Test for new bridge.
Entertainment Tonight – Gastronomic Gold!. Surely not.
Enron Voice Mail system [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Radio UserLand : New Feature: Comments
Plastic is pointing to a Village Voice piece about the Top Ten Questions the Media Can’t Answer. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Getting lots of feedback on the tune out, switch on piece. I’m also seeing plenty of people trying the Zen TV Experiment. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Biotech industry on target?. Despite the current economic slump, investing in biotech remains steady. A recent Harvard panel offered suggestions on where the money’s being invested and predictions for hot trends. [CNET News.com]
Bright Idea for Electric Scooters. What if streetlight poles were redesigned to double as electric fueling stations? [Wired News] Like, Duh? How to charge people for the power, though? And how to stop freeloaders who don’t have cycles.
The Economist thinks that investors can spot good dotcoms now. I’m not so sure.
Microsoft, Sun, Sony and Linux. In his book Charles Ferguson tells the story of his start up Vermeer, howthey saw the opportunity for FrontPage, and then sold the company toMicrosoft. Ferguson predicts Sunwill be out of business by 2006. At first I was flabbergasted by thisconclusion, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. [Advogato]
Graph theory in practice. Interesting discussion about why the 6 degrees of separation hypothesis is just that – there aren’t experiments to back it up.
WebmasterBase – Boxes and Arrows: Defining Information Architecture Deliverables. Nicely presented summary of how to do this.
What Happened to My Customers. It’s not that customers have gotten more odd, they’ve just outgrown the previous marketing assumptions.
The Install Doctor – The Do-It-Yourself Mobile Electronics Installation Resource. You need a certain skill and confidence level to start on these, I think.
eBay’s Secret Ingredient. Social capital, as opposed to human, financial or physical. Sounds a little like a last-ditch dotcom gush.
The myth of localisation. A study found little difference between word-for-word translation and language-specific rewriting. It is talking about technical support documentation, but could be relevant for standard documents as well.
After the disasters, a more ordinary broadband. Web users just want the web as it is but faster.
Web Teaching Resources: Downloadables. Some good guidlines for producing accesible pages.
New Architect: The Crime of Sharing. “For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft.” The question he poses: why are we not complaining violently about this…
Optimize Your Home Page for New Visitors. Another one of my drums that I’ve been banging for the last few years.
Wal-Mart Trumps Moore’s Law. Because of WalMart’s buying power, it sets the standards and pace at which technology is implemented. Sounds like another exit strategy: get used by WalMart.
Empathic Instructional Design Just watch. That’s my new slogan, I think.
Real-life eBook experience. I used to read from a Palm and / or a Psion all the time. It’s good in commuting situations, but not as good as a book.
Ars Technica: Microsoft .Net. .Net reviewed technically.
Location-Awareness for Improving the Usability of Mobile Enterprise Applications. Interesting first step on the way to a truly useful (e.g. not marketing-led) location-based aspect to an application.
British troops ‘invade’ Spain. Class.
New Ways We’ll Move in the Future. Good thing about article: it’s based on current technologies. Bad thing about article: it doesn’t take the singularity effect into account. e.g. technology will develop far faster than we can imagine.
The Historical Data Warehouse. Good summary of the types of metadata that we’d want to keep / define. It is much wider than simple meta-content.
Content-Based Multimedia Information Handling: Should we Stick to Metadata?. Answer: Yes. Of course.
Social Network Analysis. Great little article on how people relate. A work of progress, I guess.
Europe Offers Patent Proposal. It sounds along the right lines, from the little in this article. Full protection, but requiring an inventive step. All that US gumph will be perfect prior art…
HTML Always Outperforms Text? Don’t Stake Your Career on It. Finally, a justification (?) for my sparse email style.
FLOW CHARTS So that’s what all those symbols in Visio mean…
Yahoo! News – Chinese leader serenades Bush during dinner at Great Hall Apparently O Sole Mio is Zemin’s party piece.
Judge: If You Own Music, Prove It. “In a stunning turnaround, a district court judge ruled Friday that the five major record labels must prove they own thousands of music copyrights. And prove those copyrights weren’t used to monopolize and stifle the distribution of digital music.” Great news. I hope this has the labels worried.
INFO.ORG.IL – Searching USEIT.COM. More Jakob-bashing. Always worthwhile.
Beakbane Marketing: Fruit fix case study. Which design for a fruit smoothie would you choose. I particularly liked the non-scientific “see what people do” research at the end.
BBC version of the PIA test. Very useful to understand users’ mental models at this stage.