Note to self: Interesting blog

Note to self: Interesting blog about research on Learning and Performance.

Gimme some of that Google love

I'm listing nr.4 on page 1 on Google search results for cheap plane flights and nr. 13 (page 2) for cheap plane tickets. Google love!

Figure drawing: Basic Pose and

Figure drawing: Basic Pose and Construction. Now this is a nice and simple page: just enough decoration to brand it nicely, all the focus on the content, not much navigation. (the link to the homepage could be clearer though). And fun.

I found Bizquick.org through a

I found Bizquick.org through a textad at Metafilter. Business news for non business people: nice.

Other nice business blogs:
Alex Rubalcava's blog
Business blogs at Business2.0
Xplane's bBlog

Adam Curry blogs on the

Adam Curry blogs on the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a very right wing politician who had a good chance of winning the upcoming elections. He writes:

"If I was a Dutch citizen, I would have voted for him."

That's kindof scary: I saw an interview with the man on TV and he was very charismatic - and had very right wing ideas (that I don't agree with). He knew how to sell them really well - they all sounded reasonable coming from him. Weird...

Check out Noise Between Stations:

Check out Noise Between Stations: Victor is rocking lately.

Google's related links again.

This funky tool (via Peterme) lays out related sites in a nice Java applet, using Google's API to search for related sites. I tried it out on http://poorbuthappy.com and it really nicely grouped my interests online as in the following pictures (I added the text and the background colors):

Keeping found things found

KFTF Home: the Keeping Found Things Found website: what an amazing title for a website!

Hardware and HCI

Experiments with Un-tethered Interaction Video by this guy, from the Microsoft Hardware group. (Yes they have one!)

A talk about developing hardware, and how it relates to HCI, especially mobile usage. Interesting to hear a hardware point of view. If you want to learn about wearable, or swallowable computing, check it out.

People are great interfaces.

Characters Everywhere, a video feed from Stanford, illustrates its own point: why is it so much more fun to listen to a (good) lecture than to read an article? Some quotes:

- The world is easy to learn in because it has a great interface: people. (They even personalise themselves)
- She then concludes a human interface for the internet would be a "Holy Grail". I think she's missing the point.
- The single most powerful thing you can do to increase learning is to give them a one to one tutor.

What makes me wonder: what are the elements that are in speech that aren't reproduced in an article? Maybe trying to add these to the web (we got video, audio, the works!) would be better than try to recreate a human...

Some interfaces are kindof nice already: the Dell Service Assistant

Another interesting point is how conversations are predictable - constrained. She gives the example of the entertainment industry, who are very good at making us say-do certain things. What are the lessons here for web design? (Which are conversations as well in some ways)

Before seeing this, I was kindof against trying to simulate humans, maybe because I hadn't see it work properly, and many demonstrations focus on technical issues (language recognition, 3D, ...) - but I forgot about the "willing suspension of disbelief" - people want to believe.

Still, I think the social computing approach is a lot more interesting.

Now I'm thinking, when I send an automatic email, that kindof sounds like a real response, that's the same thing. When I edit discussions to steer them in a certain direction, that's influencing a conversation.

Mmmm...
You can try some things out here.

Diagram rehash

Good man Dan Wendling made some adjustments to the diagram I posted earlier (looks a lot better now as well). The picture is inside...