Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

IBM/Ease of Use/Business View:

“What is this all about? It’s about business - your business! Look, we’re all sold on pleasing our users, whether they are customers, business partners, or internal users. This is a sure way to contribute to our organizations and to the bottom line. But how do we ensure we not only satisfy, but also delight them? How do we increase our return from them? And how do we differentiate ourselves from our competitors? Reasonable questions. Read on. There are answers.”

easyPilot: make a prototype, user test it and then generate documentation automatically from the prototype. Coolness.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

“The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers.

This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love. “

Share your weblog log files at Weblog Kitchen: Audience Size.

Weblog Kitchen: “Welcome to the Weblog Kitchen, a Wiki about research in weblogs, wikis, and related hypertext technolgies. “

peterme.com is doing some crazy interviews. Check them out if you haven’t already and have an interest in data visualisation.

Is TrackBack really a two-way link as envisioned in the original hypertext theory, where both sides know of the existence of the link (as opposed to an HTML link where only one side knows)? People have been trying to emulate that idea by tracking referrers. With some success, but always limited by the nature of referrers: someone has to click, not exactly a two way link. If this is so; very cool. Too bad about the complexity of implementation though.

ZX VIEWS: “Text is a crucial part of documents, and needs to be viewed both separately and in more built-up and glamorous contexts. We need to be able to see the text and its connections with or without fancy effects and packaging. - However, just for the flavor, let’s start with the fancy effects and work our way back. ” (The Xanadu successor?)

Trackback Yum, I’m gonna shell out for MT now. And I don’t even really understand it yet!

NBS: The Salon: Victor recommends the Salon - I can heartily agree.

Practical design of outlines and site maps (via the ever excellent and useful IAWiki)

Swift Kick - The Semantic Argument Web: “I fear that the Semantic Web will go the way of SGML and for basically the same reason: normalization of metadata works real well in confined applications where the payoff is high, control is centralized and discipline can be enforced. In other words: not the Web.”

We’re having a go David, we’re having a go. I am betting that loosely coupled metadata (not centralized control) could turn out really useful.

Check out Simon Willison’s Weblog. Good Stuff.

Not sure if I linked to this before. OTHER media 2002 - Why you need your very own taxonomy.

XFML seems strangely appealing to Spanish and Portuguese blogs. Vacano!

An interesting blog I didn’t know: wiremine.

drop.org and NetworkWorldFusion on XFML. By the way, expect some good XFML stuff coming out in about 10 days.

Faceted classification of information and The business requirements for classifying content. Here’s more. (via IASlash)

a wiki on hacking cheap robot dogs: TWiki . Experimentalproduct . FeralRobots (via Matt)

A simple but efficient function - I remember proposing this for a client a while back: NavCode: “Find the product you want fast! Just enter the NavCode in the box located to the right of this text. You will land on the corresponding product page [...]“

Semant-O-Matic: “This site indexes the contents of eleven weblogs over the period March - June 2002 ( a total of 1440 posts ). The goal of this search engine is to demonstrate a fuzzy-search technique called latent semantic indexing. “

The science of persuasion (Economist.com)

“His main insight into omega strategies is the idea that resistance is in some sense a thing, and that it can thus be used up and replenished, rather like water in a tank. Such changes in resistance level are not necessarily the result of logical or rational argument. Once the level drops, the tank is topped up gradually until it is full again, rather as a water-closet cistern refills itself after it has been flushed. The task of the persuader is to drain the tank. That of the consumer is to keep it full enough to resist undesirable changes.

[...]

Another powerful part of decision-making is anticipated feelings of regret. This is why people are, for example, reluctant to trade lottery tickets - they think about how awful they would feel if their numbers came up.

[...]

In an experiment a few years ago, students posing as beggars found that they received small change 44% of the time that they asked directly for it without specifying a sum. If they asked for a precise sum that was a single coin (25 cents), they got it 64% of the time. But if they asked for an apparently arbitrary number (37 cents) they got it 75% of the time. The more precise and unusual the request, the less people were able to resist it.”

OpenOffice.org: working from home? Don’t want to shell out for MS Office? Get this: polished and free.

My name is Peter and I read marketing blogs. “Hi Peter!”

Let’s WARCHALK!

CSS only version of Amazon

Star Wars episode -6: it’s for real (check the video’s)

Christina points to: Improving Usability Guideline Compliance: “Over the last 1.5 years, the average compliance with established usability guidelines increased by 4%. If we can sustain this level of improvement, we’ll reach the ideal of 90% guideline compliance in 2017. ”

The ‘kob looked at 15 sites this year, 20 (different) sites last year, and concludes the Internet will be fixed in 2017. He presents this crap as serious statistics. I checked the URL because it looked as one of those Jakob spoof sites. Is the man doing bad drugs? Believability down 93.4%!

A nice IA process description: “The approach I describe here can therefore impossibly tell the whole story of what I do, but is instead a description of the methodologies and techniques I use most consistently. They are neither unique nor groundbreaking, rather what I’ve found works best for me, culled from my time in the trenches of project development, and from endless reading of books, websites, and other information resources. “

BBC News | Being wired helps you connect: “The social impact of new communications technologies is a greater number of social ties, more diverse social ties, more support.”

Next Time, What Say We Boil a Consultant: “Take a pot of hot water and a frog. Throw the frog into the pot. What do you think will happen? The obvious, of course: the frog will jump out. Who likes hanging around in a pot of hot water? Now … [t]ake a pot of cold water, put the frog in it, and place the pot on the stove. Turn on the heat. This time something different will occur. The frog, because of the incremental change in temperature, will not notice that it is slowly being boiled. Unfortunately, many organizations, as they grow, begin to resemble the boiled frog.”
Fast Company’s investigative team, the “Consultant Debunking Unit”, put the frog story to the test. ”

More hilarious stuff from Fastcompany’s Consultant Debunking Unit.

Charlie Brown writes about XFML: “This looks promising for publishing meta data that can be used by other web sites and/or user client software. After reviewing the information on the site it does not appear that they borrowed anything from the Zthes DTD for xml representation of a thesaurus. It seems to me that creating linkages between the two could make both standards stronger. ” Good point - I’m looking into this for version 0.3 of the XFML spec.

The Emporer’s complex clothes: excellent blog post on how designing a faceted classification scheme can get extremely complex. But read Victor’s reply at the bottom too: I completely agree with him.

Peter Merholz smile-shot!

RSS 1.0 Modules: Taxonomy: a way of adding taxonomy information to an RSS feed, using RDF and DC. Interesting. I’m looking in to how this can be combined with XFML. Ah, I know: just use a link to an XFML document and add #topicname to identify the topic with the taxo:link element. There you go, done, we just combined RSS 1.0 news feeds containing the last x articles on a website with their (simple) metadata, with an XFML document containing the entire (more complex) metadata map of a website. Imagine the possibilities. You could automatically generate a list of related articles to these latest articles from the RSS feed combined with the XFML document.

I read professional XML Meta Data on the bus and now I think I’m finally starting to get this stuff. Recommended.

Cooper ( Interaction Design: “The aim of this exercise is to help us determine how well you might fit the Interaction Designer role. Your response should exhibit the strength of your design skills and your ability to communicate your design decisions. This test has two parts: one that tests your general interaction and interface design abilities, and one that tests your high-level product conceptualization abilities.” (via Webword)

For not very much money, you can make your small business look a lot more professional in about 1 - 2 days of running around and errands. (for USA)

Evil has arrived: must remember: stop using Yahoo for searches.

XML.com: Bring Metadata Back to RSS.

Christina on some new Amazon “features”. Amazon have a reputation to live up to, and these ill-informed sales tricks (if only they were properly personalized.. We’d love them) are bad rep. I want to love Amazon. But not like this baby.