(via Simon) Amazon SimpleDB a complete flop?

Categorization problems in programming.

Mobuzz (the Spanish videoblogging company) is closing down.

Lou Rosenfeld is getting started with his new webinars series. Top UX people (and authors of books with him) give in-depth seminars on a specific UX topic (like webforms). It's a geat learning opportunity, and you save an airfare to a conference. Plus, you get access to a edited version of the lesson online so you can review it later.

This code will get you a 25% discount: DIJCKWBNR

Go check it out: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/webinars/

Categories embedded in infrastructure.

Arrington is right, the new Google stuff sucks, I've been trying my hardest not to click any of the bazillion new little buttons on the search results page.

Cultural localization

It's always hard to customize your technology for a specific culture. Customize your features and UI too much, and you loose the advantages of scalability (speed, cost, ...), customize too little and you're open for local competition that is focused more on how the local market is different.

Here's a good example: Google India now has a specific cricket item showing when you search for cricket (India is cricket-crazy). (A regular Google search just shows the Wikipedia result for cricket first).

I like it. It's subtle, culturally-specific and non-intrusive.

Here we go, http://prezelect.com

Obama is the prezelect (383 hits on a Google search for prezelect)?

A multilingual forum (4 languages are mixed within threads) about Belgium & Europe. I am a big fan of mixing languages in forums, poorbuthappy.com does it too. Many people speak more than 1 language. There are plenty of language-related UI tricks you can use when the forums get really busy or the amount of languages gets out of hand.

Some findings of the digital youth project:

• On social networks they mostly hang out with their real-life friends (Facebook, Myspace), not with people they don't know. They pick up social and technical skills while hanging out, it's a good thing.
  
• On niche content sites, a much smaller number hangs out with other people they didn't know before around specific interests. They get all geeky, which, contrary to popular belief, is actually a very social activity. This is where adults can also be part of the group, functioning as role models and experienced peers.
  

Gmail looks slightly more blue today and it's really freaking me out.

Lou signed some great writers for a book on remote user research. Looking forward to it!

Amazon now exands its S3 storage service with a content delivery network. That means that you can make your site (especially images and videos and stuff) much faster, using the same techniques that the big boys use, very cheaply.

I didn't know this, the first iteration of Wikipedia was called Newpedia, and was based on a custom CMS with a 7-step review process ;)

Lou Rosenfeld is planning a book salon tour - passionate discussion about UX books. If someone knows UX, books and their intersection, it's Lou. And if someone can organize an interesting meetup, it's lots of people, but definitely also Lou. So go check out the blogpost and sign up for updates.

Anders explains how Twitter gets a UI bit wrong (the "reply" feature), I agree with him.

The Google Appengine team is doing some contextual-inquiry style studies :)

"Why don't you arrange separate planes for terrorists?"

"So you claim." Brilliant as always (although I thought Ali G was funnier in England, where class is a bigger deal than race. I figure Borat came out of Sasha working in the US where immigration is a major theme).

Tagged.com was always a bit spammy, now they send emails with the subject line "Peter, please respond to your alerts...". Not friendly at all, pushy if anything. Tagged is like the pushy friend of an acquaintance that you'd rather not invite to your parties.

Does Google not index Unicode chars?

Some CSS tricks for smoothly resizing images away from their native sizes, from Flickr.

I didn't know you could do video chat in Gmail.

I made a Google moderator page where you can ask questions and vote on questions of others about IA. I'm gonna try to discuss the questions on this blog then, and perhaps others can do the same on their blogs. Go check out some IA questions.

Rocketboom, the original daily videblog, is still going strong and hiring developers in New York. Send a resume to jobs at. It's a fun team, so if you're looking to work at a startup, check it out.

• Expert knowledge of XHTML, CSS, and (unobtrusive) javascript
• Proficient in PHP, Ruby, MySQL, and building and working with web services 
• At least 1 year of experience working with an MVC framework (we mostly use Merb) and 4 years of web programming experience 
• Versed in open source software development and experienced with version control 
• Graphic design and system administration skills a plus 
• Strong analytical and logical skills to creatively solve complex problems 
• Enjoys working with a small team 
• Passionate about technology and life in general 
• Excited to show us some code they have written!
  

Luke Wroblewski's Modern Web Form Design webinar is this Thursday, November 13, 1-2pm EST. 

I tried to install disqus but no luck, got some strange errors.

Belgian usability day

I was going to speak at the Belgian usability day event in Brussels this Thursday, but I had to cancel unfortunately. The talk was an evolved and adjusted version of the global social networks talk I gave at the IA Summit in Amsterdam. I'm gonna post the slides anyway, perhaps someone will be interested in them. Meanwhile, registration is free, and seats are limited, so hurry if you plan on coming. Joannes Vandermeulen and Audrey Benoit will also give talks, the program sounds pretty good.

Cyworld is leaving the US.

Cyworld is leaving the US.

Indian cooking :)

A good explanation of money and inflation and deflation.

We all say we should do lots of user research, and then nobody does. Why is that? Donna has some good thoughts. I do think there's more to it than that though, it's just one of those things that's in plain sight but few people talk about. Why don't we all do loads of user research? Perhaps it's really not that important? Or perhaps our understanding of research is just flawed?

Anders writes a good review of the Balsamiq mockup tool.

Mobuzz, one of the early videoblogging companies based in Spain, is in trouble. Help them out!

Congrats to all my US citizen friends with your new president.

Cloudtest is an easy way to do loadtesting. It runs on EC2 itself, just say how many users (100s of 1000s) you want to visit your website, and it will simulate that. Pretty cool (and useful), loadtesting was always kinda hard to do properly and realistically.

Another good one :)

Google now tracks comments and authors on forum pages and shows them in the search results?

I was pretty surprised to see this in Google the other day:

See that "34 posts - 12 authors - Last post: 2 Sep"? Google added that. The site (mine) is a forum. Google is now (it seems) keeping track of updates to forum pages, how many comments ("posts") there are and even how many different authors.

What do you think?

Your Gmail account is now an OpenID. Cool.

How boy scouts use merit mechanisms.

Real estate in NYC being advertised in Euro.

Here's a startup idea: a web-accessible API to postal services around the world. In other words, you can tie into this API to send a postcard or a letter through the postal service in any country, for example. Halfbaked ideas - you ask, I deliver!

Chris: "What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface for just one person?" Good stuff.

Incredible.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW_wQgWviZ8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&fs=1]

Gordon Ramsey consulting

Consultants love Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen nightmares" show. In it, he visits a restaurant that is doing badly, pinpoints the problems (expensive menu, bad food, no leadership, no communication), and tries to fix it. And he shouts a lot at them too. It always makes me think of my consulting practice, other consultants seem to agree. I love his focus on getting the basics right, his honesty and his passion.

Patrick Kennedy wrote a smart blogpost about it, and Ruth Ellison gave a great presentation around the same idea:

The PHP guys are going to use / as a namespace separator, instead of the old ::

Bad decision because they forgot a criterion: semantic clearness. / already means a bunch of things, whereas :: doesn't. class::function is clearer than class/function for that reason, I would think. But I'm probably wrong.

You can now do deeplinking in Youtube videos, something that was possible years ago with Google video.

Exactly!