The Spectator.co.uk: "Africa isn't dying of Aids - The headline figures are horrible: almost 30 million Africans have HIV/Aids. But, says Rian Malan, the figures are computer-generated estimates and they appear grotesquely exaggerated when set against population statistics." Let's hope so.
Through the Eyes of Children:
"Through the Eyes of Children began as a photographic workshop in 2000, conceived by photographer, David Jiranek, and inspired by the founder of the Imbabazi Orphanage, Rosamond Carr - an American woman living in Rwanda for over 50 years. Using disposable cameras, the children originally took pictures for themselves and to share with others, exploring their community, and finding beauty as the country struggles to rebuild. "
SAP, Microsoft draw battle lines: M$ is starting the battle with SAP for enterprise applications. The article doesn't mention that SAP depends on IE (their software runs pretty much only on IE), and the advantage that that gives M$. SAP's software is stretching the limits of browser capabilities (they have drag and drop with DHTML and such) - this is going to be an obvious advantage for M$ when they start developing these apps: they can build whatever functionality they want straight in IE. They can also achieve close integration with Office.
a n t e n n a: "It's actually surprising given how data and context rich emails are that email clients have lagged behind photo and audio file browsers in the sophistication of their classification schemes." Indeed. More goodies here.
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Redistributing the Future: "Open source: we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing, they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?"
Ooh. The IA Summit 2004 has Brenda Laurel as the plenary speaker. Ethnography enthusiasts must attend!
If you use an RSS reader, you loose track of weblogs that don't do RSS. Victor has been writing about how to develop an interface that lets many business users create or populate taxonomies, and specifically about the difference between the backend taxonomy and the taxonomy that ends up being shown on the website, what he calls "display hierarchy" (he can't seem to stop coining terms, which means he must be going where not many have gone before!
Victor: "OK, you've got a taxonomy full of info you want a whole bunch of distributed, internal, business users to manage and a website that displays that taxonomy, but in a very particular way crafted to the needs of customers and controlled by a centralized web group because you don't want to simply display the raw taxonomy cause that sucks for navigation much of the time, and somehow you must do the taxonomy dance to tweak how the taxonomy content flows into pages."
Internet Explorer Vulnerability: so now looking at the URL and scrolling all the way right (to catch the @ character) isn't safe anymore either.
Ah, a category debate! On the Geography of the Bloggies....
Let me humbly provide a few categorization guidelines:
- The discussion is inherently political, so don't even try to propose a categorization scheme and state that it is more correct.
- Having a category for Africa (which has few webloggers) means promoting webloggers in Africa.
- The amount of bloggers per region is a good guideline to divide regions if you believe everyone should have an equal change to win an award.
- Categories based on population size really don't make sense.
- Self categorization is the best solution to deciding if a blog is "Asian" (say) as long as the definition of "Asian" isn't clear. This vague definition and the self-categorization is not necessarily problematic.
Bugzilla bug 39149: "It's a users choice." That's such a typical dumb programmers response it makes me want to shout at the guy (with all due respect for his undoubtedly hard work and excellent code).
The Importance of Good Copy: "One of the interesting things about direct mail is that it's quite easy to measure success rates. For instance in most campaigns they will send out 2 or more versions and then see which produces the best results. This has lead direct mail copywriters to get very good a writing copy that sells."
In the comments, a link to this (it turns out) classic of direkt marketing copy, which is discussed here.
One of the things I never quite got was the gap between direkt marketers and the other marketers. I guess it's cultural, I just don't get exactly how it works.
Any bloggers in Medellin, Colombia, get in touch. I'm visiting in January and would like to meet up.
Humanity will survive information deluge - Sir Arthur C Clarke: Sir Arthur Clarke spoke with science writer Nalaka Gunawardene at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka: "Ive slowly come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all. [...] Because we frequently suffer from the scourge of information pollution, we find it hard to imagine its even deadlier opposite information starvation. I get very annoyed when I hear arguments usually from those who have been educated beyond their intelligence about the virtues of keeping happy, backwards people in ignorance. [...] Just as our ancestors quickly realised that no one was going to force them to read the entire library of a thousand books, we are now overcoming the initial alarm at the sheer weight of available information and coming to understand that it is not the information itself that determines our future, only the use we can make of it."
(via Resourceshelf) Stu Weibel interviews Tim Berners-Lee: a librarian perspective.
Why libraries are becoming more valuable: "Paul Deane admits the numbers are rather surprising. In the past three years, his Round Lake Area Library has seen its circulation increase by 20 percent to 25 percent each year. And this year, despite a reduction in hours that limits the library's operating schedule to 40 hours a week, circulation is up again."
Cellphone tips
I have a cellphone with Cingular, and opted to get the extra line for 9.99 a month (a good deal). What I learned is this (also true with Verizon): if you get a phone or an extra line, the first year, you cannot cancel the contract. Well, you can, but it costs more to cancel than to keep it open. In this case, they charge 200$ to cancel the contract, versus $80 to keep it open 8 more months, after which cancelling is free.
By the way, if you're still with Verizon, consider Cingular. They seem distinctly less evil, for now.
MarcCanter likes the layout of my metadata overview article: "I bet even JakobNielsen would like this layout." Surely not!
Is the tide turning? I regularly (every month or so) try out a different search engine for a few searches. For the first time in many years, I got a better result at a search engine that's not Google. A search for sites linking to this one found over 11,000 results at AlltheWeb, and only 71 (many that didn't seem to make sense) at Google.
BBC NEWS | In Depth | The iGeneration
Uzbek gamers pick up computer skills: "While in the US or the UK new IT companies seem to sprout daily, in Uzbekistan would-be start-ups are subject to a while host of regulatory procedures."
Community phones connect SA townships: "Old cargo containers in the South African township of Langa are offering people a chance to connect to the rest of the world. The metal boxes are home to community telephone shops offering cheap calls in one of the oldest and poorest townships in the Cape Town area."
Cambodians share in the digital economy: "It just struck me seeing all the internet cafes and English schools - while they believed in the promise of globalisation, it hadn't brought them any benefits yet".
Brazil bets on Linux cybercafes: "Unemployed and living in one of the poorest areas of Sao Paulo City, which has a high rate of violence and little to do, 19-year-old Jose Antonio de Oliveira Silva used to spend most of his time at home. But that all changed with the opening in Cidade Tiradentes of a "telecenter", a free internet cafe set up by the local authority."
Computing power aids India's milk farmers: "Its recently installed computerised and automated milk collection centres are helping India retain its new-found position as the world's largest milk producer."
Let it snow let it snow, er wait: It's snowing again in NYC - I like it, it never snows that beautifully in Belgium. I wish I had my camera so I could take some pictures.
Simon outlines a content management approach that provides versioning, extremely easy content creation and can be implemented very quickly. He created 2 wikis, pointed both of them to the same database, and used one for editing (I assume with a password) and one for display (hiding all the wiki-like links and editing the template to look more like a site).
I like it muchly.
Mark Shuttleworth is spending 100.000 US$ next year on programmers for various open source projects (mostly in Python). Very cool, and to be imitated.
Ten Years of My Life: a picture a day for ten years.
peterme.com: My cup runneth over.: (in the comments) "Categorisation tools help, but isn't it always the questions which are key?"
Oh boy! The new Battlestar Galactica comes with chicks, and: "The look and feel of the four-hour miniseries contrasts not only with the original, but also with the rest of science fiction television at large. Grand, cinematic, Star Wars-like battle tableaus have been replaced with a "reality space" aesthetic."
keep for later: can blogs make a (political) difference?.
kuro5hin.org: "A few people have, in the past and for a variety of reasons, requested that I remove all of their postings from the site."
WorldChanging: "CIDA City Campus in downtown Johannesburg is the first university in South Africa to offer students a free, 'open-access' education. It was founded five years ago by an amazing man, Taddy Blatcher, with no resources. He literally announced that the school was open for students without having a building, professors, a curriculum or anything else that might be useful in providing students with a four year business degree. By the time his first batch of students turned up he had most of those things in place (including a building donated by an investment bank which was unused due to crime in downtown Johannesburg)."
OK so I'm linking to every single post at worldchanging. So what.
Fatema Mernissi: "But to better understand the empowerment dynamics of satellite broadcasting, one has to keep in mind the intense competition not only among channels but also among satellite operators which is forcing everyone to switch as fast as possible from manufacturing propaganda to responding attentively to the citizens' needs for credible communicators. And of course the Sheherazade profile, the brainy, self-confident storyteller is in big demand."
(via worldchanging) Engineers Without Borders
An unexpected side effect of changing a site to a new system and thereby breaking all the old URL's, is that Google ads no longer shows up the relevant ads it did before. The difference is really quite dramatic, and translates in a clickthrough rate that has halved from 1.5% to 0.7%. I guess I just have to wait until Google spiders the site again.
Great ideas 101: "People would like to do this in their 40s; we're starting it when we're 20," says Sharma, a finance and international business major. "Just to see someone who's my age, who's my peer saying, `I'm starting my own business, and if you want you can join me,' I said, `Wow.' You see someone around you doing something and doing so well, and you think, `I can do that too.' "
Fast Company | Practical Radicals: "Ever since she arrived as a child from Mexico, Maricela Gallegos has heard the same question: Couldn't she Americanize her name? "Mary" would be so much easier to pronounce. "I say, No, my name is Maricela. All my brothers and sisters changed their names. They always said to me, 'Why do you go against the grain? Roll with the punches.' But I could never do that. I'd be shortchanging myself. [...] I was trying to conform enough to be effective, but not so much as to be co-opted. [...] I compromised myself in exchange for the power of the institution".
A story on people who change the rules slowly, from the inside.
And continuing the theme: ongoing · Taxonomy Madness: "So, a reasonable person might ask: 'Why all this taxonomy work? What is it being used for?'"
Feature Myths Over Miami: "To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories." The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters." (Discussion here.)
Metadata and Search: Global Corporate Circle DCMI 2003 Workshop: "One audience member noted that a multi-year trial of decentralized metadata creation in his organization had yielded virtually no usable records, because authors were simply not interested in metadata."
Lou on Shirkey's recent metadata writings. Lou's an insightful man with tons of enterprise experience, so I'd listen to him at least.
(via Simon) Disinfopedia: "Welcome to Disinfopedia, a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests."
Technical Information For The Jhai PC And Communications System: bicycle-powered wireless internet: "The Jhai Remote Village IT system was designed in response to the expressed desire of villagers in Phon Kham and four associated villages for a telecommunications capability, specifically the capability to make local calls and to make calls overseas via the Internet."
KevinKelly -- Help Wanted: who rejects technology?
KevinKelly -- Cool Tools. A keeper.
Approaches for the too-many-tabs problem
I've seen various, slightly differing solutions to the too-many-tabs-to-fit problem recently. Amazon does a "more tabs" thing at the right, the new AOL has an embedded tab scrolling thing (the tabs that are not embedded don't scroll, thus allowing for a selection of more important tabs that are always visible), and SAP has a scrolling tab solution without the tabs that stay (couldn't find a screenshot...). Point to other solutions in the comments and I'll add screenshots.
It seems like the too-many-tabs problem is slowly coalescing towards a standard solution for websites.
I've seen the Mac solution below being used on a weblog at one point, but I can't find it anymore. Anyone?
