Wow. Congratulations to the Digital Web crew on a be-ah-u-ti-ful new site, a great example of balancing aesthetics and functionality.
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Tolerance.org & the test of time
Tolerance.org just won the Webby for best activist site again, after having won it in 2002. The design has nicely evolved and it still sports the same structure we gave it back in 2001. I wince a little when I see it, being intimately aware of the flaws, but I’m super happy that it works for people despite not being valid code and all that.
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Contextual dictionary lookups
LiveDictionary for Safari is the kind of functionality that should be enabled everywhere. Imagine how our kids vocabulary will increase when they can point to any word and get the definition. Link courtesy of jr.
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How Consulting Firms Work
I spent years in consulting deconstructing how the firms operated and what drove their business decisions. Ironically, the same year I started at a consulting firm (1993) was the same year David H. Maister published Managing the Professional Service Firm which explains it all. He’s a great writer, and has published other great titles since then. Thanks to Christina for the recommendation.
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Backslider
Riffing with Brett about how richer interaction could be used for navigation, I thought it’d be nice to have browser back button functionality that’s as fast as scrolling. Imagine you have a little slider in (for example) the upper left of the window, and sliding the handle horizontally scrolled by the pages in your history. There’d be indents so it wouldn’t stop in-between pages, but you’d see the pages scroll by for the sake of visual confirmation.
Technically it would mean keeping more pages in active memory and not just cached on the hard drive, but hey, RAM is cheap these days… what’s a few more megs?
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Woz History
Woz’s site contains some fun stories, including this telling bit: ‘…the Gates/Allen BASIC was becoming the standard thing to get for your Altair computer.‘
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Oh, does my father have experience with this stuff?
Hendrek Hertzberg, in the course of reviewing Bob Woodword’s book Plan of Attack, goes looking for and finds relationship issues between the senior and junior Bush: I asked about his father in this way: ³Here is the one living human being who¹s held this office who had to make a decision to go to war. And it would not be credible if you did not at some point ask him, What are the ingredients of doing this right? Or what¹s your thought, this is what I¹m facing.²
³If it wouldn¹t be credible,² Bush replied, ³I guess I better make up an answer.²
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New Blogger
Blogger relaunched with help from Adaptive Path and Douglas Bowman and it’s very nice. After not having used it in a long while, it’s a blast to revisit the old hood and see how much has changed. I published out an old blog (about teaching a distance education class) in one of the new fancy, schmancy templates. The profile is neat too:
On Blogger Since: August 1999
Posts Written 648
Words Written 45,191
Outbound Links 712
…
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IA Schmoozfest tonight in NYC
Avi Rappoport, myself, and other swell folks will be schmoozing prior to search-a-palooza and you’re invited. Tonight at the midtown Hilton bar.
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The law of fast processors reaches usability labs
Someone must have described this already, but for now I’ll modestly coin Lombardi’s Law of Fast Processors: as processor speed increases, software replaces dedicated hardware. In music or video production it means programs like GarageBand and Final Cut Pro and a stock Macintosh replace dedicated rack systems and DSP chips. In usability testing, it means a program like Morae — which wow’d my coworker at the recent CHI conference — replaces a rack of digitizing and video manipulation gear. So a laptop and a USB camera becomes a powerful, portable testing lab.
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MT Alternatives
Surfing around lately looking at the blogging software landscape and wondering why Movable Type doesn’t have more competitors, it just seems like everyone is running it. The plug-in library is certainly attractive, but not exclusive. Interesting direct competitors include Textpattern and WordPress. Meyer has switched to the latter.
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eContent on Enterprise IA
Tony Byrne writes a great overview of enterprise information architecture in the new eContent magazine. He also dishes out the tough love: ‘Some responsibility for the dearth of EIA activity also lies with IA specialists themselves. There is a bit of a tendency in the IA community to over-invest precious energy in KM-esque intellectual debates about ontologies and topic maps, when thought and research could better be applied to more pressing issues, like how to build compelling business cases for a corporate EIA team.’
Well yeah, the geeky techniques are more fun :) But of course the people, processes, and tools must support each other, and so Tony poses an excellent challenge we should rise to.
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AIfIA, WSJ, and the PDB
In today’s Wall Street Journal the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture achieved something we wished for from the beginning, notice in the mainstream press. The story, Redesiging the PDB, quotes Wodtke and Morville among others in discussing how IA could influence attention paid to the infamous Presidential Daily Brief on Bin Laden.
Unfortunately, the design community can’t agree on something as simple as Greg Storey’s one-page PDB redesign versus the undesigned original. One would think any attention paid to this document would be a good thing, but Edward Tufte disagrees, stating, ‘I think the design’s irrelevant.’ I hope that’s just the reporter screwing up his words.
Perhaps the most cogent statement came from Janice Fraser who pointed to the intentions of the document’s originators: ‘[Mr. Storey’s redesign] shifts responsibility — and, moreover, accountability — for interpretation to the analyst or advisor who prepares the brief.‘
