Still going after all these years.
In case anyone missed the link buried in the previous post, here is the joke about my pages as seen by MSN’s search engine:
No, I have no idea why the site description is in Chinese. Nor do I know why Yahoo claims that my site’s summary “contains characters that cannot be displayed in this language/character set.”
Thoughts?
I think Amazon has had limited RSS support before, but this is something else. About a hundred custom RSS feeds by category. That takes me to 200 feeds… (As seen on Scripting News, among others…)
Jakob Nielsen’s latest column, about the dangers of quantitative studies, is out. In a nutshell, he argues that numbers lie. Misrepresentation of statistical significance, confusing correlation and causality, ignoring covariant variables, over-simplifying analysis, and out and out distortion of the measurements are of course all potential pitfalls in any research, and it’s good to point them out. Of course, I have a copy of How to Lie with Statistics on my bookshelf that made the same point fifty years ago—and made it more entertainingly.
There’s also an interesting connection to Mark Hurst’s column from two weeks ago about the “Page Paradigm.” Nielsen, who has been advocating breadcrumb navigation and other usability features for years, rises like a brook trout to Hurst’s bait that breadcrumbs, unless they help the user fulfill their one purpose in visiting, are useless. He makes cogent points about users who drop into a site from a search engine or other outside links, or who might want to revisit a site, but still I have to wonder whether the timing of that particular discussion is coincidence.
Still, I have to agree with his fundamental point that quant isn’t everything. I was recently in a situation where we had mounds of hard quantitative data—we were, almost literally, drowning in it—but couldn’t solve our fundamental challenge. Had we been able to run a few focus groups, we could have zeroed in on the problem much more effectively.
Good article on “interactive fiction” (also known as text adventures, Zork-type games, etc.) at 1up.com, pointed to by Slashdot among others.
I think my favorite interactive fiction game of all time is probably still The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and not just because it’s legally available on line (Java required) through the kind auspices of the late great Douglas Adams.
Via Tomalak’s Realm: Mark Hurst writes on GoodExperience.com about how users interact with websites by discussing something he calls “The Page Paradigm.” He distills the patterns of user interaction with websites to the following rules (paraphrased):
In practice, he says this means that on each page, you should identify the user’s goals, de-emphasize or remove areas of the page that don’t help the user fulfill that goal, and emphasize links or other elements that help the user find the goal.
It’s hard to argue with his practical recommendations. His rules, though, are open to investigation. Surely site navigation and structure, if consistently defined and executed, plays some purpose in helping users figure out how to accomplish their goal.
Still catching up with my blogging from last week. As reported on BoingBoing, FCC Chairman Michael Powell last week articulated four Internet Freedoms that he believes Americans are entitled to:
- Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
- Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
- Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
- Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.
Nowhere in this list is anything that indicates that “consumers” (as Powell meaningfully calls Internet users) could be anything but consumers. The reality is that the Internet has always been, to abuse a phrase, a “World of Ends.” Remember, no one owns it, everyone can use it, anyone can improve it. Including “consumers.”
I want to see a fifth right added here: the freedom to publish. Unfortunately, restrictive ISP service agreements that prohibit running servers, plans to “improve” the Internet to prioritize broadcast traffic over that generated by mere “consumers,” and other restrictions on the “two-way Web” promise to keep this “right” off the list for good.
To my surprise, SmartManila eventually did download all the content from my site, back to 2000. I was also impressed that while it was downloading the GUI was responsive and I could do other work.
I wasn’t able to post however; the message just posted in my discussion area rather than a news item. Here’s what I wrote:
User interface gripe: Manila only allows one category at a time for news items, but not only does SmartManila not prevent you from selecting multiple categories, you have to if you want your news item to have a category and appear on the home page, since they have inserted “Home Page” as a category.
There is a toggle in the editing pane from WYSIWYG to raw HTML, which is good. However, they uppercased all my lowercase HTML tags. That would be a problem if I were doing XHTML.
SocialDynamix, who make a front end for Radio, now have a beta of a similar product for Manila, code named Smart Manila, that allows you to manage multiple Radio and Manila sites with a single client side UI. Windows only.
Usual start up pains. I’m not sure why, but the tool couldn’t automatically find my XML-RPC gateway from my Manila site address. Once I manually entered the address, by appending /RPC2 to the edit site URL, it was good to go.
Now it’s trying to download every single post I’ve ever done. Since I’ve been blogging daily for almost three years, it’s going to take a LONG time. Later today I’ll try posting something from there.
I also have been playing around with .Text, the .Net-based blogging framework for Windows. Unfortunately the blog isn’t publicly accessible (I’m using it to become one of those embedded behind-the-firewall department-level bloggers), but the framework seems pretty good. But where are the GUI clients? I am really coming to hate editing blogs in a browser. It’s good to have the capability every now and then, but as a daily thing it’s not the best interface in the world.
Via Tin Man: Product warning labels for physicists. My favorite: “Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State.”
Apple has pulled together all its available RSS feeds in one place (including some simple stock iTunes feeds) at www.apple.com/rss/. Thanks to Scripting News for the tip.
The keiretsu has been a little quiet the past few months. Now with Esta’s blog active again it comes roaring back. Evidence:
I thought Google wasn’t going to put up a doodle (their famous customized logos that they roll out on holidays and other special occasions) for Valentine’s Day this year. Then I looked at my Google Toolbar this morning.
To the best of my knowledge this is the first Doodle that Google has done in the toolbar. Impressive trick.
Ben Hammersley, expat O’Reilly author-turned-Florentine, dreams of the gentler more innocent days of the web, when Garrison Keillor was Mr. Blue at Salon; when Suck and Word (the web magazine, not the software program) still ruled web content; when there was a Cool Site of the Day page actually worth visiting; and when Mahir was proclaiming “I Kiss You!”
Me? I miss Mirsky’s Worst of the Web.
I started to write yesterday about this but decided to wait until something happened. I’m glad I did because the end result was much cooler than I described.
While I was chatting with Dave at the end of his Microsoft talk, two folks came up and asked if there were a way to cut through some of the noise of the RSS ocean based on recommendations. The young woman described it as “people who subscribe to feed X also subscribed to feed y.” Dave first told them that the SDK was open to anyone to code against, then got out his cell phone, called Andrew Grumet, and gave the phone over to Shira who described the idea to him.
I had to leave at that point so I didn’t know how it would turn out. But yesterday Andrew had the first version of Similar Feeds up and running, and Dave pointed to it last night. Here’s my similarity list.
(Incidentally, thanks to all for the comments and pointers over the last couple of days. It’s been helpful hearing other peoples’ perspectives. Shouts out to Tom Harper (subscribed) and Korby Parnell (subscribed).)
A quick link roundup: