Visualization and Discovery
One of the reasons I love designing for the web is the constantly shifting landscape, both in terms of audience and tools. With each technological shift in the brief history of the Internet, designers have evolved and created new systems for people to navigate online spaces. In the last few weeks, there’s been a good ...
Suggested Reading, April 11, 2006
Despite the recent news that even newspaper prose is search engine optimized, I’m sticking with my own obtuse title today. Sometimes the web moves so quickly it’s hard to keep up with the explosion of ideas both big and small. I recommend reading the following for a snapshot of the web as we know it ...
Tagging Yourself and Others
Like a lot of web people these days, I’ve been actively tagging my “stuff” in del.icio.us, Flickr, rojo, BlinkList, and Technorati. The more I tag both the content that I produce (blog posts, photos, links) and the content that I find (bookmarks, news stories, blog posts), the more I’m looking for a web application or ...
Info-bits in Flux
In a recent blog post at O’Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes, “A while ago, I thought I’d try an experiment: could I organise all my work, all my personal stuff, all my writing, in one huge text file?” You may think he’s crazy, but my first thought was “Cool! Another geek like myself who keeps everything ...
Tag This
Yesterday I wrote about the need for more integrated tools to organize the various bits of information that we need, use, and collect in our daily digital lives, both online and offline, work-related and personal. Whether we organize online or on paper, whether it’s a result of today’s information overload or a librarian gene in ...
Smarter Bookmarks
“Smarter Bookmarks. How do you find your favorite websites? Some people, reports Lisa Guernsey in The New York Times, “try to keep track of websites by sending themselves an e-mail message with the link and a note of why it might be useful. Others,” she writes,” print pages or use sticky notes. Increasingly fewer people, ...
RSS
Remember “push” technology? It was all the rage back in 1997 when Pointcast launched its software that turned a PC screensaver into a headline ticker for all sorts of real-time information. The problem was, users quickly tired of the constant onslaught and network administrators complained the massive data downloads overwhelmed their systems. By 1999, the ...
Audio-on-demand service for cellphones
RealNetworks and Sprint will announce today that they’ve teamed up on a digital audio service that will offer content from ABC News, Fox Sports, National Public Radio and others. The service, which will cost $4.95 a month, will be available on various handsets and ill include a monophonic digital audio program and the ability to ...
Personalized searches
Kaltix, a Web search venture formed by three members of Stanford University’s PageRank team, is bent on out-Googling Google by developing a speedier version of the Stanford PageRank algorithm and using it to develop a more personalized Web search service. “Kaltix is a ‘stealth-mode’ startup… (leveraging) research done at Stanford University as well as several ...
The Accelerating Rate of Change
Futurist Ray Kurzweill says that “the whole 20th century, because we’ve been speeding up to this point, is equivalent to 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, and we’ll make another 20 years of progress at today’s rate of progress equal to the whole 20th century in the next 14 years, and then ...
Opera browser gaining users
The Opera web browser has been downloaded 10 million times already this year and is “showing growing signs of use despite Microsoft’s continued dominance,” says this piece. The Norwegian company behind Opera “sees America Online’s reduced commitment to developing future versions of Netscape as a good sign for its own future.” Opera CEO Jon von ...
Why iTunes has bands on the run
Explores a growing split in how musicians and their fans view online digital music services. Some bands say fans downloading only a song or two dilutes the artistry they put into creating an album of songs, but customers, on the other hand, like being in control. Story at BusinessWeek [via VirtualR]
Everybody’s doing it
A recent survey conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of AT&T predicts that four out of five companies will use remote workers by 2005, compared with only 56% today. The advent of more affordable (and workable) networking technology, combined with a corporate drive toward globalization is making telecommuting a practical option for many ...
Geek Chorus
Students with laptops and wireless connections are opening up “back-channel” discussions during classroom lectures, according to a New York Times article by Lisa Guernsey. While the lecturer is up there lecturing, clusters of students are back there working the instant-messaging circuit—commenting, questioning and even blogging the proceedings. “We’re just moving the corridor into the room ...
Future: Is there life after the browser?
One of the disadvantages of the browser is that there aren’t very good ways of organizing information,” Meyrowitz (president of Macromedia Products) said. “Bookmarks just don’t do the whole job. There’s no real sense of place for the information you want to come back to. Full story at cnet