Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Google decides to be more open about their ranking systems: “PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger
system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle
phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query
models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time
models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and
some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and
personalized models (not all people want the same thing).”

test

Amazon web services now uses more bandwidth than amazon.com itself.

Check out UXSocial: A Not-for-profit Investigating Information Architecture in Policy.

The US eats a *lot* of corn:

The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to
avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact
of many real users hitting many machines by means of a “dark launch”
period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat
servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends
without a single UI element drawn on the page. With the “dark launch”
bugs fixed, we hope that you enjoy Facebook Chat now that the UI lights
have been turned on.

The alternative productivity manifesto. (via Jorge)

This is pretty fun.

Session variables without cookies (via Simon): it turns out you can store session vars in windows.name, they persist between sessions, even between domains. The browser still has undiscovered secrets.

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Jmaps: a handy library to display Google maps with all sorts of overlays and stuff with jQuery.

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• Travel Blogs, Travel Journals, Travelogues, Travel Diaries - TravelPod since 1997
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• Travel Guides | Travel Reviews | Trip Planner - RealTravel
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Draw a very small elephant walking across the table:

Facebook is raising another 100 million (for a total of about 500 million) to get another 50,000 servers. That’s like what - 2000$/server I suppose. Sounds right. Google is supposedly adding 500,000 new servers a year, Microsoft 200,000.
Scaling cheaply is a great competitive advantage.

A great presentation on design & Star Wars:

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If you’re applying to Founder’s Co-op, you should know that our default preference in terms of number of founders is as follows:

1. 2 founders: 1 technical and 1 business
2. 3 founders: 2 technical and 1 business
3. 4 founders: 2 technical and 2 business
4. 1 founder: 1 technical

Sounds right, although for 4 founders I’d prefer 2 technical, 1 business and 1 user experience/product.

Amazon S3 now lets you copy, rename or move objects in S3 buckets. The Amazon guys are on a roll, and have been so for a few years now. I’m still amazed nobody (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, …) has come even close to what they offer.

Fred Wilson: “Tim makes a passionate argument for “tackling big hard problems” in
his keynote. But Dave is correct in his assertion that the best way to
do that is one step at a time. Think about the way Linux was built and continues to be built. One
step at a time. Each one looks trivial. Taken together it’s awesome.
Same with wikipedia. Or a social net like Facebook.”

Hate your intranet? Check out Google’s internal tools.

In case you didn’t know, I’m blogging at 290s.com about global UX stuff.

Good notes of a talk by Amy Jo Kim: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software.

Kim recognizes social game mechanics in the following forms:

1. collections (Flickr lets you collect photos to demonstrate your aesthetic savvy),
2. points (Digg lets you demonstrate insight into what’s going to be popular), and social points given by other players (Flickr’s metric of “interestingness” are points generated by others based on how many people have seen your video, shared it, etc),
3. feedback demonstrating mastery (Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution offer compelling visual and auditory cues),
4. exchanges both implicit (comments on FaceBook) and explicit (MySpace “Add Me as Friend”), and
5. customization (MySpace profiles, avatars in WoW)

Here are the slides:

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Hey, Amy Jo Kim has a blog! Subscribed!

I had a great chat with Eugene Kim who works at IGN (a fascinating website) at the IA summit - he’s blogging about UX and stuff, check it out. With his experiences on IGN with community, he should have some interesting insights.

I heard two stories lately. One about an entrepreneur who got rich making a system that works like this: you call a phone number, then you get access to a website as long as you leave the line open. When you close it, access is cut off. You get charged because the number you call is a for-pay number. The second story is about Africa. You work in the city, your mom lives in a village and is poor. There’s someone selling minutes on a cellphone in the village. If you want to send your mom money ($5), you buy a phonecard, but don’t use the code. Instead you call the guy with the cellphone, give him the code and ask him to pay your mom. He pays your mom 4.90$. Micropayments over distance.

Blogging about your kids: “Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours
and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your
resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest
about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for
me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk
away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one
day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my
love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about
their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave
enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally
stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard,
frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting
for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.”

Natural building: Apart from that, there is a good feeling we get from natural buildings which is difficult to describe. Even though conditioned to prefer the new, the shiny, and the precise, we respond at a deep level to unprocessed materials, to idiosyncrasy, and to the personal thought and care expressed in craftsmanship. Nearly all the natural buildings I have seen, regardless of the level of expertise of the builders, are remarkably beautiful.

Microsoft hasn’t lost it’s touch. Without even blinking, by bidding on them and now withdrawing, they’ve wounded Yahoo deep enough so that insiders now seem to believe it’s a goner. It’s like the 90s all over again.

The first thing I ate when back in Belgium was a nice portion of fantastic french fries with a generous helping of mayonaise. Yea.

Halfway through Prince starts to rock like crazy. He’s still a brilliant guitar player.

Flamewar!

If you haven’t registered for the IA Summit yet, you might want to take in a pre-conference workshop or two.

(plug): My workshop on Global IA is Friday afternoon. If you’re interested in how to organize websites in many languages, countries or cultures, you might wanna check it out, it’s gonna be good. There’s so much more you can put in a 4 hour workshop compared with a 1 hour talk (a regular talk is really 45 minutes of the good stuff, which with questions and such really comes down to like 35 minutes, so the difference in the amount of detail you can pack in a workshop is really big).

The half day pre-conference workshops are $375 (= less than 240 euro, a bargain).

I’m really looking forward to the Summit this year, the weather is gonna be great too. See you there!

• Photos and memorabilia from Colombia’s past (Poorbuthappy in Colombia!)
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If you wanna see an incredible list of pictures and stories of Colombia’s past, check out this page.

Alive in Baghdad is a videoblog with fantastic coverage from Baghdad. If you want to know what daily life really is about, check it out.