Author: Victor

Just “met” Jen via email, with a common link that we both practice Unitarian Universalism in New Jersey.

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?”) ?

Comments on eMatter at eMatter. ev also likes it.

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

They still show a Ship To: address even when no shipping is going on.

The download link isn’t very prominent – I’m sure some people will miss it.

There’s at least one screen more than necessary in the download process, maybe two.

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.

I just discovered eatonweb and thought how I’d like to come back here on a regular basis, but my current method of bookmarking – an HTML page, doesn’t allow for easy updates. “Just use yer darn Bookmarks/Favorites!” my readers (aka my alter ego) berate me, but I like having all that idea/navigation stuff in one place all blended together in one happy information space. Besides, these days I’m bi-browser.

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.

Ouch. Tufte is such a respected figure in the information design world, this review of his book almost hurts. But I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while, prompted by a colleague at work. Here’s some juicy bits:

“Tufte is a showman—a 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.

Train’s Meet Virginia – currently on infinite headphone rotation.

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.”

How to Avoid Foolish Consistency – a more reasonable and reasoned point of view on consistency in UI design than Jakob Nielsen’s do-what-other-sites-are-doing-even-though-they-suck-ass-too approach. Here’s the bottom line:

• Begin by reusing existing controls or UI concepts in your sketches and prototypes—start 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.
  

And the Emerson quote seals it for me:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Astounding! I just heard Geoffrey Canada at the First Unitarian Society of Plainfield, NJ (FUSP). Geoffrey’s the president and CEO of the Rheedlen Centers in NYC. His talk was about youth violence in America, tapping into his personal counseling experience. Besides being a great speaker, he is able to succeed in and bridge the gap between the world of public policy and the world of street violence in Harlem.

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.

Amazing! The MetaFlash: 3D system is very cool – what I wish QuickTime VR had become. They use a photographic technique to create a 3D image of real-life objects. It’s actually worth downloading the 500K plug-in just to check it out, and I normally have a low threshold for plug-ins.

bike.com’s new site. It’ll be interesting to see how this works, especially as I may be working on a similar project soon.

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!

Just modified my nav bar there on the right so my favorite links are on top so I can get at them more easily. In general there are lots of ways we can organize our frequently accessed information so we can get at it easier and encourage us to take advantage of this gorgeous resource of a network.

Helllllllllllooooooooooooooooooo… Anybody reading this besides me? ;-) If so, take a look at the site I just soft-launched last night, the Unitarian Church of Montclair, NJ and let me know what you think.

The new Webmonkey. Funny, I’m currently designing a portal-like site at work, but I briefly worked on a proposal for some new business and my screen schematics looked like, what else, a portal, ’cause that’s the frame of mind I’m in. Others working on the proposal said, “It looks too much like a portal” and I agreed.

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.

Making note of the gorgeous horizontally scrolling artwork: s k y l i n e

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

evhead created this super-neato addition to Blogger allowing us to add a hyperlink and blog entry by right-clicking on a page.

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.

A play on my post below, I guess it’s just a matter of time before there are epinions about ematter and ematter about epinions. Matter I’ll do both, promoting my ematter on epinions (I wonder if there’s an official place for authors like on Amazon?) and write an ematter article about the sociology of epinions.