Author: Victor

Hey, I’m posting from Blogger’s new server. Neat. Speedy. A good value for the donation.

Send them a picture and get a custom-made
action figure in your likeness. I’m thinking these
would make perfect wedding favors. via eatonweb

Doing my obligatory 404 page research, and I noticed Wired’s minimalist approach is almost an exact replica of Yahoo!’s. I don’t think copying in this case is a bad thing; if someone found a great way to do it then let’s stand on their shoulders and move on to conquer our other tasks.

The Palm mutates in the hands of Apple industrial designers? via Signal vs. Noise

I’m pleased to see MTV is struggling with and acting on their indiscriminate choice of music in the past, including Eminem’s misogynist lyrics. I’m not in favor of music censorship; but MTV is neither an artistic entity nor a publisher, they’re simply a distributor. And by distributing hateful music in the past they’ve promoted it, which reflected their values.

Blogger started asking for donations, which made me think about other free services we take for granted. For example, who types in all that “CDDB” track information that tells my computer what CD I’m playing, and how do they pay for it? That’s a company called “Gracenote” and they make money a few different ways. They allow owners of certain CDs to unlock extra tracks to reward buying CDs. They sell advertising on their site.

They also run Billboard-like charts of most played CDs. To do this, they have to know about what CDs you’re playing not just the first time you play them, but every time. Doing this sometimes involves collecting your email address. They pledge not to do anything bad with it, but I thought you should know.

“A black, steel monolith nearly three metres high has mysteriously appeared in a park in the American city of Seattle.” Brilliant.

I swear every time I turn around IBM is doing something really right. They’ve actually established an “Institute for Advanced Commerce” to study things like how well people compete against computers in auctions. It’s interesting research, it may give them an edge in future ecommerce, and applications like this one may actually make our lives easier if computers can take on all our buying and selling for us.

I’m finding more reasons to sympathize with Tog’s dismay over the MacOS X interface. In the original Mac UI guidelines they offered wisdom like Colors on gray and Beware of Blue. And what does Apple do? Come out with a system called “Aqua.”

:-o

Sony came crawling back to Kioken after having been fired as a bad client. What makes Kioken so bad? Check out this prototype (quicktime, and not for the bandwidth-impaired).

It’s probably a bitch to download, but structuring your web site like an application solves so many navigation issues.

Word of the day:

argy-bargy   \ahr-jee-BAHR-jee or ahr-ghee-BAHR-ghee\   (noun)
     : a lively discussion : argument, dispute

There’s also a slightly older variant, “argle-bargle”. I think I’m in touch with my feminine side, but I have trouble imagining myself using “argy-bargy” in casual conversation without feeling insecure.

The combined force of Nielson, Norman, Tog, and Laurel raining down ideas…it’s all kind of staggering this time of night.

So, should I support Netscape 6? The web standards project is creaming over it, while some web gurus are calling it a “crappy bug-ridden piece of beta software.” My developer friends tell me they have to write code differently for the new software, and if it’s standards-compliant I tend to think that’s a good thing. But if it’s buggy then people won’t use it and it’s not worth adapting to.

Right now Statmarket says N6’s market share is .33%, which is the reason why we’re not supporting Netscape 2 (and in some cases v3) anymore. But this should trend up, right? It seems .33% of people immediately adapted it and then it leveled off there. Maybe people are tired of chasing upgrades. Maybe it’s buggy. Maybe no one cares.

uh, I should probably practice what I preach (see the rant below). Here’s a first draft of a 3 year vision for the future of the web:

In 2003 anyone who in the year 2000 had access to a television will have the ability to access any information in a library or on the Internet without any prior computing experience.

This speaks both to the design of the user interface as well as the availability and price of technology.

Speaking of usability rants, I so rarely see folks state a vision of what they really want user interfaces to be like in the future. I don’t think we should sit back and wait for Tog or Stephen Johnson to think about the future if all of us are responsible for building it. We have an understanding of common, current points of view (“make it usable”, “make it beautiful”, “increase brand equity”…). Wouldn’t it be great if we had similar common understandings of what we should all have 3 years from now? This could then guide all our efforts, instead of only bickering about what we did yesterday. Of course, we’ll never agree and will continue to have multiple points of view, but diversity is what makes us strong.

I need to go post this on some lists and see what happens…