(Comments added for week ending Sun 02 Dec 2001) | View Other Weeks
| last updated:16 Aug 2002 13: 33 Webword time, or 16 Aug 2002 18:33 UK time |
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| Webword Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 02 Dec 2001) | View Other Weeks |
| Amazon Promotion | Sun 02 Dec |
| Free Shipping on orders over $99 at Amazon.com! |
| Sun 02 Dec 11:24 | Jack Schonchin | Shop NoAmazon.com instead and sleep with a clear conscience. |
| Sun 02 Dec 13:16 | MadMan | John, Do you realize that you're not making any 'associate' money from this? Your URL's 'tag' is set to 'ubiquity208-20' and not 'webwordcom' as it should be :)) |
| Sun 02 Dec 19:45 | John S. Rhodes | MadMan, Thanks for looking out for me. Fortunately, I am making money from this promotion. I only need the run the advertisement a fwe times and Amazon will give me $50. I'm some sort of beta tester for one of their new promotional systems. I figured a little bit of advertising wouldn't hurt anyone. By the way, just to be 100% open, I also happen to own a (very small) number of Amazon shares. I meant to post that yesterday. |
| Sun 02 Dec 20:00 | Jack Schonchin | Or consider Holt's Uncensored list of independent book sellers. |
| What makes the sound when we crack our knuckles? | Sun 02 Dec |
| (Scientific American) If you take an x-ray of the joint after cracking, you can see a gas bubble inside the joint. This gas increases the joint volume by 15 to 20 percent; it consists mostly (about 80 percent) of carbon dioxide. The joint cannot be cracked again until the gases have dissolved back into the synovial fluid, which explains why you cannot crack the same knuckle repeatedly. |
| Sun 02 Dec 01:15 | John S. Rhodes | Scientific American: Ask the Experts! |
| The game of war | Sun 02 Dec |
| (Red Herring) Microsoft claims it will sell 4.5 million to 6 million consoles by June 30, 2002. But the more units it sells, the more money it loses on hardware. Some Microsoft sources have estimated that their company will lose $800 million in the Xboxs first four years and a total of $2 billion over eight years. |
| Sun 02 Dec 01:06 | John S. Rhodes | A loss of $2 Billion over 8 eight years is actually quite trivial when you consider that Microsoft currently has over $36 Billion in cash available. This market is extremely important to them. We must remember not to forget their real plans. |
| Six Steps to Better E-mail | Sun 02 Dec |
| (Business 2.0) Include relevant contact information that recipients can easily save into their address books. This simple gesture will greatly increase your chances of being contacted again in the future. |
| Sun 02 Dec 01:02 | John S. Rhodes | Harness the Power of Your .SIG |
| Half.com Price Patrol | Tue 27 Nov |
| Half.coms Price Patrol is free software that helps you save money and time when you shop online for products. You can use the Price Patrol to take Half.com with you to hundreds of online retail sites. |
| Tue 27 Nov 00:38 | John S. Rhodes | I posted this because I thought it was an interesting use of technology. What are your thoughts? |
| Tue 27 Nov 09:22 | Francis Wu | Hard to say... I may be wrong, but I'm not sure if Half.com has enough loyal customers to justify the installation of software. While some customers may actually install this there's enough stiff competition out there that'll make sure that the software gets installed and forgotten on the user's machine. Pessimistic, yes, but not impossible. |
| Fri 30 Nov 12:08 | Danielle Gobert | MyPoints.com is doing something similar... Not sure how loyal their customers are, but I would guess moreso than half.com. It's also similar (in function if not technically) to sidestep.com, which automatically searches for better airfares when you enter a request at a major travel or airline site. Seems to me that getting info about a better deal is pretty welcome. Isn't that what MySimon was supposed to do? |
| IAwiki | Wed 28 Nov |
| IAwiki is a collaborative discussion space for the topic of Information Architecture. Anyone can contribute, and there are no pre-registration hoops to jump thru... (Comments: I posted a link to IAwiki a few weeks ago. It has grown since then so I thought Id point to it again.) |
| Thu 29 Nov 21:51 | Eric Scheid | The IAwiki also has an RSS 0.92 feed for updates. There is also some interesting content being developed behind the scenes so stay tuned. You could f'rinstance subscribe to the IAwikiNews announcement list. |
| How to Search and Browse for Lotus Support Content on the IBM Support Web Site | Tue 27 Nov |
| This document provides instructions on how to effectively search and browse the IBM Support web site in order to find Lotus Brand technical documents that will assist customers in resolving his/her software issues. The intent of this document is to help customers become comfortable with the functionality of the IBM Support web site as well as help them better navigate the site. |
| Tue 27 Nov 00:41 | John S. Rhodes | You know that something is wrong when you need to post information like this. IBM keeps squeezing Lotus more and more. I would not be surprised if Lotus eventually goes away, at least in terms of branding and marketing. What do you think? |
| Tue 27 Nov 10:32 | Francis Wu | I'm perplexed as to why there are such instructions in the first place. My philosophy is that if properly designed, no instructions are necessary ('specially in terms of how to search or browse for stuff). Am I wrong to think this? |
| Thu 29 Nov 11:53 | David Tallan | Francis wrote: 'if properly designed, no instructions are necessary ('specially in terms of how to search...' I think that depends upon how powerful your search tool is. If you want to add wildcarding capabilities, for example, the availabilty of help as to what symbols mean what is really important to usability. I believe that, for searches, no instructions should be necessary to search at a basic level. Advanced search capability, which comes with a defined syntax, etc. should be available for those who want it, along with the necessary help. If you design a search so that no instructions are ever necessary, you are removing a lot of the potential functionality. That doesn't necessarily make it 'properly designed'. |
| Thu 29 Nov 13:28 | Francis Wu | David, I agree. It really depends on how powerful the search tool is. |
| The Microsoft Beatdown | Tue 27 Nov |
| The truth of the matter is that while each version of Windows is more stable, we have nothing to compare it too except the previous version of Windows. There is no other consumer operating system other than Windows. Sure, some form of Linux would be a possibility, but just how many home users know how to use Linux, let alone support it. We are being taken advantage of; we know it and we support it. |
| Tue 27 Nov 09:43 | Jack Schonchin | We are digital slaves. Our one hope of being unshackled was the federal lawsuit, but the new administration has allied itself with our slavemaster. I would like nothing more than to be Windows-free. I simply don't have the time to learn another OS. In fact, I don't want to know the OS exists. It should be transparent. I just want to use my applications in the easiest manner possible and have quick access to my work files. We need the Beatles. They couldn't read sheet music and they didn't know 'the rules' of writing music. They made new rules and were hugely popular because of it. We need a visionary programmer to come along who is not bound by the thinking of previous operating systems. We need a revolution. |
| Tue 27 Nov 10:10 | Francis Wu | Agreed. MS is taking advantage of our need for usability, despite the shortcomings of its OS. What we also need are ethical and responsible businesses that aren't hell-bent on making a buck just to satisfy their shareholders. It's all about speculation; here's what Noam Chomsky thinks about MS and corporations. |
| Tue 27 Nov 18:32 | Jonathan Heron | 'There is no other consumer operating system other than Windows' Surely the Mac OS would fit into this category? OS X, I'm still not sure about as a consumer OS (though Office v10 is fantastic), but OS9 has all the major applications a consumer needs (with one notable excpeption being MS Money) and I know a great many people who have used Macs successfully in their homes and offices for years. For games, Windows beats the Macintosh hands down though. I would personally rate the classic MacOS far above and beyond Linux as an option for the home user. No Linux GUI has the finesse or the application support (I know I'm about to start a flame war with that comment) that can support a casual, innexperience home user. Nautlis could have been the GUI Linux needed, but it is all but dead now. |
| Wed 28 Nov 23:10 | Jack Schonchin | The Mac is not a consumer operating system. It is a niche system like Linux. |
| Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature | Wed 28 Nov |
| Hypertext has been promoted as a vehicle that will change literary reading, especially through its recovery of images, supposed to be suppressed by print, and through the choice offered to the reader by links. Evidence from empirical studies of reading, however, suggests that these aspects of hypertext may disrupt reading. In a study of readers who read either a simulated literary hypertext or the same text in linear form, we found a range of significant differences: these suggest that hypertext discourages the absorbed and reflective mode that characterizes literary reading. |
| Wed 28 Nov 07:55 | Matt Round | It's obvious that if you take an existing linear narrative and crudely break it up into hypertext chunks then readers will find the whole experience to be poor, so the study doesn't seem to offer us much of a new insight. If a piece of literature wants to guide the reader with a continuous external 'voice' under the writer's complete control then hypertext won't provide that immersive environment. It's fragmented, and relies upon the reader constructing their own narrative based on their own conscious decisions. However, genuinely interactive fiction can easily immerse participants. Anyone who's ever been hooked on a text-based adventure or Multi User Dungeon game can tell you they certainly weren't distanced from it, however disjointed and poorly written much of the text may have been. Similar issues are coming to the fore as 3D games approach TV/movie quality... |
| Wed 28 Nov 12:56 | Dennis G. Jerz | Disrupting conventional reading modes is exactly what literary hypertext authors are trying to do. But the authors of this study are right when they point out some of the weaknesses of literary hypertext theory; that theory almost never takes into account the fact that the whole text becomes more difficult when the technology (i.e. learning the interface) is difficult. The key here is the phrase 'simulated literary hypertext' in the abstract of Miall and Dobsson's article. They chopped up an existing short story -- they didn't actually test hypertext literature. But the control group also read the text in chunks -- they were linear chunks, rather than chunks linked by inline keywords. If you printed out a work of literature that was designed for hypertext, readers would probably have en equally hard time of it. A student in my 'Writing Electronic Texts' course tried to write a paper on Shelly Jackson's 'Patchwork Girl,' a seminal work of literary hypertext. She was having such a tough time navigating the text that she ended up printing it all out so she could read it. I think she missed the point. She never wrote that paper, and ended up bombing the course. The authors of the study set themselves up against George Landow, who's 1992 book, _Hypertext), had a lasting impact on the humanities world, since it came out before must humanists had any experience with hypertext. But Aarseth's _Cybertext_ critiques of Landow's rosy depiction of the 'freeing' nature of hypertext, pointing out that the chief value of hypertext is not that it lets us do certain literary things much better, but that it has strengths of its own. The study has value, not because it is a new argument against hypertext, but because it offers emperical evidence regarding differences between the value of sequential links and in-line textual links, when navigating a text that was designed to be experienced in a set sequence. I have no empirical evidence, but I did review an interactive fiction version of The Tempest, which was not, in my mind, a useful experiment, but an unsatisfying experience both to gamer and literary reader. http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/articles/IF/tempest.html |
| Wed 28 Nov 16:32 | Dennis G. Jerz | Oops -- in my last post, I meant to say that the interactive version of 'The Tempest' *was* a useful experiment. I apologize for not catching the mistake. |
| The Anti-Thesaurus | Wed 28 Nov |
| Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases. |
| Wed 28 Nov 09:07 | Matt Round | Excellent suggestion, although I doubt it'd get used much. I've had clients ask me to add keywords such as 'Britney Spears' and 'XXX' to their sites to boost traffic. The fact that visitors looking for such content almost certainly won't be interested in their site and will merely cost them money in bandwidth & equipment doesn't seem to matter. |
| Wed 28 Nov 09:31 | Francis Wu | Matt, you've got some stupid clients... but don't we all :)? How do you respond to such requests? Do you have your face in a knot in utter contempt :)? I know I would... Or do you ask your client if their target market is pimply computer geeks surfin' nekkid and stoned in front of their computer at 3:00 in the morning :)? |
| Wed 28 Nov 09:54 | Mick | I'm not pimply! |
| Design Writings | Sun 18 Nov |
| Thoughts and observations about design, information architecture and design history. |
| Tue 27 Nov 16:16 | Kevin Conder | Wow! Thanks for adding my article. It's an honor. |
| Tue 27 Nov 16:17 | Kevin Conder | Wow! Thanks for adding my article. It's an honor. |
| Paper prototyping | Tue 27 Nov |
| (IBM) Wouldnt it be great to find out what users (and marketing) want before you start coding? Paper prototyping lets you do just that. While it may seem counterintuitive to test an interface without using a computer, paper prototyping lets you get maximum feedback for minimum effort. After a few usability tests with a paper prototype, youll have confidence that youre implementing the right thing. |
| Tue 27 Nov 11:22 | Anonymous | How many more articles on redundant research do i need to see??? Sheesh. Content is getting slim, eh? |
| WebWord Comment | Thu 23 Aug |
| Im working on an idea for an article. Here is how it goes. In marketing, we care more about getting people to believe that a product has some quality than to actually give the product the quality. For example, we care more that people think that a car is red than if that car is literally red. As long as everyone thinks the car is red, then it is red. When the car is red in the mind, it is red. It might actually be blue, but if people think it is red, then, well, it is red, at least as far as the marketing folks are concerned. Now, suppose we transplant this idea to usability. Do we really need to care about usability or the perception of usability? While you might start to argue that usability folks measure actual behavior and all that jazz, the reality is that usability is based on the actions associated with the perception of usability, not usability itself. Lets take another example. If one web site takes seven seconds to load and another takes twelve seconds to load, then should we automatically say that one page loads faster for users? I emphatically say NO. Spools research tells us that slower loading sites can be perceived as being faster when users are able to easily complete their tasks. Therfore, we cannot simply say that faster download time makes web sites more usable. However, we can say that perceived download time, and thus perceived usability, is important, not actual download time. The result is that we need to understand how users think, not just how they act. Gathering data via observations of real tasks is not enough. We must understand how people derive their judgements of usability. |
| Tue 27 Nov 10:43 | Yves Rannou | Interesting point. I was thinking about something similar; if a user think that the site is a usable site, does it really matter whether or not the site is in fact usable or not according to usability principles? This differentation between usability and perception of usability might explain why there is a disconnect between what happens during one-on-one usability testing and what users say on a questionnaire measuring their subjective appreciation of an interface. But then the same 'disconnect' between the survey results and the results of the one-on-one usability testing could be explained to the fact that the questionnaire was not measuring what it was supposed to be measuring.. Yves |
| Tue 27 Nov 10:45 | Yves Rannou | Interesting point. I was thinking about something similar; if a user think that the site is a usable site, does it really matter whether or not the site is in fact usable or not according to usability principles? These concepts might very well explain why there is a normally a 'disconnect' between what happens during a one-on-one usability testing and what users answer on a questionnaire measuring their subjective appreciation of the interface being evaluated. But then the same 'disconnect' between the survey results and the results of the one-on-one usability testing could be explained to the fact that the questionnaire was not measuring what it was supposed to be measuring.. Yves |
| Are You Wearing Your Cell Phone? | Tue 27 Nov |
| We have a new piece of technology to take a look at. No more holding your cell phone in your hand, or putting it in your pocket or clipping it on to your belt. Now you can wear it as part of your daily piece of clothing. |
| Tue 27 Nov 10:28 | Francis Wu | Quite kewl. One bad thing about all the recent gadgetry is that currently, clothing isn't designed for this, until recently with the Dockers Mobile Pant. Before this, I think most of us wore all this stuff on our belt, looking like we just mugged Batman. At one point, I had four things on my belt: cellphone, Palm, Roller Woody yo-yo, and Gerber tool. Glad to know that some companies are aiming to properly integrate gadgetry into our lives. |
| Lefthandedness | Thu 22 Nov |
| Being left-handed is like being in a secret club. We have our own bizarre initialization rituals, such as learning how to write the wrong way. We pay our dues every day, in terms of the extra effort that we must make to live in a right-handed world. When we encounter another lefty, we immediately have something in common. The club is shrouded in secrecy, because we rarely mention the topic to our right-handed friends. |
| Mon 26 Nov 14:45 | jan | Workaround for pockets on the wrong side for left-handed ease of use on clothing: Make your own clothes, then you can put the pockets where you want them to be. |
| List of famous lefthanders | Thu 22 Nov |
| This is a list of famous lefties. The names are from reliable sources or from my own observations (tv, movies). In red are the names of Dutch or Belgian celebrities. |
| Mon 26 Nov 12:36 | jan | Research indicates that logic and reasoning abilities are controlled by the left side of the brain, which would be the dominant hemisphere in left-handed people. While research can be interpreted in many ways, this suggests that left-handed people may well have better mathematics & musical abilities than the rest of us right-handers because of their dominant left brain. |
| Mon 26 Nov 12:43 | jan | Correction. Left-handedness is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain. So who knows why left-handed people may have better math & musical abilities? Maybe they just like to practice more. |