Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Belgium is incredible in the summer: festivals, markets and activities ALL the time, and often free. So that’s a plus.

Great post on scaling. (via Simon) Some good bits in the comments:

• We do TV advertising and have huge spikes within 3-5 seconds of the spot running. After maybe 20-30 seconds everything is back to normal again, with maybe +5-10% traffic (a normal variation).
• Times was an article that included links to the site. The article was one level off the home page (it was a section page). So, there you see the level increase and stay increased for about 20 hours or so (with some die down due to Times traffic behaviour). The Digg stuff, has a much shorter time frame. It is the life of an entry on Digg on the front-page. Anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but rarely longer than that.

Visiting Google adsense now gives me this:

I love Japanese webdesign.

Insightful post by Steve Rubel about social search.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”. Specifically, they’re starting with some Wordpress plugins.

That’s 60 euro for a 500 GB drive on Amazon. Crazy stuff. Here are some of my older calculations of the dropping cost of storage: For investing US$10 a month, you’ll have accumulated 15 petabytes of storage space by 2020.

Year—price per 1 Gig
1980—500000
1985—80000
1990—9000
1995—1000
2000—15
2001—6
2002—3
2003—2
2004—1
…
2008—20 cents for a gig!

Fuck twitter I like blogging :)

IE sends FF a cake :)

Scaling tip: set lighttpd in front of Apache to handle http requests, redirect dynamic requests to apache and handle static files by itself. Ah, smart :)

A NYT article on Paul Otlet, the Belgian inventor of the library index card.

Ademloos, website over de nieuwe brug die in Antwerpen is gepland, en veel lawaai/fijn stof zou veroorzaken.

Yahoo is not bad at launching a certain type of content/community website. OMG for example is doing well: 2 million user comments the first year, and great traffic. Is Yahoo therefore only a “destination” site. Would that be so bad?

Great. The Firefox download page is down.

This is the right link (I believe) for Dakissa, the new videoblog on user interface.

Mock it up before you fuck it up.

New videoblog about user interface by good men Michael and Victor. Check it out!

“If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand.” - so true. (via)

hema.nl has a funky intro - check it out, it’s quite surprising.

Always good for testing: Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

I find it strange that the so caled “A-list” bloggers are voluntarily leaving the platform they control (their blog) and going where the audience is with their conversations (the social networks, twitters etc…), to the walled gardens. It’s the same thing I’ve seen young kids do, but I didn’t expect to see it happen so much with the bloggers. mm. Maybe it’s ok to have your conversations in walled gardens. But it does feel like it’s not. Hadn’t we been there done that?

I was working on a UI screen the other day with some Javascript in it, and because the js was rather simple (show and hide areas of the screen), I decided to just code it myself. That way I could try it out, feel the experience and adjust things as I went. Went pretty well. I had to learn the JQuery show and hide command, but that’s supersimple. So yea, if you work on UI’s, try JQuery to mock up simple stuff. It might help.

This got me thinking again about wireframes: “He goes on to explain that the main problem with wireframes is when
they try to do too much, serving multiple purposes at the same time.”

That’s exactly *not* the problem with wireframes, that’s their strength. The page description diagram misses the point - it tries to create boundaries, not overcome them.

Wireframes are boundary objects. They’re used by multiple groups of people, that otherwise don’t have good ways of communicating. The whole idea of the wireframe is that it can be used in discussions with clients, visual designers and programmers alike. It’s an object that bridges communities, in a way that no functional specification or page description diagram ever can.

And yes, that comes with some ambiguity and sometimes confusion about who owns what, but that’s the whole point. Remove the ambiguity, and you remove the usefulness.

Kevin Kelly: Most companies don’ t live as long as most humans. Their relative short
life has to do with culture’s rapidly shifting interests, and the
difficulty of transmitting values and goals beyond the original
founders. When viewed this way, it is a wonder any
group of workers would continue to exist after the founding group
vanishes. It is simply astounding that some companies could outlive the
industry they began in, or even the country they were started in.

Great post on game mechanics: “A system alone is not a game. A dump of
information is not a game. A system that encourages learning through
strong feedback mechanisms is a game.“

Good analysis on techcrunch: Google Gears wasn’t just for offline storage, it’s Google’s competitor for Flash and Silverlight. And it rocks.

• Facebook - Myspace growth us/iinternational
  (tags: i18n)

The programme for this year’s Euro IA Summit is online, and registrations are open. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Talk about bad information architecture!

“We need lots of variations on the theme of collaboration. Editing adds value, as does expertise.”

Exactly. That’s why I didn’t just throw up an install of MediaWiki for my travelguide wiki. Instead, I’m trying to create the technology so that it supports creating a travelguide for backpackers. A wiki won’t do it, I believe. It might, but I think there are better ways. Anyone can still edit anything, but things are more structured than a wiki, and the editing process is also evolving.

We’re writing a collaborative travel guide to Bolivia (for backpackers) this week - barnraising. If you’ve ever traveled there, come and join us! Friday is the deadline!

I always love scaling stories, dunno.

From this:

To this:

(via) Google supports unavailable_after, and also 1-visit pages (which you can visit once for free, but after that you have to pay for them). Google is really newspaper friendly actually, they go out of their way to index content behind a pay-wall.

Plinky (new startup by one of the original blogger team members) and the brain?

Yahoo user interface patterns around reputation. Rock.

Plurk has some funky timeline navigation (try scrolling the mousewheel).

According to those in the know (Google themselves!), this is where you should put ads on your blog: (red ones get more clicks)

There’s a whole new bunch of countries and collaborative wiki-like backpacker travelguides live at poorbuthappy. Check out the Colombia travelguide for an example that’s getting started well, and join in the fun. The travelguides are free to print, for example, there’s a free easy-to-print Colombia travelguide here. They’re cc licensed - can be shared for free, and anyone can edit them. Let’s see how this experiment goes :)

Speed as strategy for startups. Sounds damn right.

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