So Shopping.com (”Simply Fast”) is trying to position itself as the Google of shopping, like Google’s own Froogle. Quick and easy. Shopping.com is owned by Dealtime, a comparison shopping site which has bought the review site Epinions (who apparently weren’t making much money).
Webword screenshot: plain lying infograph, and badly done as well.
This is probably old news but here are some RSS feeds from News.com
If you want to see an example of a good web index, check out the PeopleSoft Site Index (by Fred Leise, ex-argonaut) - it won the Australian Society of Indexers Web Index Award.
ContextualAnalysis: “… provides consulting services in information architecture and metadata design, including creation of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, including thesauri.”
Flash Animation Tutorial 2: Animating body parts A great tutorial!
Michael launches the GraphViz sitemap generator.
New Scientist and BBC: “The world’s first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.”
Travel UCD - consultants in travel and hospitality website design. A specialized UCD company. It kinda makes sense.
Visual Studio Magazine - Why We Don’t Build Software for Users (Interview with the Coop - it’s Coop day!): about UML and extreme programming: “One is the engineering movement, as exemplified by UML and the Rational Unified Process (RUP), which describe how you plan and document huge projects. The other is the craft movement. McBreen asserts that programming is craft.”
I never thought of it like that. UML = engineering. XP = craft. Funky.
Cooper Labs Television Hub: “If lost, the remote control can be found by pressing the “Find Remote” button on the Television Hub’s front panel, which tells the remote to audibly signal its location.” Nice.
Cooper: Design Research: Why you need it: for a business audience: “Ever notice how often a product that makes a huge splash at tradeshows fizzles in the marketplace? The story goes like this: Product is introduced at show to much fanfare. News media gives Product lots of press, and consumers everywhere express interest in Product’s features and capabilities. Product hits store shelves - and stays there. Some early adopters purchase Product, but it never penetrates into mass consumer markets.
[...]
designers must lead—or at least participate in—user interviews. Simply handing them a report generated by someone else is not nearly as effective.” Yes yes yes. There is also a good discussion of why companies don’t do design research (a phrase I will start using - it nicely distinguishes it from validating research like most usability tests).
Cooper: Time for another About Face (via IASlash): the new version of “About Face” will finally have details on how to make personas: “A detailed overview of Cooper’s Goal-Directed design methodology. How does Cooper bridge the gap from research to design? How do we create personas that are effective design targets? How do we create comprehensive, representative, and convincing usage scenarios?”
Informaat: a Dutch user experience consultancy.
Oskar van Rijswijk: “I consider style switchers noise.” Me too. Arg, styleswitchers! They are the hit counters of 2003. Most annoyingly, they break my standard way of resizing text because they all use points and stuff for text sizing.
Easy Topic Maps: BeerTM: “This is a collaborative project to create a topic map about beer. The idea is to first create an ontology for describing beer, and then allow people to provide their own content using that ontology. The topic maps provided by different people can then be merged together to yield larger data sets.”
Boxes and Arrows: Happy Birthday B&A: “I am incredibly proud and amazed at what this little zine has accomplished in providing a space for information sharing. A quick look around reveals that we’ve got 111 articles, 84 authors, and already over 1,149 comments at the time of this writing.”
WERBLOG: “On Alexa’s list of the Top 500 Sites on the Web, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google are in the top 5. That’s not surprising. But sites #3 and #4 are, at least to me. They are two South Korean portals. In all, 11 of the top 20 sites on the Alexa list are Asian, dominated by Korea.
I knew Korea had the world’s highest penetration rates for broadband and mobile phones, but hadn’t realized how much usage patterns have shifted as a result. After all, this is a country with less than one-fifth the population of the US. Something major is happening when the usage disparity is that great. ”
Jeremy: “This really caught my attention. It makes sense in the context of known usage patterns associated with broadband. Research shows that broadband consumers use the Internet much more frequently and for longer durations. I’ve also read that something like 50% of website usage is driven by broadband users, despite only 20% having it in the US. With Korean broadband usage so high, it makes sense. But like Kevin, I would have never guessed that it would skew this much.” Just wait for the Chinese to get online.
Best of Buslib-L: interesting mailing list archives to peruse.
The BBC has a fascinating mix of language and locale for their international websites. For example, there are 2 sites in Portuguese: the African portuguese site and the Brazil site.
Scientific Visualization and Information Architecture (all PDF lecture notes) (via The Eyes Have It via Antenna)
Matt corrects me on the BBC CMS and points to an old but interesting article.
Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - The Floor Plan With a Plan: Paco Underhill analyzes the Apple stores. The best store I’ve ever been in (as in: it made me want to buy stuff) was Ikea.
US public turns to Europe for news: “Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: “We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media.”
US media (especially the news) is indeed shockingly stupid. I can tell - I live here now.
So Nielsen, Tog and Norman have surrounded them with an (almost) all girl team. Clever!
pMachine redesigned their site.
Sunday_Mirror.co.uk - SADDAM’S SOLDIERS SURRENDER: “TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started. [...] The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.”
Also in the news: eBay to close Half.com, scam targets Paypall users and Afghanistan activates its .af domain.
News.com: “The HP ProLiant DL560 server comes with up to four Intel Xeon processors and up to 12GB of memory. Prices start at $7,099.” Make that 100GB of memory and we’re talking. Then I could have my entire system in RAM - database and all. (I’m not a server expert though)
Microsoft rebrands Office for enterprises. This, plus the xml-ization of Office, makes me think MS got it: Office can easily replace many disfunctional coorporate document management or CM systems. All MS needs to do is focus on features like versioning and workflow. If I was a CMS builder I’d be worried medium term.
Also on iaSlash, Jess is posting the SIGIA Highlight Reel. I hope he can keep it up.
Woody Pidcock of the Boeing company: metamodel.com - What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model? (via IASlash via Interconnected). All good definitions there.
If you are in New York and need some of them happy spring plant vibes (it’s cold!), check out the New York Botanical Garden. They are doing a great exhibition about orchids.
For custom Visio stencils you might want to check out Visimation.
matt jones: “If you had to get someone of guru-status to both introduce and inspire a group of about 100 designers from various backgrounds about the field of interaction design, who would you pick?” I haven’t got a clue. Like, really. I guess I need to go to more conferences and shit.
A study shows content management systems often fail, and the implementors all over go like: we knew that! It’s just the suits who didn’t know. Gerry writes an article about it and says: “But do you need such software? Most companies don’t. I know organizations that are successfully running massive websites with Microsoft FrontPage.” Upon which John asks: “How could a site like News.com run on Frontpage?” Consider this: the BBC news site reportedly ran happily on FTP and server side includes until 1999. It sounds like afterwards they moved to a home grown system. Anyone knows the current status there? Non trivial indeed.
Are you a great designer with limited CSS skills? Joshua Kaufman: “Hack Hotbot With Me”.
Hack HotBot: HotBot is doing a CSS competition.
Google Content-Targeted Advertising: “If you’re a web publisher who sells advertising inventory, and your site receives more than 20 million page views a month, you may be a great fit for Google’s content-targeted ads.”
