Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I posted this in 2004, but the How to make a documentary post is still going strong :)

Happy new year everyone! (To my 3 faithful readers - yes, that’s you - thanks for reading.)

Good post on user/profit numbers for freemium models.

Web standards in China.

6 good reasons to choose a categorization system (and I’m not being glib). “5. I can pass the blame onto Apple.”

So of all the things to do while sitting in front of a computer, programming is definitely the most fun.

Dave Winer is brilliantly bootstrapping again, this time with an element to indicate where to find a thumbnail of a picture.

Reasonably good talk about performance (speed). There’s a bunch of little things in there that I disagree with, but the general gist is good and there are some good bits.

• The size (in Kb) of webpages and the amount of objects has increased since 1995 on a nice graph.
• 100ms extra loadtime on Amazon.com caused a 1% drop in sales.
• Yahoo did a test: added 400ms to some important pages. Result: 5 to 9% increase in people that click BACK before the page even loaded.
• Google added 500ms, this caused 20% less searches. (!)

Cross-cultural product design.

Victor Lombardi is doing some great work around tools and techniques for concept design - the phase before the actual “design” phase (where we usually start working), when you’re still exploring different concepts.

Category:Nothing

Some questions just catch you. Are the laws of nature more like habits?

Funny thing: the word
“school” is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was,
if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you’d
spend it learning and talking about cool stuff with other similarly
well-off people.

Alphabetical ordering and Dutch last names.

“This has to be one of the most difficult challenges as a single parent,
having travel plans undermined and vetoed by your ex-partner.”

• The top 5 India travel forums (Poorbuthappy in India!)
  (tags: india, travel, travel forums, backpackers)

“I was looking for website designer but the kind of website i wanted is similiar to facebook, or myspace. I was wondering if you guys know anyway of doing that type of website and if I bring you the designe I want then we can make it happen. Email me with your respone and if yes how much would it cost me.”

Good promo video for interactive prototypes (I’m a big believer in them, although not a fan of iRise specifically).

Facebook uses 800 servers supplying over 28 terabytes of memory through Memcached.

futurepractice2 is the twitter tag of Indi’s webinar on mental models that just finished. Check it out and see what people say.

Amelia now blows her food (to cool it down). And yesterday I found her trying to open the lock of a closetspace in the living roomd with a key she found. She didn’t figure out how to put the key in the lock.. just yet! She know where we kept the key (on top of the closet), so she put a little stairs next to the closet, got the key, and tried to open it. Smart.

The law in Belgium speaks of the race category as “so called race“, in order to clarify that there is no such thing as race scientifically. The law in the US has a different approach I believe, I think they define it (for use in the census) as being self-assigned (so you decide yourself what race you are).

So it turns out you *can* actually track members versus non-members with Google analytics.

Is there a way to use Google analytics to distinguish between logged-in users and not logged-in users?

Frozen *homemade* burritos, that is.

Today, I discovered the wonderful usability of frozen burritos.

Bloglines is gonna be down for 12 hours while they move to another data center. Pft. I think I’m finally gonna give in and move to Google reader.

Presentation tip: at most conferences, you get 45 or 50 minutes. Leave 5 as buffer, 5 for questions, speak for 40 minutes max, which means you should aim at about 30 slides max.

So I don’t forget: Amelia ate spicy Thai crackers and loved them this week (I’m so proud!), she’s babbling like crazy and she spoke on the phone for the first time with her mom (instead of just listening) :)

Chris makes some good points on a really bad UI - or is it?

Quick and easy explanation of Facebook development, using Slideshare’s audio feature (which rocks).

Very exciting: Google analytics can track ajax interactions now.

The travel with kids forum is getting active. Check it out!

(via Simon) Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop?