Economist.tv. They don’t quite have the style of the print mag.
Archive for March, 2001
Anatomy of the IRS - sounds horrific. But you can cheat on your taxes!
Interesting take on the “who owns my copyright” issue from a publishing point of view. In addition, a rant about publishers.
Another mini-rant on how to run a startup business.
A good reference to how the web helps - Cisco reckons well over $1bn a year in savings.
3G’s biggest competitor is 2.5G. Or is it 3G?
Interesting discussion with the founder of Handspring - he’s very rational about competition.
Interesting article from 1996 about how to run a web company.
Is this the current face of Big Brother. Apparently the recording industry are using something like this to check who’s sharing stuff on Napster and Napster-alikes. Glad you ticked that firewall box now?Whoops, we’re on a bandwagon now…the Independent covers usability testing. Interesting comments on JWT and their usability labs (we just beat them for a contract…).
Good article on rubbish patents and the abuse of the current US Patent System: Would You Buy a Patent License From This Man?I want one and I love the idea that you can logon to all sorts of random companies’ networks while sitting in a park. All we need is the summer for it…Reasonably serious discussion about Hailstorm.Conspiracy theorists among us will like the idea that Microsoft have been planning the Dotcom crunch.
Interesting story: VeriSign issues false Microsoft digital certificates. This is very similar to the identity theft busboy. These are not Internet stories at all - it’s no different to me forging a credit card and pretending to be Spielberg. Actually, I’d have to be shorter, balder and grow a beard. But anyhow.Following on from McKinsey report that suggests that 89% of book buyers buy at the first site they hit, WebWord suggests that there is a big lie going around on the internet: that another site is just a click away. In summary, Every Click is an Investment.
Great article about the Usability gurus. It’s a little tongue in cheek, but none the worse for that: The church of usability.
I’ve just managed to snaffle an Intellimouse with Intellieye (the light based mice). No more mouse ball cleaning for me! Means that my funky mousepad is slightly irrelevant now, but c’est la vie.Interesting article which looks at providing news items in the style of Amazon.com: amazoning the news.Interesting article which looks at providing news items in the style of Amazon.com: amazoning the news.
Yet another great article by Clay ShirkyInteroperability, Not Standards. The message is that you’ve got to have a play / test / iterate period first before you define standards. This way you can really test alternatives. Otherwise you’re purely in the realm of the philosophical, and we already know that that doesn’t work.Tim Bray on where we are now with the Internet infrastructure: TAXI to the Future. Transform, Aggregate, send XML, Interact.
Interesting thought: You Own Your Own Metadata.
Great article about Zipf’s Law, Heavy Tails, and the Death of Personalization.
What is the Internet Genome Project?
Very interesting, if it works. But like all DRM technologies it is pretty likely to be breakable.
Fascinating - the US army has one of the largest procurement exchanges already working online: Military Maneuvers.An extraordinary waste of time, but I can follow my old route to work in the DizzyCity. I always thought it was the big apple?Fascinating discussion of IT advisory companies Under the Influence. Are they as bad as they sound?Usability of URLs. Very short and to the point. Mostly MAP, but useful.
Bizarrely slightly out of date, but still OK list of information architecture resources.Interesting 101: the Yale Style Manual.The good old WDVL comes up trumps on navigation as well. I haven’t used this since 1998.Very good article on information design. Nothing has changed.A sample chapter from a useful book: Designing the User Experience.Interesting article (dated, but so what) on how to make your Web site fast and usable through navigation.
Cracking piece of own petard: Aimster has managed to comply with the DMCA while using the act to prevent access to its network. Brilliant.
Very useful stuff for me right now! Cochrane’s Q - a reasonably statistical approach to usability testing on small samples.
