with). He knew how to sell them really well - they all sounded reasonable coming from him. Weird…

Check out Noise Between Stations: Victor is rocking lately.

This funky tool (via Peterme) lays out related sites in a nice Java applet, using Google’s API to search for related sites. I tried it out on http://poorbuthappy.com and it really nicely grouped my interests online as in the following pictures (I added the text and the background colors):

KFTF Home: the Keeping Found Things Found website: what an amazing title for a website!