Author: Victor

I was offered a Free PC a while back and declined ’cause I didn’t like the terms. I just received another email from them with a slightly more desperate tone reminding me that I’m eligible. Five years ago the thought of not accepting a PC because it’s too much hassle probably would’ve seemed absurd. And the thought of a company not being able to give them away fast enough also seems absurd.

“To make myself as uncomfortable as possible” – stated as the goal of a women just off the bus in New York City who has come to pursue an acting career.

Watching a well-dressed woman on the train this morning reading a well-dressed magazine, I thought of how comforting it must be to dress right, read the right books, and live the approved life. Living on the fringes takes a willingness to be different, to even be uncomfortable at times.

Wonderful article on Webmonkey about the lack of accurate, targeted search. I like the way she doesn’t have a solution at the end of the story; search pretty much overpromises and underdelivers.

But of course in the future everyone will adopt XML to create structured data that will be searchable with advanced artificial intelligence techniques we don’t even know about yet, so why worry?

Brig just linked to the Salon story on Sony’s $900 picture frame. I really like the idea of the CyberFrame, I just think Sony made it too expensive.

I’d like a Palm-like setup where I could transfer the photos onto the memory stick by syncing it with my computer. As a photographer I’d love to be able to rotate the photos in my living room and run a slide show. Considering the money saved in printing and framing costs – and of course the whole neat factor – it could be economical as well.

But, as the article states, “Sony seems infected with the dangerous assumption that its products will sell at any price.” So true, I’d pay $99 for the CyberFrame, definitely not $899.

What does the guy who invented the web put on his homepage? The usual stuff actually – FAQs, Bio, contact info, etc. But also these juicy essays on web architecture and a plug for his new book, Weaving the Web.

Oh boy, as I look around I realize there’s lot’s of goodies here:

Screenshot of early web browser – looks like NextStep meets Gopher

The hash (#) used to create intra-page links was inspired by apartment numbers.

A list of his original hypertext design issues. Looks like the same stuff we’re still arguing about today.

I recently read in a newspaper interview that Tim Berners-Lee is a Unitarian Universalist. It’s rather appropriate that someone who believes in an “interconnected web of existence” would create the World Wide Web.

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

Carlos provides the solid reasoning against Google that I didn’t: good, hard evidence:

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.

Eeek. The iXL Exodus. They’re our direct competition, so from a strictly capitalist point of view I should feel smug. But I feel sorry for these employees; what a shame to see a company with so much potential get so nasty.

“I love you honey, but I’d like my kids to look more like Cindy Crawford” I can’t think of an ethical reason against selling model’s ovarian eggs, but it just feels wrong. It reinforces superficial behavior and I just don’t like it!

More bitching about Google, this time from a more philosophical perspective. The rather dumb spiders (e.g. AltaVista, InfoSeek, anything powered by Inktomi), paired with simple mathematical weighting algorithms, produce much more democratic results. They treat all sites equally; all sites get a shot at inclusion in pertinant search results.

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.

Down with HTML! cries Balthaser Studios. Would we all be better off in a Shockwave/Flash web? I’m sure Macromedia would.

It’d be neat to combine eMatter and epinions into one site, allowing you to provide smaller scale works for free on the chance you could be compensated but also charge for larger scale works to reflect the investment in the work.

Yiipppeee! Writings of Brenda Laurel. I especially like Technological Humanism and Values-Driven Design which ties into the whole Bill Hill/soul/spirit thread below.

Seduction in the Interface. Funny premise, solid advice, good lecture. I especially like this part:

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.

And when it comes to building community, you need to create meaningful relationships.

Words I need to know to communicate with design-geeks:

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