Side Note: the URL above leads to the W3C's site, and it uses a funky URL:
http://www.w3.org/People/all#timbl%40w3.org
I'm too lazy to look up which character corresponds to %40

Try searching Google for this string: copper cobbler

Some happycookers.com site comes out on top. Go to the 10th page of results, then to the 20th, the 50th, on to page 100 of results...virtually ALL of them are to the same site, of course linking to itself over 1000 times, meaning it is *very* popular as Google understands it.

And then consider that a site called coppercobbler.com does not show up at all. I'm getting more meaningful results out of Oingo and ?DirectHit than from Google.

Whereas Google's results exclude unpopular sites; the tired, the poor, the downtrodden. Google's algorithm only favors often linked-to sites - the cheerleaders and football players of the web. You would think the overarching nerd mentality of the 'Net would naturally be opposed to this.

One of the most common definitions for seduction--and one of the most important aspects, is the creation of a special space between two people: that moment in space and time when everyone else in the room disappears and the noise ceases to be a distraction because of the intensity and ... seductiveness ... of the interaction.

Didactic designed or intended to teach

Reductionism a procedure or theory that reduces complex data or phenomena to simple terms; especially : oversimplification. This course in Neurophilosophy says "'reduction' has come to have a bewildering range of uses in the scientific literature and thus no longer stands as a simple product or thesis of Logical Empiricism"

Determinism a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws. See also The Society Of Natural Science

I thought of this site this weekend while listening to Bill Hill of MetaDesign San Francisco. He spoke about our lack of design that appeals to the soul and the spirit. He mapped new media design onto a hierarchy that corresponds with human experience: the physical (logos, identity), biology (interaction such as 1st generation web sites, CD-ROMs), and mind (personalized sites like Amazon).

The next levels are soul and spirit, for which there are no great examples yet. "Why not partner with Deepak Chopra?" asks Hill. He decends upon a mostly superficial and ego and money-driven industry like a ray of sunlight.

Found via Kestrel's Nest

This also makes me shake my head at Xerox. If they only gave us what we want (copies and printers that don't jam) they'd be so much more successful. When a company's tagline doesn't explain what products they sell ("The Document Management Company") then no one will buy them.

Recently MIT staged a wearable technology fashion show during Internet World in New York City. It had all the trappings of a usual stuffy, uptight fashion show but with electronics draped on the stone-faced models. It's too bad they need to inject themselves into that scene in order to validate their designs.

I saw the above trying to read an article on the New Statesmen site, looks like their PHP/MySQL combo bit the dust. Sometimes I wonder if putting a database beind a web site is like trying to fit a supermarket in your kitchen cabinets.

It's a shame, because designers and programmers need to have a better understanding of 1) what's possible with DHTML, 2) what the performance tradeoffs are (e.g. moving layers suck up processor cycles, loading hidden layers sucks bandwidth...), and 3) all the usual usability concerns that must be re-addressed now that stuff is flying around the screen and what not.

Since time stamps accompany each of these posts, let's hope my manager considers blogging a productive creative outlet.

Reading through her blog I thought it's a shame UUs have to qualify ourselves ("No, no, really, it's not like other religions..."). I feel the same way. I wonder if this is the effect of the religious right ('What do you mean you're religious, you don't even believe in Jesus Christ!"), the relative lack of spirituality these days ("What'r you some kind of religious freak?"), or if UUs always felt this way ("What the hell is Unitarian Universalism, you freak?") ?

I just tried downloading my published eMatter (Sleeping with The Enemy: Learning Windows for Mac Users ) and have these nit-pickings:

That said, the rest of the purchasing and access process is about as friendly as it could be.

I just realized it's kinda similar to what Northern Light does in offering Special Collections of content for sale. One major difference is distribution. NL simply acts as an additional distributor for publishers, whereas Fatbrain is a central clearinghouse.

Another major difference is the visitors' intent at the site. NL's visitors are searching for information, and probably surprised that the search engine is returning documents for sale. Whereas Fatbrain's visitors are in a bookstore and ready to buy content, they just have to adjust to the medium in which the content is delivered (hard copy via mail vs. download). I think Fatbrain's is the easier sell.

Mind fuck: I need a meta-blog! A blog composed of blogs! Update your navigation as easily as your ideas! Excuse me, I must go request this.

"Tufte is a showmanóa magician. He puts on a performance and we applaud it. What we applaud is Tufte himself, rather than the information design he presents us with."

"You can enjoy its splendour, but you cannot see how the information artefacts he shows actually work for people in their context of use. Nor does his exhibition teach you how to do what Tufte does, any more than looking at a beautifully stuffed animal in a display case will teach you how to be a taxidermist, zoologist, or ecologist."

"He frames illustrations with 'instructions' on how the illustrations are to be viewed, leaving no uncertainty for the audience. Thus primed, the audience then 'looks' at the illustrations and behold: the evidence for the truth of Tufte's argument is there before their eyes! Great magic, and one is left with the conviction that the illustrations 'work' just as Tufte told us they would."

Found this via eatonweb.

They're compared a lot to REM, but to me they're much more Spin Doctor-ish. It's rare when REM is not depressing (not necessarily a bad thing) and when they're fun it's with this inside-joke thing happening (e.g. Shiny Happy People). The Spin Doctors are saying "let's tell the song version of a joke and get the listener to smile and laugh with each listen."

• Begin by reusing existing controls or UI concepts in your sketches and prototypesóstart with as much consistency as you can. Style guides, like the Windows Interface guidelines, are of great value here in helping you to reuse as much existing knowledge and good design work as possible.
• If your sketches and prototypes aren't working in user tests or other evaluations because of the failure of existing concepts, try to grow an existing concept to cover the new situation you have. If you change the behavior of a control, apply that change everywhere the control is used. If you change a concept, consistently apply that change.
• If you can't extend what you have to solve the problem, go and design a new control or concept to solve your problem.
• If you have to use special cases (local optimization of a UI control that isn't used everywhere), make sure it's the best trade-off you have.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

His main points:

• Adults need to be more involved in the lives of today's youth. Parents especially, but also all adults must work with parents to create a supportive environment.
• Adults cannot be afraid of violent youth.
• The lack of spirituality in the lives of youth leads to a lack of foundation with which to interpret advertising and commercialism, leading to a value system based on clothes, jewelry, cars, guns, drugs, etc.
• The government has too much emphasis on the back-end of social improvement (prisons, law enforcement) and not enough on the front end (community programs).

Interestingly, Canada is a martial arts black belt and teaches this skill, but this is not a contradiction. He embraces power and self-expression without embracing violence. He earns respect for his strength without fighting.

I'm excited to read his book, Fist Stick Knife Gun : A Personal History of Violence in America.

This is another site, like boo.com, that started advertising way ahead of launch. That may work well to generate hype for movies, but for web sites you expect it to be working when you get there. It generates the same feeling as clicking on a link only to be notified on the resulting page that it's under construction. AAArrrgh!

But on the way to work this morning I thought, "Is that such a bad thing?" People associate portals with customization and personalization, maybe there will be some subliminal effect created by the very look of the page - its composition of modular content chunks - that might give the impression the site is somehow custom tailored :-)

And there's the new Webmonkey this morning all redesigned and modular and columnish.

There aren't many examples of well-executed horizontal content on the web, and even few original works for the web that can be

It only works with IE though. This is just about the last straw that will break Netscape's back for me. I experience this surreal refresh phenomenon where half of the old page stays around while half of a new page loads, making for some interesting combinations.

I'm hoping Mozilla will rule, but open source = open ideas and they won't have anything that Microsoft couldn't release the next day.

Second, it feels more like being published. Even if you get published on a site like Salon that makes money (and you make money) it's not the same, because the site didn't necessarily make money on your article. It's different when an actual person opens up their wallet and lays out hard earned cash for your opus, that says something that epinion will need a while to say. Of course, having a publisher risk financial burden by publishing your work would mean even more, but I've got to choose my battles.

By the way, when the ematter goes live on 10-18-1999 my 15 page article will retail for $2.00.

Makes me pine for my old Pentax K1000. This guy even includes a .wav file of the shutter sound! What a nice touch.

Here's a photo of Limerick (mostly my girlfriend's cat but a little mine too):

Interestingly they let you choose from among four different "operators" - there must be some interesting psychology behind who chooses a male or female or what the names mean to people.

Here's the (reversed) conversation (the second session. The first time I tried to enlarge the window and my browser crashed):

Tracey: Hi there, Victor. What can I help you with today?
Victor: sorry - browser crashed. So I was asking about how you like this form of support vs. a phone call.
Tracey: It is easier to talk with a group of people.
Tracey: And you can handle more volume efficiently .
Victor: ahhhh, I see - you can keep a few conversations going simultaneously. Do customers get frustrated by the time lag?
Tracey: No. We haven't had any complaints that I know of.
Victor: Do you think the questions people ask are more or less descriptive as a result of having to type them?
Tracey: Some questions can be very specific...
Tracey: Most of the times, they are short and to the point.
Victor: Are you typing or using speech recognition?
Tracey: Typing, but some of the answers are preformatted...
Tracey: Preformatting is useful for sake of time.
(said goodbyes and hung up)...

OK, so I've gone from thinking that was silly to thinking it's darn useful. But I've yet to use it with an actual sales or technical problem.

I'm comparing a book reviewer who works at a newspaper to a book reviewer at epinions. Let's see if I can do a table freehand...

newspaper	epinions
Hired by editor, subjective but with expertise in field of journalism	Self-hired and "promoted" by the masses who are (as a group) objective but with varying degrees of expertise
Reviewer may accept and review feedback, but the editor/publisher is the ultimate judge of quality	Reviewer (and all the reviews back through time) is automatically ranked using direct reader feedback
Newspaper can only employ a limited number of reviewers	Epinions' review collection only limited by disk space

The "...and all the reviews back through time..." note is particularly interesting, because any current ranking is cumulative - mixing the rankings over time and combining the changing attitudes and tastes of the public.

As someone with journalism experience (and a lover of the Internet) I like both models very much. I'll continue to give much weight to what I read in the New York Times and, when I can't find something there, I'll turn to epinions as more of a research option.

"It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never seen a website that was truly stellar with respect to usability. "

(in a list of things that will "will increase the usability of virtually all sites)
"10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to work the same on your site. Remember Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience: users spend most of their time on other sites, so that's where they form their expectations for how the Web works.

I take this to mean, "Even though no one is producing usable sites, imitate them anyway so users will know they have to go through the same suck ass experience as everywhere else on the web. For God's sake don't innovate! A little learning on the user's part isn't worth creating something better."

An aside: Upon rereading this I said to myself, "That's the normal way everyone looks for information, silly." I guess I found this neat because 1) I know the futility of most brute searches and usually opt for a directory, and 2) because I picked a term I normally would never use in a search term - the rarity of it is the key.

On a related note, "Whose Web Is It, Anyway?" points out that Yahoo!'s editors are getting too picky for the mortal webweaver, though they partner with Inktomi for the heavy duty keyword searching (I haven't looked into the latter's filtering philosophy yet). Nevertheless, I've replaced my shortcut to the once beloved and familiar Yahoo! with one to the Open Directory Project. They're open and collaborative and warm and fuzzy and everything that the early web was before Yahoo! made commercialism possible.

An aside: I'm benefitting professionally from this commercialism on a professional level, but I equate Yahoo's policies with censorship. A directory should be like the phone book; organized and open to all.

And she manage's to use black backgrounds without looking pretentious, very nice.

Anyway, I went back to Blogger's discussion forum to figure out how I could correct an HTML error of mine that screwed up the edit feature of that post, which effectively screwed up the entire page. Luckily this guy pb is on top of the show stopping stuff and created a neat little fix for careless folks like myself.

Poking around his own 'blog had me thinking "This guy's pretty cool!" He reads Peterme, Memepool, likes the music of David Byrne, and is a programmer too. It's the people with two genuinely developed sides of the brain that impress me.

Their stats page reveals some interesting facts:

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