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.
Sorry Everybody
Sorry Everybody: brilliant. Pictures of people apologizing for the election results. This is what I wanted americans to do after the prison schandals.
Momentshowing: The Videoblog Roundup
Momentshowing: The Videoblog RoundupL Jay gives an overview of videoblogging slowly taking shape. He doesn't discuss the technology, but what people actually do with it. Jay's an advocate for the users, and if videoblogging ever takes off it will be partly because of him.
If you run WordPress, have a look at your admin screen Edit > Comments. I am deleting hundreds of comment spams, and a lot of people are being hit hard. I didn't turn off commenting, just made any comments with over 1 link go into the moderation queue, and added a few words to my filter.
Wordpress moderation features out of the box are pretty good, and if you want more there are plenty of plugins. Right now, I figure trying out plugins will take more time than deleting spam so I'll stick to that.
I discovered this new and interesting blog on anthropology and design and such: TechnoTaste.
Russell Beattie Notebook - I Want Konfabulator Mobile!: Konfabulator lets you script little apps for BOTH Mac's and Windows. Just use Javasript and some XML. Why is it 2005 and is it still so hard to cross-platform script stuff? Python on the desktop exists, and seems to be used a lot. But this stuff should be MUCH easier, so that developer/users (like Adam Curry) can create their own apps relatively easily. FTP, XML_RCP, RSS/XML parsing and all that should be supereasy and out of the box.
A great case study on the design of the new moleskin notebook covers and store display.
Jay on Bloggercon: "I see a lot of serious bloggers here who want to make CASH. See, i can undersatnd but here's where everything starts to get derailed."
Neighbornode: the extensible neighborhood network
Neighbornode: the extensible neighborhood network: "Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it."
So who makes a neighborwiki?
One of the true joys of working with OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office is its strenght in exporting. I can export to MS formats or PDF supereasily. Creating multiple versions of a document is easy, whereas with MS Office it has always been a pain.
OpenOffice isn't perfect (it's slideshow program for example is not as good as Powerpoint), but being open really has advantages.
Jay went to Bloggercon to represent the videoblogging community. We talked on Skype today, and we tried to record it but it didn't work out. We'll figure it out though. A lot of thoughts on videoblogging, audioblogging and such. We'll try a podcast (audio) one of these days. Sure, podcasting when you're promoting vidcasting is a bit inconsistent, but hey, we can live with that!
I can't record a Skype call with Audacity on Windows. According to
this page, there is a setting called "Stereo Mix", but that dropdown is greyed out in my version of Audacity. Any tips? Thanks!
Today is the NYC marathon. Good luck to everyone!
(I wish I could run, not the marathon but just for practice, but every time I train my knees start to hurt, and supposedly there's not much you can do about that.)
BitTorrent consumes a third of the Internet's bandwidth. ( According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic.) Not sure how solid the figures are.
Gizmodo : MOVIE VISION AV Portable MPEG-4 Recorder, 20GB HD
Gizmodo : MOVIE VISION AV Portable MPEG-4 Recorder, 20GB HD: "Apple doesn't think you need a video iPod, but apparently these people do: the Movie Vision AV has a 20GB hard drive for MP3s and video, including MPEG-4 and DivX. Even better, like a lot of the other newer PMPs on the market, it can record video, as well (although only shows about dolphins, due to an error in translation leading to the installation of a 'flipper chip.')
Oh, and it has video output and is less than $500 USD. You'll need to be in Japan to get one, though, because there's no way anyone is going to try to sell a distended iPod in the US without an Apple lawsuit deathwish."
Yes - people DO want to watch movies on small screens and portable devices (your phone for example). Stop resisting.
If I have a database table with posts on a forum that has id, text and userid, how do I do a query that lists userids in order of who has posted the largest amounts of posts? Thanks! I can do basic SQL but this kinda baffles me (it's been a while). Mysql.
Momentshowing: VIDEO: "Fresh in CA": Jay, our videoblogging MAN, travels to Palo Alto for BloggerCon to infiltrate the geek community.
Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software: "The user of a piece of social software is not just a collection of individuals, but a group. Individual users take on roles that only make sense in groups: leader, follower, peacemaker, process nazi, and so on. There are also behaviors that can only occur in groups, from consensus building to social climbing. And yet, despite these obvious differences between personal and social behaviors, we have very little design practice that treats the group as an entity to be designed for."
The sitemap-at-the-bottom meme continues to stick its head up every now and then. Now Flickr does it. I have an interest because it is an interesting design pattern and I think I was the first person to research it. If I find some time, I might write about how this design pattern has evolved over the years, on different sites.
Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad: works in Firefox, previews images inline. Looks good. I can't believe it's 2004 and this qualifies as news, but hey, there you go. That's what you get for years without any browser competition.
Better Living Through Software - Personas
Better Living Through Software - Personas: "At Microsoft, we sometimes use 'personas' when designing features and writing specs.
[...]
There is some controversy internally about how useful personas are. Real people always trump imaginary people, so personas become less useful when ready access to customers is available. And it is questionable how successful a product can be without ready access to customers, personas or not. And personas can easily become caricatures or stereotypes that don't really accurately represent anyone. It is a lot easier to do personas wrong than it is to use them in a way that adds value."
One volunteer can get free entry to Steve Krug's web usability workshop and Lou Rosenfelds enterprise IA seminar coming Monday and Tuesday in San Jose.
Jon Udell: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8: his review (especially the excellent show&tell demonstration in Flash) shows how far this stuff has come. Maybe we could use software like this to produce transcripts of podcasts? It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be good enough for Google, or for people to have a quick scan of what's been said.
Killer CC App: The Publisher, beta version
Killer CC App: The Publisher, beta version: "Leveraging the Internet Archive's generous offer to host Creative Commons licensed (audio and video) files for free, we recently completed the 0.96 beta version of The Publisher, a desktop, drag-and-drop application that licenses audio and video files, and sends them to the Internet Archive for free hosting.
When you're done uploading, the application gives you a URL where others can download the file. It also is able to tag MP3 files with Creative Commons metadata and publish verification metadata to the Web. A HUGE congratulations to Nathan Yergler, who's done an amazing job with this. Also, a great thanks to Jon Aizen and the folk at the Internet Archive. You can download the Publisher from here -- give it a test run and let us know what you think.
Also note that aside from being downloadable from Internet Archive, these tagged MP3s can flow on to P2P networks, and be identified as Creative Commons licensed (see our Lookup app we recently also updated to 0.96). Morpheus is currently the only file sharing application to identify Creative Commons licensed files."
This is brilliant. As long as you put your video under a creative commons license, you get free hosting from the internet archive, who can handle it. An excellent way to encourage people to CC their content, and an excellent way to host large video. And it looks user friendly, too. I am going to start experimenting with this.
The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture
AIFIA | Editorial: The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture.
One of the hard things as a user, when using a web based tool, is knowing what effect changing certain settings will have. Does anyone have examples of tools that handle this particularly well? Thanks!
Bad news. Julia in the comments: Bush will appoint possibly 3 Supreme Court Justices in the next 4 years. What are americans thinking? Separation of church and governement? Civil liberties? Women's rights? If it only affected them, I'd say they deserve what they get, but it doesn't.
With the right interface, a todo list in RSS could be popular. Basecamp look out!
Anne Galloway: want to find some good books on qualitative research?
Dina on gobal teams. Global teams, small startups. I'm starting to work in circumstances like his now that I am an independent consultant.
A good article on Server side usability. Point your sysadmin to it.