Omnigraffle stencils for sketch wireframing
If you use OmniGraffle, check out Michael Angeles’ Sketch Stencils, they rock. They’re only 10 US$, that’s like 3 coffees, so go get them while they’re hot.
How cool are these stencils?
These guys make very cool short videos explaining products.
Supplo is a marketplace for goods that I did some consulting with (interesting multilingual challenges!)
I started a new blog about raising kids in more than 1 language.
New Australian IA organization
Paul Minty emailed me to let me know that a non-profit association has been formed in Australia to support the work of Information Architect's in Australia. Check it out at www.iaia.org.au. You aussies!
Email exchanges with Steve Chen
OK, bite dust Peter, for getting it wrong.
This is from an email exchange with Steve Chen (Youtube founder who is now filthy rich) in June 2005. He pinged me about Youtube (I was running Mefeedia at the time) and I criticized their service for not being open about their business model.
Me: "Thanks for taking criticism so well :) You're right, there are lots of new players. Most won't last though. I'm looking forward to see how you guys do and what features you come up with. Let's stay in touch."
What's more though, in the following emails we discussed syndication and I helped them figure out (together with Josh who was working on ANT then) how to support the mediaRSS extensions in their RSS feeds and specifically add a file extension (.swf) which made my work easier and to add RSS2.0 enclosures.
Me: "Both ANT and Mefeedia (and probably other future aggregators) support RSS2.0 enclosures, not the media:player element. So could you add this to the feed (with the mime type and whatever the length is)?"
Steve: (few emails later) "Yes! Finally! We went through a lot of iterations with getting this right. Now it's moving on to tackling REST and MetaWeblog API. :)"
So a bit of history there, I think I got Steve Chen to add enclosures to the Youtube RSS feeds :) I had totally forgotten that until today Facebook asked if I wanted to be Steve Chen's friend. Actually, I remember meeting him in a bar in NYC and disussing the option of going to London to work with Youtube, but that may be a false memory (may have been someone else).
Mixed lists
As information architects, we always have loads of ways available to view information in lists. Show the latest, the most popular, the one with the latest comment, everything of one particular type, etc... We don't always know which way users want to look at the information, so the solution is usually to offer different views of the same information. Choose the most likely popular default view, and users can choose other views as they like.
The problem with that approach is that we're expecting users to switch between views, and to understand what the various views mean. And that's often too much to ask - in practice, many users stick with the default view, and whatever that shows or, importantly, hides.
So there's a new tendency I've noticed the past few years to mix multiple views into 1 definitive view, a mixed list. The algorithm that determines what goes in there can be more complex, it can show multiple types of information, etc.
Google's evolution is a good example. At first, they just showed different options to see their search results: see results in news, in images, on the web, etc...
The "tabs" were there for a few years, but are gone now, as they move to 1 definitive serp, they call it universal search.
The definitive search result page shows thumbnails of pictures, movies, blog results and other elements, all mixed on 1 page. The seem to be experimenting a lot with this and they think it's successful. Here's a good example, showing images, videos, shopping etc... on 1 page.
Examples are everywhere, study Facebook for a good example. They also mix content types and stuff like crazy to make their mixed lists more useful:
More thoughts/examples on mixed lists?
Funky categories
I love funky categories, I can always imagine the meetings around those when I see them. Here's an example:
Second category is "Crave" - it's the only one that jumps out a little.
The name of the game is influence. "Al Jazeera Network today announced the world’s first repository of
broadcast-quality video footage released under the Creative Commons 3.0
Attribution license."
I wish I could find a link to a specific Amazon AWS issue from their status page. PBH was down a few hours today, probably caused by a brief issue they reported with EC2.
Todd Warfel is sharing some templates for data-driven personas.
Tripadvisor has a good way of dealing with reviews that are written in multiple languages: the user can choose which language to display first, reviews in other languages get listed below those.
"Let's have a big time" is the slogan of a new Belgian radio station. Sigh.
I like Google Chrome's tabs in Options: "Basic", "Minor tweaks" and "Under the hood :)
Amazon AWS continues to innovate, requester pays is another great step forward. Incredible.
It seems Warner Bros. Watchmen movie is being held in the courts by 20th Century Fox. Damn, that was one I might want to see.
I will follow Adam Quirk who noted "my new years resolution is to do boring work that hurts people, lose
all my friends, go bankrupt, and move into a van down by the river".
I posted this in 2004, but the How to make a documentary post is still going strong :)
Happy new year everyone! (To my 3 faithful readers - yes, that's you - thanks for reading.)
Good post on user/profit numbers for freemium models.
6 good reasons to choose a categorization system (and I'm not being glib). "5. I can pass the blame onto Apple."
So of all the things to do while sitting in front of a computer, programming is definitely the most fun.
Dave Winer is brilliantly bootstrapping again, this time with an element to indicate where to find a thumbnail of a picture.
- The size (in Kb) of webpages and the amount of objects has increased since 1995 on a nice graph.
- 100ms extra loadtime on Amazon.com caused a 1% drop in sales.
- Yahoo did a test: added 400ms to some important pages. Result: 5 to 9% increase in people that click BACK before the page even loaded.
- Google added 500ms, this caused 20% less searches. (!)
Cross-cultural product design.
Victor Lombardi is doing some great work around tools and techniques for concept design - the phase before the actual "design" phase (where we usually start working), when you're still exploring different concepts.
Some questions just catch you. Are the laws of nature more like habits?
Funny thing: the word
"school" is actually the ancient Greek word for leisure. The idea was,
if you had the means to live a life of leisure, then of course you'd
spend it learning and talking about cool stuff with other similarly
well-off people.
Alphabetical ordering and Dutch last names.
"This has to be one of the most difficult challenges as a single parent,
having travel plans undermined and vetoed by your ex-partner."
“I was looking for website designer but the kind of website i wanted is similiar to facebook, or myspace. I was wondering if you guys know anyway of doing that type of website and if I bring you the designe I want then we can make it happen. Email me with your respone and if yes how much would it cost me.”
Facebook uses 800 servers supplying over 28 terabytes of memory through Memcached.
futurepractice2 is the twitter tag of Indi's webinar on mental models that just finished. Check it out and see what people say.
Amelia now blows her food (to cool it down). And yesterday I found her trying to open the lock of a closetspace in the living roomd with a key she found. She didn't figure out how to put the key in the lock.. just yet! She know where we kept the key (on top of the closet), so she put a little stairs next to the closet, got the key, and tried to open it. Smart.
The law in Belgium speaks of the race category as "so called race", in order to clarify that there is no such thing as race scientifically. The law in the US has a different approach I believe, I think they define it (for use in the census) as being self-assigned (so you decide yourself what race you are).
So it turns out you *can* actually track members versus non-members with Google analytics.
Is there a way to use Google analytics to distinguish between logged-in users and not logged-in users?
Frozen *homemade* burritos, that is.
Today, I discovered the wonderful usability of frozen burritos.
Bloglines is gonna be down for 12 hours while they move to another data center. Pft. I think I'm finally gonna give in and move to Google reader.
Presentation tip: at most conferences, you get 45 or 50 minutes. Leave 5 as buffer, 5 for questions, speak for 40 minutes max, which means you should aim at about 30 slides max.
So I don't forget: Amelia ate spicy Thai crackers and loved them this week (I'm so proud!), she's babbling like crazy and she spoke on the phone for the first time with her mom (instead of just listening) :)
Quick and easy explanation of Facebook development, using Slideshare's audio feature (which rocks).
Very exciting: Google analytics can track ajax interactions now.
The travel with kids forum is getting active. Check it out!