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.
Wireframes are boundary objects
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.
The programme for this year's Euro IA Summit is online, and registrations are open. Get 'em while they're hot!
Talk about bad information architecture!
"We need lots of variations on the theme of collaboration. Editing adds value, as does expertise."
Exactly. That's why I didn't just throw up an install of MediaWiki for my travelguide wiki. Instead, I'm trying to create the technology so that it supports creating a travelguide for backpackers. A wiki won't do it, I believe. It might, but I think there are better ways. Anyone can still edit anything, but things are more structured than a wiki, and the editing process is also evolving.
We're writing a collaborative travel guide to Bolivia (for backpackers) this week - barnraising. If you've ever traveled there, come and join us! Friday is the deadline!
I always love scaling stories, dunno.
From this:
To this:
(via) Google supports unavailable_after, and also 1-visit pages (which you can visit once for free, but after that you have to pay for them). Google is really newspaper friendly actually, they go out of their way to index content behind a pay-wall.
Yahoo user interface patterns around reputation. Rock.
Plurk has some funky timeline navigation (try scrolling the mousewheel).
According to those in the know (Google themselves!), this is where you should put ads on your blog: (red ones get more clicks)
There's a whole new bunch of countries and collaborative wiki-like backpacker travelguides live at poorbuthappy. Check out the Colombia travelguide for an example that's getting started well, and join in the fun. The travelguides are free to print, for example, there's a free easy-to-print Colombia travelguide here. They're cc licensed - can be shared for free, and anyone can edit them. Let's see how this experiment goes :)
6 years ago: "Which reinforces the idea I’m getting that we need unpopular links as much as we need popular ones."
A Radio site I made in 2002, exactly 6 years ago. And it's still around, you gotta hand it to them.
Or maybe the Amazon POST proposal (what's the status of this?) could serve this purpose. Although that won't do any image resizing or anything, it's just file upload.
- You sign up, enter your Amazon keys.
- You add a form to your site, where users can upload images. (The service could also provide bulk uploader programs and such.)
- Users submit the form, image gets uploaded to EC2, transcoded, resized etcetera, and stored in your own Amazon S3 bucket by the service.
- The service then POST's the results to a script on your server, with the metadata about this picture, which you can then enter in your database.
Is this a reasonable approach? I would certainly use this service if it was idiot-proof and affordable. Does it already exist?
via “In particular, working with him (…) he is one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with. In the sense that, he thought through all of the formal relationship between a client and a professional such as himself. Obviously, very deep thoughts about this and, therefore he had very clear conclusions about what the relationship meant to both parties and how it should be conducted.
For example, I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you’ll pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you, you’re the client, but you’ll pay me’.
The best logo ever (via Simon).
Screencasts teaching code, only 5$ per episode? A new business model? Online teaching has potential, that's for sure.
The LiveJournal Policies make for some fascinating reading by the way.
The breastfeeding moms can once again use a picture of a breast as a profile picture on LiveJournal. "non-graphic, non-sexualized nudity" it's called. LiveJournal continues to serve its users and tackle the hard problems of community building.
A smart idea if you have kids/babies and live in the USA: instead of asking for presents (that get tossed aside), ask for contributions to a college fund. Freshmanfund.
How is Vox, the social blogging platform doing these days? Anyone know? According to Alexa and Compete, not particularly great, and I never got into it myself either.
http://www.uxsocial.org/: Youtube video interviews with UX people.
I tried the downloadable clients but it's too much stuff coming in, I prefer to visit twitter.com now and then.
Some even better Visio tricks in the comments.
I like the "new!" pattern Google uses. It's so old school it's new school. Plus, when do you get the use the <sup> tag anyways? (And that exclamation mark. It's new guys! New! Love it.)
It turns out that "community" is the official and best translation of "community" in Dutch.
A slideshow of Facebooks proposed redesign.
Tricks for IA: copy and paste from Visio
I've seen people export stuff in Visio into images, and then paste those into Word documents. There's an easier and better way: you can copy and paste stuff from Visio straight into Word, and it'll look better (and print nicer) too than if you turn things into images first. One disadvantage: you can only paste what you can copy, so backgrounds don't get copied along.
Interestingly, if you use a program like Windows Live Writer (which I use for this blogpost), you can also copy and paste from Visio straight into the program. The objects will be turned into images and uploaded. Funky!
Here's an example, copied from Visio.
ok this is cool. I just realized I can copy and paste straight from Visio into my blog editors (Scribefire or Windows Live Writer), and it shows up as an image! Not perfectly optimized, but that's cool. 
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)."