October 1999

I’ve been thinking lately about how to create a mostly monochromatic look to a web site, even a metallic look if possible. Sean, a designer at work, brought it up – he’s inspired by the beautiful simplicity of PDAs and mobile phones. Two sites that are mostly monochromatic: Banana Republic and Univega.

The Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation has some generous information online, check out their Journal which includes an article titled The Invisible Computer by Don the-design-of-everyday-things Norman.

Whoa! I just found the page for ICAD, the International Community for Auditory Display. They’re probably doing the most advanced work in helping us communicate as effectively with sound as we do with graphics.

I’m currently thinking about putting Jennifer Tidwell’s HCI Design Patterns to the test by using them to design a web site at work. More patterns can be found at Tom Erickson’s Interaction Design Patterns Page.

NY Times story on the Living Surfaces conference I attended last week. It’s an interesting distillation of the ideas presented there. Everything sounds more interesting and important when the NY Times reports on it.

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…

“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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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;…