Day 1: "Jacquelin, who goes
Day 1: "Jacquelin, who goes by Jackie, lives with her mother in Park Ridge, Illinois, outside Chicago. She is 19 years old, a senior in high school, and she is an A student. The reason she is an A student is partly because she has private tutors to help her, but mostly because she studies diligently and reads voraciously. She has all of her textbooks on audiocassette, which she listens to on a special tape player that can intelligibly play the tapes at 3 times their normal speed with minimal distortion. She has been blind for 8 years."
This is too good not to link to... Describing case studies has too long been the stepschild of user research, numbers and graphs were long seen as the ultimate conveyors of truth (see Market research). Time to change that back. There is a lot of detail lost in the numbers and graphs, and a long time ago, the medical profession (for example) recognised that. They used to do detailed case studies; what happened to that practice? These days, case studies have been all but banned to the dark back alleys of social studies, and are not taken as seriously anymore in "real" sciences it seems to me. But hell, I may well be all wrong here.
Belgium! Belgium! Belgium!
ITopia (via Scripting.com):
""callRECORD!" allows every user to dial a telephone number and to receive a copy of the held conversation in his E-mailbox.
The "callRECORD!" service is aimed towards people who are looking for an easy way to take e.g. an interview over the phone and to have a copy of this conversation. Companies may also be interested in "callRECORD!" by recording telephone discussions in order to improve customer satisfaction. "
That's funky. And Belgian! I just hope they start doing automatic transcription as well.
entwickler.com: "Die Spezifikation zu dem
entwickler.com: "Die Spezifikation zu dem offenen XML-Format XFML (Exchangable Faceted Metadata Language) liegt nun in Version 0.2 vor. XFML ermoglicht den Austausch von Faceted Metadata und soll den Web-Developer dabei unterstutzen, der eigenen Webseite eine automatisch generierte Navigation hinzuzufügen. Ebenso sollen Links zu verwandten Topics auf anderen Webseiten automatisch generiert werden können. XFML ist ein freies Format wie SOAP oder RSS; ein Anwendungsbeispiel kann auf http://xfml.org/ eingesehen werden." Yeah!
Google insights (scroll down): "Any
Google insights (scroll down): "Any document with more than two sentences that are the same get tagged with a "duplicate" score."
Google Gets the Most Traffic
Google Gets the Most Traffic (Evolt)
"These new ratings are based on a new measure "Search Hours," which not only looks at the number of people visiting a site but also the average amount of time each visitor spends there. This differs from the more traditional means to ranks search sites' popularity, such as "audience reach," which records the percentage of the Internet audience that visits a site in a given month, without taking note of the number of times that each visitor spends at a site or the number of searches that they perform while they are there."
The Berkeley Group for User
The Berkeley Group for User Interface Research has some cool, and notably fun stuff.
Continuing our series of international
Continuing our series of international IA blogs: Webblogg.net. I think it's swedish.
I halved the amount of
I halved the amount of entries on this page to save some bandwidth...
Go and vent your opinions
Go and vent your opinions on the Win XMP interface at Christina's.
Amazon's gold box.
Seth Godin ("My name is Peter and I read marketing blogs." - "Hello Peter!") mentioned the new Gold box feature at Amazon.
There is a little gold box at Amazon, and if you click it you get a few promotions that last only one hour. Very cool: I looked at them all. You then get some seductively labelled buttons:
Too bad the products weren't very well targeted. If I would have had any interest at all, I would have bought them. What about offering me a discount on a book that's been sitting for months on my wanted list for example?
Down to middle-earth?
Andy muses about XFML: "Practical experimentation in existing websites could bring some of the semantic web ideas down to Earth." That is so it.
In our series of Spanish
In our series of Spanish weblogs about IA: arquitecturas.bitako.com.
IASlash on Self-checkout. Some discussion
IASlash on Self-checkout. Some discussion going on. I saw this for the first time a few months ago, and I like it. It's surprisingly easy to use. I took a picture but something went wrong with the digital camera.
XFML version 0.2
XFML specification version 0.2 published today. Some small changes, and some interesting work going on making XFML compatible with Topicmaps and RDF.
If you've been looking for
If you've been looking for a Spanish language weblog about IA and stuff, look no more: jmarquez.com
If you're out of work
If you're out of work and need some stuff on your resume (or just some karma), check out Netaid.org.
Mozilla 1.0 released. I really
Mozilla 1.0 released. I really hope it doesn't dissapoint, or droves of developers will turn away forever. If it doesn't, who knows?
XFML and RDF
Some interesting work going on on XFML, check the XFML mailing list if you want to find out more. Luis Argerich is doing some great work on RDF serialization of XFML, which will mean compatibility between RDF and XFML.
We plan to finalize the spec in a week or so, and then quickly to release software that can show of some of the funky possibilities of XFML... Stay tuned!
New Monster jobsearch interface
The new monster jobsearch interface (link will probably go out of date) is a lot nicer than what they used to have. They obviously learned a lot and looked at what companies like Google are doing.
jill/txt on ethnography: "Did you
jill/txt on ethnography:
"Did you know that ethical guidelines for internet research are mostly inspired by guidelines for medical research that stems out of the N�rnberg trials and the response to the Nazi's horrid medical experiments in concentration camps?"