Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Victor has the best writeup I’ve seen of the EuroIA conference. I only saw 1 talk, John Ferrara’s on game design, and I agree with Victor: it rocked.

1-page websites. Yea. Although I just added 3 pages to my personal website, it now has 4, because I wanted a dedicated consulting page.

A bit of Livejournal history. Classic stuff for anyone who runs a community site.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

How Flickr does community management.

Does anyone know of any software or something that would let me make worldmaps with adjusted country sizes like this?

I’ve been using the empty Inbox system for a few days now. LOVE. The “archive” button in Gmail is now my favourite button. It means: “I don’t have to worry about this email anymore.”

That *is* a cheap way to print a book, from about 2.50$ per boo (order 250, shipping not included).

Good presentation on bias and social design:

Good post by Raymond about evolving the workshop model.

I’ve made it so my blogposts (which tend to be short anyways) go to twitter too now. I just prefer posting on my blog. It’s mine, twitter isn’t, it’s theirs.

I removed over 11,000 messages from my inbox today and now I’m using the empty inbox system. So far: I’m LOVING it. Somehow it just feels like I’m in control now or something.

I updated my personal website with a consulting, presentations and a writing page.

And I love using petervandijck.com as my openID by the way. OpenID rocks.

Ah, the old days of blog conversations. What happened to that? Are they really all on twitter now?

A jQuery plugin that copies something to the clipboard (like doing CTRL+C). It seems that, to get this to work cross-browser, you need to fallback to a Flash script.

Slideshare is great. From my slideshows, the Social networks going global one (for an upcoming talk) has had almost 300 views, the older the Global Information Architecture workshop one (from the beginning of this year) has had over 3000 views. That’s great promotion.

I love sharing slides in this format - I remember when Rashmi told me about the service, and I just thought it was brilliant. And it is.

(via Simon) Google’s usability research on federated logins.

Lieve jongens?

Next Saturday from 12:15, I’m giving a presentation on Taking Social Networks Global, at the EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam. I was working on it the past days, and I’m pretty happy with how the talk is turning out. As a preview, here are my slides (so far, they might still change slightly). See you there!

Hey, useful!

“We have a patent!” Cultureshock.

The email feature I always wanted is now in Gmail!

The only IA Summit that is free (I have no idea how they do it, because the organization, space and food are top), the Italian IA summit, is planned for December. They’re accepting proposals now.

I have created a really short and quick survey about IA-related workshops. If you could spend a few seconds to fill it in, I would really appreciate it. Click here to fill in the survey. (Only takes a second.)

Fascinating for IA’s: “Now Iyengar has published a new study
showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to
group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories
make people happier with their choices.”

A must-read for anyone interested in the IAI (Information Architecture Institute).

Cellphone polishing services. Jan Chipchase’s blog is fascinating.

An example implementation of the MetaWeblog API in PHP.

“The product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months,
there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its
expenses but for no reason.”

Oh yea.

Here’s a question: sure Google appengine will scale, but is it also fast?

Brilliant parent blogging: “At that moment in my head I was dancing around, giving myself a high-five and mooning you.”

99designs is a brilliant way to get a logo designed. You write the design brief and the prize, designers compete, you select the best one and pay them. Brilliant and simple.

Today (in about an hour) they will attempt to create antimatter in a huge scientfic complex 100m under the ground in Switzerland. If Europe gets sucked into a black hole in an hour, it was nice knowing you all!

And here’s a video explaining it:

I like learning and doing things that are not “My job”. I did the “Hello World” of Google’s appengine the other day, it was fun. I want to do more things like that.

This is fascinating. Google tests *everything* in their search results page, even minute changes in whitespace, that have statistically measurable effects.

De nieuwe Google Chrome doesn’t do RSS - doesn’t display feeds in a good way, and doesn’t display the little icon in the adress bar. Oh well, back to Firefox for now.

Here’s the official Google page for the Google Chrome comic book.

That’s funny, Techcrunch is down. 503 error.

I was reading a scanned version of the comic book (see and link to this blog post) that is introducing the Google browser - “Google Chrome” - but the site’s way slow and seems down now, so I saved the images in my cache and am publishing them here under the same Creative Commons license.

They’re all on one page, so it’ll be kind of long. Here goes.

“It might be a good rule simply to
avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have
had to make it prestigious.”