ongoing � Warm Antwerp Glow: my home town on the blogger map!
Joi Ito's Web: Video of French soldiers shooting civilians: "There is an interesting discussion going on on MetaFilter about a very graphic video of what appears to be French soldiers shooting at civilians in Cote d'Ivoire. The discussion starts with understandable outrage, but some people begin to question the authenticity of the video and question whether it might be propaganda from the Gbagbo government. There is more and more political video on the Internet and it clearly is more emotional than text. Well respected groups such as Witness have been using video to expose human rights issues for awhile now. It will be interesting to see if/when/how not so respectable groups begin using video on the Internet for political issues or to spin the truth."
The KANO model
A discussion on the SIGIA-L mailing list introduced me to the KANO model. It is something business analysts use to prioritize features, among other things. It's a way to make decisions about requirements. Interesting to UX folks, KANO analysis has a big focus on user satisfaction and even user delight.
A good writeup of the basic approach
KANO analysis in IT: "I was working for a startup company where they provided free lunch ordered in for all the employees every day (remember Dot com times?). Yet employees just grumbled at the sight of food every afternoon. Counter-Intuitive? Not so."
A presentation on KANO for UPA people by Anthony.
Center for Quality Management's special issue on Kano Methods
I haven't seen much in there that's way new to us, but if our colleagues use it it's good to be at least aware of the method.
Catalogablog: "A new version - 0.2(beta)- of Dublin Core Services/Describethis has been published. This new version, as main feature, brings us an automatic generator of keywords: DCS incorporates now a dictionary of 5300 words in 11 different languages, included Catalan, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Italian, among others, that permits to recognize and generate keywords automatically."
The service is nice, and I especially like its multilingual features. You enter the URL of a resource and it returns Dublin-Core friendly specific information about the resource, ex.: submitting dates, keywords, creators, extension and more. It pulls out the RSS feed of a website if it can find one as a reference, for example.
EffectiveBrand - Create your branded toolbar: let users of your site download your own branded toolbar.
cubicgarden.com: the BBC is changing it's historical fear of letting out plans of projects to embrace the web and create BBC backstage, something like Google Labs, hopefully mixed with webservice access to much of their data.
Dave: "Smoking is an aid to creativity. I don't do the intense multi-day programming jags anymore, I can't without the cigarettes. The reason why, I think, is that the drug helps you tune out distractions. The smoke keeps interruptions away. Work that requires intense concentration is aided by things that push away distractions. But at our age, Zeldman and I are roughly the same age, after thirty years of smoking, to keep doing it would be suicide, and not far-in-the-future suicide, like it is for people in their twenties and thirties, but suicide in the near future. A few people get to smoke into old age, but it seems that most don't."
I agree that smoking can help concentration. I quit many years ago, and I'm pretty happy I did. Who needs concentration anyway? (By the way, I believe one of the the best ways to train your concentration skills is mediation.)
Public dial on GigaDial.net: "GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters."
A browser based XUL File Manager (use Firefox to access it) I couldn't access it (the launch window showed but that was it), maybe I need to upgrade to the latest Firefox?
A friend asked me yesterday: why haven't journalists in the US asked the question: "Is the war on terror going to turn out like the war on drugs"?
Long Copy vs. Short Copy
Long Copy vs. Short Copy (Signal vs. Noise): "MarketingExperiments.com recently set out to see what impact the length of sales copy has on a website%u2019s conversion rate. The results: long copy clearly outperformed short copy in all three of their tests.
This is something we've wrestled with at BasecampHQ.com. We like to be as descriptive and informative as possible. But there's a downside to this approach. Many visitors are intimidated by large blocks of text and just tune out the site and the tool when they see long copy. We've heard from some visitors that a large amount of copy can make the tool itself seem complex (i.e. if it takes this much text to explain it, can it really be simple?)."
This is the kind of thing you should be able to test side by side - deliver half of your audience a long version, half a short one and see which one performs better.
Apologies for the plug, but I started a newsletter for my own professional activities - so if you want to know when I do workshops, launch new projects or put presentations online and such, feel free to sign up. No spam - promise!
I know AdaptivePath and other similar companies do one, so I figured: why not? If there is nothing interesting happening I just won't send out anything that month.
Anil Dash: i'm the guy who loves clippy
Come Together, Right Now: The Internet's Unlit Fuse | Personal Democracy Forum: "Basically, the collective action problem arises when a great number of people are willing to do something, but only if they think it will be worthwhile because enough other people will also do it. Imagine you look out your window to see two large men beating up a poor child on your street. If you go out alone, you%u2019re afraid you too will be beat up. But if you knew that all your neighbors were also watching, and would also be willing to take on the men, you'd get out in the street in an instant, knowing that collectively you can overpower them."
I click on a link on this page and Firefox (not the latest version) tells me "rtsp is not a registered protocol". Easy fixes? Doesn't work in IE either.
vogbrowser 0.1
vogbrowser 0.1: still an experiment: it pulls in videos through the RSS feeds of the videobloggers, and then lets you browse them. Videoblogging becomes more tv and less clicking around to see all of them. I have hopes for this - I think it will become an important element of the videoblogging ecology. Podcasting (pulling in audio files through enclosures) became the tipping point for audioblogging. RSS readers were not a tipping point but an important element of the textblogging thing. Maybe vbrowsers will turn out to be an important element of the videoblogging revolution. (Darn! I said the revolution word. Sorry.)
A discussion on The Language of videoblogging
Scripting News: 11/17/2004: "Now what I want -- a $249 hard disk with every Beatles song ever recorded in MP3 format. Come on RIAA, cough it up. I want to pay! If you really want to break down the barriers, sell me a license for another $249 that lets me include the songs in my podcasts. I bet you make a $billion. Rockin out here in Seattle, love Dave"
Doc Searls: "How long before somebody designs an RSS newsreader that blocks ads in RSS feeds?"
I've already seen ads show up in an RSS feed in my reader (Bloglines). No good. Sorry. RSS and ads don't mix: there's a reason why I use an aggregator, and it's not to see your ads. There are maybe two blogs that I might continue to read even with ads, but they'd have to work hard to keep me.
Yahoo has a new frontpage design, de-emphasizing their directory function even further into oblivion. Two product taxonomies though. ("Products" are Yahoo services, like chat, auction, ...)
I like the design of the search box, the customization features. Very nice.
Gizmodo : MagPix Pocket Photo Album
. I saw someone using one of these little gadgets that show pictures to share some photos yesterday. They were going through the pictures and discussing them.
So I predict (it's almost end of year, right?) that these things will be cheap and hugely popular. The big problem with digital pictures has been sharing them, talking about them with friends, and these devices seem to be a pretty good part of a solution. Of course, they'll also play video. Short, personal video like the videobloggers make are also going to become more popular, me thinks.
Finaly fired from Macromedia! gravity always wins: Salvation arrives: "When I got into the meeting, someone from HR was there, and I immediately knew things were going to go well in this meeting. My boss said it was my last day at Macromedia, and I immediately replied, "What took so long?"
FRONTLINE: watch online | PBS: the latest video is about the business and science of choosing language to sell us things, including politics.
(via Michael) frontline: the persuaders: interviews: frank luntz | PBS: "Are there different techniques you use when working with politics versus corporations?
The technique is a little bit different because politics and corporations are a little bit different. But in the end you're still using the same focus groups; you're still using the same dial technology; you're still using the same quantitative data; you're still doing split samples where you ask half a sample one way and the other half a different way. You're still asking and re-asking the questions. You're still showing them visuals to see what they like the best, and you're still showing them or having them listen to audio track to see how they respond. So the actual techniques are the same, but how they are applied is different. And that really is the separation; that's the differentiation between politics and the corporate world."
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: "Marqui is a company that's pumping up publicity by offering to pay people to write about them on their weblogs. I just got a copy of their blogger contract
[...]
what it says is that they'll give me eight hundred bucks a month until either (1) they realize I am not capable of writing something which is neither pornographic nor defamatory, or (2) the investors get wind of what's going on, whichever comes first."
Interesting: Nokia Semantic Web Server
The New York Times > What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits: "By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts."
scratch video: exquisite corpse
scratch video: exquisite corpse: just keep the last frame for the next part of the story, and join the videoblogging party!
I'm listening to some Podcast about paying content, and they ask "Does anyone look at the right side of the Google screen (the ads)?"
I noticed something I haven't seen documented: for some searches ("cheap hosting"), the search results are so poluted that the ads are actually more relevant. You read it here ;)
UCSB Anthropology: American Modern
: the history of the flush toilet.
This Blog Sits at the: Skype and individualism: "In about 2 weeks, Skype has made itself indispensable. I use it to talk to my fianc�e, a couple of brothers-in law, colleagues and friends. But it's also anthropologically illuminating ..."
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Speed of Language: small languages evolve faster.
Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion: a story of software development.
peterme.com: Cathy Marshall on Personal Digital Libraries.
Organizing digital libraries is indeed an unsolved problem, although I can see we are getting close. I think we'll need 2 more generations (6 years - 2 more intellectual breakthroughs) of software to get something decent.
Rent A Coder - viPodder: Jay needs a coder to work on viPodder: iPodder for video. Help him out, he's a good man!
John Robb's Weblog: "My kids are using Skype for 85% of their voice communications with friends (5% is on cell phones and 5% is on traditional landlines, and 5% on AIM). They found it on their own (without my help)." And it's not about price.
CC Mixter - The remix family tree
In a few weeks I'll look back on what I accomplished this year and one of the things I'm happy with is the videoblogging group I started with Jay (and that really took off thanks to Jay and the gang, not much thanks to me.)
Here's a site I run. As you can see, the forums have been categorized into "Friendly Talkzone", which contains everything, and "Politics and the war", which contains political posts. I created the second forum so that people not interested in this topic could ignore it by only reading the other forums.
Now, there is demand for a "Relationships & Fiancee visas" forum, again, so that people not interested in this topic can easily ignore it.
I am thinking about the consequences of categorization. Creating a category legitimizes the category. It means there will always be a place on my site for those discussions, even when nobody wants to have them anymore. And I have the feeling there are other social effects of creating a category like this.
(PS: The Friendly Talkzone is the "Everything Else" category.)
Thoughts on the social impact of categories on online discussions are very welcome!
Om Malik on Broadband: Skype-to-plain phone, on the cheap supposedly. I love Skype, but I hate my dodgy ADSL modem that connects with USB. Note to self: don't get USB modems. They are twitchy and eat up a lot of time trying to fix them.
Sean's vBlog: Rocketboom and Slashdot Naysayers
. Good follow up on the videoblogging against Slashdot fight. It's epic, and we're just getting started. What this is doing for me is emphasize the fact that text and video have a different quality to them. And video does things that text never can (and the other way round). It cannot be explained, it must be experienced.
Google has a Firefox branded start page: http://www.google.com/firefox. In other words, they are putting a little bit of their considerable weight behind the Firefox browser.
User Experience Comes in Threes: the Venn diagrams of user experience. He forgot the IA Venn diagram(s).
Codinghorror: A metaphor for explaining usability problems versus attractiveness of the application: "You'll never have a big enough cheese to compensate for even small electric shocks, unless you provide free mp3's or porn." Anyone have any good metaphors around information architecture?
The Library of Congress' Luminary Lectures program lists a whole list of lectures in video format relevant to information architects. Cool.
coljac.net - How to Learn a Language
Peter Van Dijck - Information architecture presentations
I taught a post-graduate class on information architecture (you can download the presentation there - in Flemish) in Leuven, Belgium on Tuesday.
They run one of the few UX courses in Belgium. It is given by the brand new KU Leuven Mediacenter (including a brand new usability center which is cool (built-in living room for testing living room usability, eye tracking) but the one-way windows aren't really one-way, I think they were ripped off a bit on that one and I should really stop writing these long-winded sentences that don't go anywhere.
Anyway, the class was fun and the group interesting. I wish we could have chatted a bit more after the class but it was late and people had to catch trains. Next time, beers all?
Videobloggers fight back
There is some interesting experimenting going on with social videoblogging.
A recent Slashdot post tried to kill the videoblogging star, but the small handful of videoblogging rebels are fighting back, using the only weapons they have.
Quicktime: The Human Dog's answer. Mica's answer. Then Charlene answered the Human Dog ("no video - nothing to see"). We're a bit worried about being Slashdotted, but hey. Such is life.
Sure, we're a bunch of underpowered, experimenting fools, fighting impossible odds (bandwidth, media formats, bigCo). But we tap into the Force. We got it going on. And you know it.