Month: July 2000

  • About a week and a half ago I went on a retreat to Sweden with about 30 other Razorfish employees. In preparation we were to think about our vision for ourselves and the company, among other things. My vision was a bit idealistic, or so I thought at the time. I think of all this “user experience” hubbub as just a euphemism for “improving people’s lives.” I think everything we do either makes the world a better place or a worse place, and I feel we have a moral imperative to try to make it a better place.


    One day on the retreat a talk on broadband strategy led to a discussion about how new technologies will change lifestyles, and in turn led to how we influence people’s lives and therefore how we need to bring a sense of responsibility to our design. I was overjoyed that the words coming out of other people’s mouths were the same words I thought to myself when envisioning our future. It was encouraging that this group of incredibly talented people has a similar vision as myself, one that includes a moral dimension.


    It’s with this in mind that I hear Jakob Nielson call us a “glamour design shop.” I spend a lot of effort evangelizing and working to improve usability, so the contrast between what I know as reality and his stupid perception is numbing. You know what Jakob, the IAM site was built for aspiring actors, musicians, and dancers, not for you, so your opinion isn’t valid here, you’re not the user (at this point I must take a deep breath and not sink to his level of petty criticism, even if the new SIGCHI Bulletin says about his new book, “save your money.” Ha!).

  • “It’s as if we’ve landed on Mars and we’re constructing a commercial and business setting.”

    — THOMAS VARTANIAN

    Chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Law of Cyberspace


    That comment, from the article Net may need cyber-borders, really speaks to the megolomaniacal nature of attorneys these days. Listen folks, just because there’s no laywers running the Internet doesn’t mean it’s not an organized domain. It’s not like Mars at all, it’s like the Bar Association arrived in Columbus, Ohio, saw a lack of lawyers, and decide to take over. Fucking legal imperialism is what it is, and I’m not even one of those crazy Ayn Rand freaks.

  • Some amusing want ads. I especially like this part:


    “…You will have at least three years experience of doing jobs for which you have no skill or aptitude, ideally in a Unix environment…”

  • IBM’s Pervasive Computing Glossary, and a whole issue of the Systems Journal dedicated to pervasive computing.


    Surfing around IBM’s sites I actually noticed how easy they were to read and navigate. Although I design web sites for a living I’m rarely struck by this. Kudos to the Ease of Use team.

  • Upbeat article on Razorfish. I think the cult-culture is overdone a bit, you don’t have to “drink the Koolaid” to work here.


    Nice photo of the CEO’s dog, Sophie, on the cover, though.

  • Bill Gaver has produced some fun work lately. I returned to his page as I’m researching auditory interfaces, and he has several papers available for download. I especially like his idea of everyday listening.

  • I think I’m averaging about a post/minute this weekend. Just shows how my life descends into utter geekiness when Sarah’s out of town.

  • Amazon.com is five years old. The original home page is funny in a quirky way, and the timeline is not only interesting, it’s downright hilarious.

  • Found the Mac version of a Gnutella client, Mactella, but I was unsuccessful after several attempts of trying to download files with it. It’s almost ready for prime time though.


    This reminds me of something I wanted in the early days of FTP and the WWW: task based downloading. I want to tell the program, “Go get me foobar.mp3” and it does it. More explicitly, it finds it, determines the fasted connection, initiates the download, and if the download fails it tries again. That last part of trying again is a serious drawback of Napster and Gnutella. They’ve given us access but not ease. (damn I’m demanding).

  • Just discovered Gnutella (how did I miss this one?). At first glance it doesn’t seem much different than an FTP/WWW server/search engine for everyone, which Apple started shipping with the OS a while ago. A key difference is that this is anonymous; It seems you can’t reference a server by an IP address; your identity is only revealed when you download.


    Wonderful quotes from the Gnutella support page:


    “Gnutella Is Designed to Survive Nuclear War”

    “…hungry lawyers are probably more destructive than nuclear weapons…Gnutella Can Withstand A Band of Hungry Lawyers “

    “Gnutella is nothing but a protocol. It’s just freely-accessible information. There is no company to sue. No one entity is really responsible for Gnutella.”


    I suppose that could bring up the ultimate Internet legal battle, trying to outlaw a protocol.

  • A while ago I ran an experiment testing the acuracy of the 5-day forecast. While my sample was small, I found the forecast for the 5th day had only a 50% chance of nailing the basics (precipitation or not, significantly higher or lower than the average temperature).


    After reading a great article by Howard Rheingold on “community computing” this month in Wired, I decided to help improve this situation. The Climate Dynamics project would, in the words of a researcher, “introduce as entirely new form of climate prediction: a fuzzy prediction, relecting the range of risks and probabilities, rather than a single ‘best guess’ forecast.”


    I thought this was a better use (read: helping everyday people) of my idle CPU cycles and bandwidth than testing cryptography or looking for extraterrestrial life.

  • I had to edit the below post once I learned some more about the IAM situation. The reality of the situation is just not as significant as the Standard article sounds.

  • TheStandard.com: IAM Sues Razorfish for Poor Design. IAM, among other things, is looking for “a formal declaration that the five-day period in Razorfish’s contract is legally unconscionable.” What happens if the contract is declared “legally unconscionable”? Will a judge sentence the developers to 10 Sundays in church?

  • In the New York Times this morning, a story about the Tour de France mentions a statue to Tom Simpson, a rider who in the 1960s cycled himself to death. Like the Vasa entry below, it struck me as another example of a European country praising a somewhat disturbing failure. I wonder if Amercans are just not honest enough about our failures to publically acknowledge them. Perhaps we need a big memorial to Richard Nixon outside the Capital in Washington D.C. as a constant reminder to our representatives.

  • Regarding business plans, Lane at Deepleap (an actual startup) has some oh-so-helpful advice:


    most of the people these days — and they’re pretty much all vcs [ venture capitalists ] — recommend you don’t bother with a full biz plan, and just do a 6-8 page executive summary, since it’s all they’re going to read, anyway.

    Makes me wonder if I can get a million dollars in funding per page :)