From: Gleanings
To: e.people
Subject: Gleanings: Funny Friday

OPENING THANG

It's Friday, so I'll start with a laugh: Interface Humor...
http://www.oasisproductions.net/jake/fear/

Everybody's favorite whipping boy is back.

"Just in time for Halloween, online fashion e-retailer Boo.com is being
resurrected from the ashes of its spectacular flame-out earlier this
year.'
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19358,00.html?nl=shg

Shouldn't they say, just in time for April Fool's?

I can't help but wonder, will Boo learn from the tons of articles pointing to bad usability as a partial cause for their failure, or will they just continue their merry way?

USABILITY MATTERS

New Alertbox...
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001015.html

"The Web requires us to reverse the traditional direction of marketing.
Instead of messages that a company generates when it wants to reach its
customers, request marketing establishes a connection when the users
ask for it. Request marketing is especially suited for the
mobile Internet where intrusive messages are especially aggravating.
Permission marketing is no longer enough to satisfy customers:
request marketing is the next wave."

NEWS

From Tomalak, the Standard

Salon: SDMI cracked!
All of the Secure Digital Music Initiative's watermarks -- its much ballyhooed
music protection scheme -- have been broken. According to off-the-record
sources, the results of the Hack SDMI contest are in and not one single
watermark resisted attack.
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/10/12/sdmi_hacked/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=110

News.Com: RIAA to develop "digital bar code" for online music.
The record industry's trade association said Thursday that it will develop a
system for identifying digital music, an effort that could help it protect
downloads from labels and find songs posted illegally online.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-3174453.html

Guardian Unlimited: Kerbango tango.
"It looks and works like a radio, but it's an internet radio, so instead of
picking up just 20 stations, it could pick up 20,000," says James Gable, the
president of Kerbango. "And it does it without using a personal computer!"
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,380866,00.html

"Pure-plays are dead" was the rallying cry of e-retail beat writers
this week, judging from the number who, encouraged perhaps by a market
sell-off, flocked to debunk the dot-com "myth" of the first-mover
advantage.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19357,00.html?nl=shg

Why Wine Exports Need the Net
http://www.thestandard.com/newsletters/NLdisplay/0,2936,115-2185,00.html

TECH MATTERS

Found a cool new tool... really only good if you have a personal site built the old fashioned way http://www.freefind.com/ gives you a search engine and a site map. Look for it on EH shortly...

Also, cool link checker here http://www.watchfire.com/

APROPOS OF NOTHING

Webmonkey is all about mars... and so am I

Mars' First Colonists: Roaches?
http://go.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39389,00.html/eg20001012

The Physics and Biology of Making Mars Habitable Conference
http://web.mit.edu/mmm/www/terraforming.html

is E.piphany not one of the worst names ever? Why did they take a perfectly good work like epiphany and dotcom it in such a brutal fashion? And there URL doesn't even reflect the goofy spelling...www.e.piphany.com breaks, as does http://e.piphany.com/ but www.epiphany.com works. Bah. Off to F*cked Company...
posted by Christina Wodtke 10/13/2000 8:21:09 AM

From: Gleanings
To: Mulders
Subject: Gleanings: The Truth is Out There

OPENINGS THANG
Found this link on Peterme's site (who is ranting against anthropology these days, go take a look peterme.com)

http://www.simpleton.com/20000930.html
It's a story of a reporter who wrote a story on the Reverend Jackson for a major magazine, and had it rewritten to portray the Right Rev as a villain. It's an interesting story, but I also find it interesting that there was a day when this would have happened and no one would have ever known. The internet may provide for hoaxes and urban myths, but it also allows truth to get out to the general public.

USABILITY MATTERS

The true story of QWERTY, everybody's favorite example of good enough+mass acceptance=standard
http://www.reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html
and more info here, if you are interested
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/myths.html

What size is your user's resolution?
Here's how to track it
http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=2295&catid=17
and what the author found about his own site
http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=2297&catid=20

IBM developerWorks: When Web pages don't work.
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/web-work.html

IA & DESIGN

Everyone's talking about UrbanPixel
Tog says:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/040Urbanpixel.html
visit the site
http://www.urbanpixel.com/preview.html

NEWS
from tomalak

Industry Standard: Web Publishers Learn to Love Micropayments.
But publishers complain that the micropayment brigade still hasn't fixed the
biggest problem - customers' unwillingness to pay a la carte. Until there's a
widespread and easy-to-use standard, that reluctance will probably endure.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19250,00.html

Useit.Com: From January 25, 1998; The Case for Micropayments
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980125.html

from NUA
http://www.nua.com

B2B ecommerce revenues in the US are expected to rise from USD336
billion this year to USD6.3 trillion by 2005, according to a new report
from Jupiter Research.
http://jup.com/company/pressrelease.jsp?doc=pr001002

Speedy delivery of electronic solutions to the marketplace is now the
biggest concern for those in the financial services industry.
http://www.capgemini.com/news/2000/0928competition.htm

WAP
from CHI-WEB

WAP/Mobile Links (in no particular order)
www.ajaxo.com/
www.combra.se/wap/ewapservices.html
http://mobileinternet.ericsson.se/
www.ericsson.com/internetsolutions/
www.yourwap.com/
www.cs.ccu.edu.tw/~jjh/mobil.htm
www.mwif.org/
www.nokia.com/corporate/wap/
www.wapforum.org/
http://updev.phone.com
www.phone.com
www.anywhereyougo.com
www.wapguide.com/wapguide/
www.wapsites.com.au/
www.iec.org/tutorials/wap/
www.cellular.co.za/
www.allnetdevices.com
www.iir-mobileinternet.com
www.nokia.com/phones/tutorials/7110/0.1_topics/
www.portablelife.com
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mobile/
www.wapforum.org/what/technical.htm
www.wapholesun.com
http://webcab.de/www.htm
www.thinkmobile.com
www.wirelessdevnet.com

APROPOS OF NOTHING

DOG, BUDDHA, ELVIS
Witness a portrait of a man besieged by his triune conscience. Perhaps you have been this hung-
over, no?
http://www.atomfilms.com/default.asp?spot_id=141&sl=1009

my friend dave is number eight on the f*ckedcompany board. go dave!
posted by Christina Wodtke 10/11/2000 8:23:10 AM

From: Gleanings
To: music lovers everywhere
Subject: Gleanings: Come on get nappy

OPENING THANG

New creative good newsletter in the mailbox today. http://www.goodexperience.com
I was tickled pink to see I was in it, though he referred to me as a 'weblogger' which I suppose is technically accurate, it's not how I define myself. Well, no such thing as bad publicity!

"Wednesday, October 4, 2000

About Napster: I have avoided talking about Napster to date because
it has been covered to death on other sites. But one piece stands
out with an angle on customer experience: weblogger Christina
Wodtke's column called the real reason Napster is revolutionary
(it's the consumer experience, stupid). Here's an excerpt:

It's easy to just download the dang thing. No painful
registration screens (they get that information later). No hiding
of the links users want the most (it's right at the top, download
Napster, tour Napster). Last time I was on Adobe's site I had a
hard time just finding where to download products, much less
finding the product I wanted most: Acrobat Reader.

Since the beginning of the Web years, companies have spent millions
of dollars to create the perfect browser plug-in or other app -- and
then they forgot to **make it easy to download and install**. If
you're hoping to create a successful plug-in, remember the initial
phases of the customer experience.

http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/2000_09_01_pastblog.html#nap "

anyhow, I'm chuffed.

As for the rest of the newsletter, here are some highlights, you lazy readers you...

Why do customers abandon shopping carts?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/474061.asp
http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/101000cart.html

3d shopping technology
http://www.atnewyork.com/views/article/0,1471,8481_475451,00.html

MORE ON NAPSTER

ZDNN: From July 25, 2000; Glaser: Let's make music Napster-easy
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2607181,00.html

Salon: The Mojo solution.
Q&A with Jim McCoy, CEO of Autonomous Zone Industries. Users cannot simply take and give as they do with Napster and every other file-sharing service.
Rather, those who download the free, open-source new release in November must use Mojo to buy and sell content for prices that they themselves determine.
http://www.salon.com/tech/view/2000/10/09/mojo_nation/index.html

Wired News: Fear of a Pay-Per-Use World.
Unless some exceptions are created, they argue, the entertainment industry
will have more control than the Constitution allows. One concern is that this
could lead to a pay-per-use world where consumers don't truly own the books,
movies and music they purchase.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,39330,00.html
posted by Christina Wodtke 10/10/2000 8:31:05 AM

From: Gleanings
To: little jakobs everywhere
Subject: Gleanings: more usable than ever

OPENING THANG

Remember the 5K competition?
http://www.sylloge.com:8080/5k/home.html

There is another competition for under 4K applications and you can find the
reference @
http://msg.sk/web4096/

USABILITY MATTERS

Formal paper on user's tolerance of low quality of service (things like slow download, etc.)
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/A.Bouch/wwwpaper.html

RNIB's (Royal National Institute for the Blind) Campaign for Good
Web Design has many useful links as well as a design guide for
accessibility. http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/

Very good thread recently on CHI-WEB on why you should make your fonts resizable and ways to do it.
http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A1=ind0010b&L=chi-web#9

IBM Developer: The usability lifecycle.
Jakob Nielsen. The one thing that works for creating usable systems is a full
usability engineering lifecycle that corrects the quality of the design at
every single step of the way. Here is the lifecycle I recommend, divided
across the three main stages of a development project.
http://www.developer.ibm.com/library/articles/nielsen3.html

WAP

your guide to the wireless revolution
http://www.anywhereyougo.com/

GENERAL NET STUFF
mostly from Tomalak http://www.tomalak.org

NY Times: Now That I Have Your Attention.
Lately, it seems, spammers have become more intimate in their subject lines,
often hinting at some connection to the recipient. Messages to me that were
labeled "Hi" turned out to be a get-rich-quick scheme, "How's it going" was
for pornography...
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/08/technology/08SLAS.html

Maps of the Month: Mapping the Geography of Domain Names.
Zook argues that his research is 'putting place back in cyberspace' as a
scholarly response to the simplistic claims made by some commentators that the
Internet and telecommunications will inevitably lead to the massive dispersal
of people and economic activities...
http://www.cybergeography.org/maps/maps16.html

Scientific American: Speech without Accountability.
Inventors have played an occasional starring role, too, Gutenberg being the
archetype. But with the rise of the Internet, a certain class of inventors--
computer scientists--has asserted its own special power to determine the
boundaries of permissible speech.
http://www.sciam.com/2000/1000issue/1000techbus1.html
posted by Christina Wodtke 10/9/2000 8:22:24 AM

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