From: Gleanings
To: miniyou
Subject: Gleanigns: snack sized glean

OPENING THANG

The Carbon IQ crew has started a group blog. On it find Noel's rant on customer service, my adventure setting up greymatter and Noel teasing me. And Gabe's beautiful design.
http://www.carboniq.com/log

USABILITY MATTERS

I haven't been here for quite a while, and dang it's great! Worth it for the glossary alone.
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/

Kayla Block posts her ideas on evangelizing user interface throughout a organization
http://interfacing.blogspot.com

DESIGN MATTERS

Lovely portfolio and personal site.
http://sabine.cc/frames.html

TECH MATTERS

mattjones sends this

"Writing code, he explains, is like writing poetry: every word, each placement counts. Except that software is harder, because digital poems can have millions of lines which are all somehow interconnected. Try fixing programming errors, known as bugs, and you often introduce new ones. So far, he laments, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the beast of complexity"
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=568249&CFID=1765964&CFTOKEN=83880030

APROPOS OF NOTHING

from Kottke.org
"Ok, this is the best thing ever! Ever! All those other times that I told you about the best thing ever? I was lying! Go see Extreme Stick Death #3 right now. Now! Turn up the sound! (Note: I've had *way* too much sugar this morning....) "
http://games.sohu.com/fightgame/fight3.htm

I forgot to say, go see memento. amazing movie. form supports the story, enhances, disorients...
http://www.sfgate.com/eguide/arts/movies--030.html

posted by Christina Wodtke 4/19/2001 12:47:27 PM

From: Gleanings
To: Filters
Subject: Gleanings: all the news that I think is fit to print

OPENING THANG

Welcome to Wednesday. How did it get to be Wednesday already? Seems like just yesterday it was Tuesday. Well, I missed yesterday and I may miss tomorrow, but I've got a massive one for you today. Enjoy.

~~~

from the blog...
nadav http://giantant.com/antenna/ points at http://www.epinions.com/user-review-6F8A-7479A90-39FFAA96-prod1 which is interesting to me both as a history of a company's evolution, but also as a consequence of what happens on a site where you let your customers review products: at some point the product they review will be you.
It also makes me realize that I'm getting most of my news through a human filter (except, of course the holy two hours on Sunday morning with the newspaper and iht) and I'm happy about it. I've long doubted the existence of "journalist objectivity" and by receiving all my news through blogs and the like, every single piece of news is so very clearly slanted, I feel free-- no, obligated-- to form my own opinions on the matter. I question what I see, think, search... the "untrustworthy narrator" makes reading an interactive rather than a passive activity. feel free to disagree. http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/archives/00000018.html#comments

a short note on the exception: I have loved the International Herald Tribune for years, and have always wished I could get it in America (I buy it when I'm traveling). Their website is all the things the paper is: succinct news with a world view presented elegantly.
http://www.iht.com/frontpage.html

IA & DESIGN MATTERS

Critical thinking in design
"At the heart of design and engineering is critical thinking. The ability to separate what is worthwhile from what isn't is the hallmark of the best in many fields, from film directors to project managers, programmers to designers... "
http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue14.htm

~~~

two of my favorite people, critiquing one of my favorite subjects: banking sites

Internet World: Deconstructing Citibank.com. (tomalak.org)
"Louis Rosenfeld and John Shiple. Lots has changed since the web exploded, but
one of the few remaining constants is that large, multifactional organizations
will play out their political tensions on their most visible and valuable real
estate, the main page."
http://www.internetworld.com/041501/04.15.01decon.jsp

~~~

Visual Arts Trends (xblog.com)
http://www.VisualArtsTrends.com/
"Visual Arts Trends is a quarterly 'state of the industry' report for the creative professional. With offices in New York, USA, and London, UK, Visual Arts Trends is an international publication focusing on graphic design, advertising art direction, photography and illustration. Each quarterly report offers a brief, business-oriented, definitive and timely overview of industry developments that affect aesthetics, pricing, salaries, working conditions and client relations."

~~~

Usor: a collection of user oriented methods (giantant.com/antenna/)
"This web site contains descriptions of different user oriented methods. These descriptions are not meant to be exhaustive descriptions that you could use right after you have visited this web site. They are rather short summaries with references to more thorough descriptions of these methods."
http://www.nada.kth.se/cid/usor/

~~~

Web Design Workflow
( Acrobat 3.0--523K)
"Web sites are becoming increasingly complex and multi-layered. Kelly Goto helps you set up a plan for concepting and storyboarding the structure of your site."
http://www.thunderlizard.com/tlp_pdfs/wd_workflow.pdf

NEWS & COMMENTARY

What is Tesco.com doing so right that Kozmo did so wrong?
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/weekly_editorial.html

~~~

Disappearing Act
"Online advertising is already hurting. Now software that zaps Web ads is about to go mainstream."
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23640,00.html

~~~

IntelliQuest: Sixty percent of women click on banners
The results of a surprising new survey show that 60 percent of female
users of the MSN website click on banner ads.
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356651&rel=true

~~~

E-Tax Filings Miss the Mark
The latest stats show that more Americans filed their taxes online than ever before - just not quite as many as the IRS expected.
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23746,00.html?nl=mg

~~~

University Raided in MP3 Copyright Action
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18290.html
"A multinational recording-industry front group called the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has filed suit with the Tainan District Prosecutor's Office against fourteen students at Taiwan's National Chengkung University, accusing them of illegally copying and trading MP3 music files, the Taipei Times reports. "

Yahoo to Charge for Reading E-Mail
"Yahoo! Inc., looking for ways to cash in on the popularity of its Web site, will start charging for its service that reads e-mail messages over the phone."
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Yahoo-Fees.html
(Registration required.)

~~~

DaveNet: The Web is a Writing Environment. (tomalak.org)
"The Web is at the intersection of publishing and the telephone. How many brands of phone conversation are there? Can you call Sandy to talk with Allison?"
http://davenet.userland.com/2001/04/17/theWebIsAWritingEnvironment

~~~

Comparison shopping websites are set for a shakeout, according to
Forrester. Sites that aggregate online retailer listings and products,
and hand consumers passively over to retailers, will suffer badly
while those that survive will evolve into ecommerce brokers.
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=VS&art_id=905356645&rel=true

~~~

Battle for the Unseen Computer
"Windows won the war for the desktop. But there's a new struggle over operating systems embedded in everyday objects, and this time free software has the inside track."
http://www.techreview.com/magazine/may01/tristram.asp

APROPOS OF NOTHING

MetroActive Features Taxi Tales
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/03.98/taxis1-98-3.html

~~~

in the category of "I found it before, and look, I've found it again"
the bullshit generator
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
posted by Christina Wodtke 4/18/2001 10:32:57 AM

From: Gleanings
To: Monday Robots
Subject: Gleanings: you will think what I tell you to think

OPENING THANG

Welcome to Monday. Republic.com is the book everyone is talking about. Supposedly in it (I'll cheerfully admit I haven't read it and feel no urgency to do so), the author speculates that new technologies will allow us to become ignorant about the world around us and more intolerant, because we'll be able to filter out the news we don't want. Has he ever seen a family read the newspaper? In the most archetypical scenario, mom takes the food section, dad takes sports, brother takes classified, sis take fashion and little one reads comics. In a real scenario a similar but perhaps less gender driven scenario takes place: people read the sections that interest them. Ever watch someone couch surf across the TV channels? Filters happen.

Instead the author should be grateful that email allows people to forward news articles to each other, suddenly allows a human filter to push through current events the way a newsbreak interrupts a rerun of friends.

Of course gleanings is very much a "daily me:" a human filter for your news.

Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/13/technology/13CYBERLAW.html

BLOG OF THE DAY

I've been really enjoying Nadav's "antenna" lately. from April 15th:

"My first reaction on seeing this navigation map of computer ethics was "feh! Why do people insist on mapping ideas onto a physical geography," but then I spent a minute with it and realized that, unlike antarctica, where there's no meaning to the geographical distribution of the data, the organization was meaningful. While both Encryption and Spamming are within the borders of Privacy, the former is near Intellectual Property, while the latter is at the juncture of Computer Abuse and Commerce. "
http://www.giantant.com/antenna/

DESIGN & IA MATTERS

The Myth of 800x600
"Developing fixed-size Web pages is a fundamentally flawed practice. Not only does it result in Web pages that remain at a constant size regardless of the user's browser size, but it fails to take advantage of the medium's flexibility. " Amen brother.
http://webreview.com/2001/03_16/webauthors/index01.shtml

Visual Architecture: The Rule of Three
"Visual architecture is applied to the new media design context and defined as the use of a particular method of building visual information and balancing communication between images and words." Funny, where I grew up this was called design. In any case, this is an excellent article-- especially for nondesingers-- on effective layout.
http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2001-4.shtml

also in digtalweb
Designing for Search Engines and Stars
"Great search engine placement doesn't require you to sacrifice appealing design. While "content is king" for high search engine rankings as well as overall site popularity, your imagination and creativity with designs can still reach for the stars."
http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/

Web typography: the rookie mistakes
"Novice designers, writers, editors, and publishers who come to the medium with no background in web publishing tend to make simple mistakes that can turn an otherwise utilitarian website into a visual junk store. Their websites, consequently, are hard to look at, hard to read, and hard to navigate. "
http://www.nua.com/nkb/index.cgi?f=VA&art_type=STYLE&art_id=618

Another decadent eyecandy design studio site. and why not.
http://www.malex.it/

USABILITY MATTERS

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 15
"According to a recent critical incident analysis, users' most important
Web tasks involve collecting and comparing multiple pieces of information,
usually so they can make a choice."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010415.html

Audience interviews from the final leg of the User Experience World Tour:
Is the Slowing Economy Helping or Hurting Usability?
http://www.nngroup.com/worldtour/cit_se.html

Users Aren't Happy in Captivity
"Marketing columnist Blake Rohrbacher debunks the myth of stickiness. "
http://www.business2.com/content/channels/marketing/2001/04/12/29907

NEWS & COMMENTARY

More Net firms in profit than might be expected
"ActivMedia Research reports that 61 percent of mid-sized online businesses and 39 percent of large online firms are profitable. "
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/?f=VS&art_id=905356657&rel=true

IPO Disasters Give Underwriters Reason to Blush
"Dot-com-pushing analysts have long taken the brunt of criticism for over-hyping the market, but what about the investment bankers who took those companies public? Did they know they were selling damaged goods with no refund policy? "
http://www.iht.com/articles/16977.html

A Computer Mouse Without the Trap
"Build a better mouse, and the world will beat a path to your door. At least that is what Johan Ullman, a Swedish medical doctor and ergonomics expert, is hoping. Dr. Ullman invented the pen mouse, which resembles a pen stuck into a small mouse or, viewed differently, an automobile stick shift in a gear box. "
http://www.iht.com/technology.html

The glory days of e-commerce are over
"Broke and stingy e-tailers have taken all the fun out of online shopping."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/11/29/ecommerce/index.html

APROPOS OF NOTHING

Joey Ramone dead at 49 (biggerhand.com)
"Singer Joey Ramone, the punk rock icon whose signature yelp melded with the Ramones' three-chord thrash to launch an explosion of bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols, died Sunday. He was 49. "
http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2001/04/15/ramone/index.html

Suicide In The Netherlands Could Come In Easy-To-Swallow Pill Form
http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/15/1846236&from=rdf

How many products can you spot in the JOSIE & THE PUSSYCATS trailer? (evhead.com)
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=8503

In future anyone can be my DJ. or at least dack can.
http://www.dack.com/music/show/2001-04-12.html

I regret clicking this link, yet I share it with you anyhow. (camworld.com)
http://www.gpl.com.au/temp/EasterXcld.jpg
adn this one, for different reasons
http://www.crackerfactory.org/crouching_robot_hidden_kitten.jpg
posted by Christina Wodtke 4/16/2001 08:04:05 AM

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