Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

“I said that already” Erlang. Smart stuff, couchDB.

If you like ethnography and web2.0, you’ll love Metagold - an ethnographic research blog about the Japanese phenomenon Nico Nico Douga, an extremely popular video sharing site where people can comment in a kind of video overlay (you have to see it).

Social design as urban planning: “The challenge is how we make it bigger while still maintaining the same
quality and sense of intimacy with now 7.2 million registered users and
23 million monthly unique visitors. It comes down to urban planning in
a way that a massive city like London has all kinds of cozy little
neighborhoods.” (Stewart Butterfield)

Gogrid is a competitor of Amazon EC2. Roughly similarly priced, but comes with free load balancing.

test

A so far undocumented feature in Google’s social API now lets applications suggest URL’s that might be of the same person. For example, enter petervandijck.com and get a bunch of related URL’s.

Practically, this means that when you sign up for a website, and it asks you to enter your websites, it can start suggesting other websites from the moment you’ve entered at least one. Nice work.

My Google profile page.

Speed continues to be really underestimated. Little known fact: Amazon internal testing showed that 100ms extra pageload time means 1% less sales. Google tests show that 500ms longer pageload (half a second) means 20% less traffic.

Meditate on those numbers for a moment, and then tell me your webteam takes speed seriously enough.

Live from Bejing: "Whenever I show Chinese websites to American friends who don’t speak Chinese, the friends universally have the same reaction — “Wow! That site sure is crappy-looking! Guess those guys haven’t learned how to design a good website yet, huh?”

"Most Americans are by now nodding their heads: “Yep. Love those US sites. Much more advanced. Clean, simple design. Not cluttered. Guess those Chinese guys will figure that out sooner or later.”

Great post on working with teams in India.

The mionews UI for friendfeed is a relief. If they expand to incorporate the basic friendfeed functionality, they might well kick their ass, although probably not.

Google is retiring their Adsense referral program (you could make money for people downloading Firefox, for example).

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