It's been a month since I've posted anything here. I have no excuse except, you know, I haven't posted anything. I have been doing a lot of posting over on our TechNews site, talking about Office 2007 and Windows Vista and I'm planning to do another series specifically on Vista as well as posting on internal technical issues as they arise.

But I mean to post here again too. Maybe even later today....

Christine Kane relates 17 things about creativity, including:

--Creativity is about paying attention
--The only way to learn about creativity is to create things
--Everyone has valid fears, excuses, resentments and blocks (Creativity teaches you to say 'so-what?')
-- When you’re creating something, you really GET that all of the things that are supposed to matter so much don’t matter much at all.
--Creativity is about showing up, not perfection

Soon, you may be able to download audio books to your phone:

Audio books are set to be revolutionised by a tiny card that can store up to five lengthy novels on a phone.

The card can be slotted into a mobile phone, dispensing with the need to carry up to six CDs for an audio version of a book. The technology, originally developed to store music, will be released this year by Nokia.

The Guardian provides a list of 100 useful websites

Inveneo, which brings wireless networking to rural villages, is looking for people willing to donate old thumb drives they're no longer using.

New research from Akamai and JupiterResearch indicates that the average online shopper waits about 4 seconds for a webpage to load before abandoning the site. Also:

Based on the feedback of 1,058 online shoppers that were surveyed during the first half of 2006, JupiterResearch offers the following analysis:

--The consequences for an online retailer whose site underperforms include diminished goodwill, negative brand perception, and, most important, significant loss in overall sales.
--Online shopper loyalty is contingent upon quick page loading, especially for high-spending shoppers and those with greater tenure.
--JupiterResearch recommends that retailers make every effort to keep page rendering to no longer than four seconds.

Additional findings in the report show that more than one-third of shoppers with a poor experience abandoned the site entirely, while 75 percent were likely not to shop on that site again. These results demonstrate that a poorly performing website can be damaging to a company’s reputation; according to the survey, nearly 30 percent of dissatisfied customers will either develop a negative perception of the company or tell their friends and family about the experience.

According to Time, it's YouTube

You will be unsurprised to know that PayPal and eBay are the top two places that phishers falsely claim to be representing.

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank are also in the top ten.

Some tips for starting an 'activity-centric' wiki:

1. Pick a project or activity you are involved with or leading - ideally, one that is current and has several emails going back and forth amongst the team members (and others, if appropriate).
2. Collect all the relevant emails you can get your hands on including the document attachments.
3. Based on the emails, the project objectives, etc, draft an outline of the project as if you had to give a presentation to someone as to the project purpose, history, status, next steps, current activities, issues, ....
4. That outline is your wiki HomePage (or FrontPage or MainPage or whatever depending on the wiki engine you're using). Copy it into your workspace Page. (Optionally, take a key phrase from each line of the outline and make it a page link.)
5. Now - copy the content of each email somewhere into that outline OR Pages you are linking to from the HomePage.
6. Don't start editing yet. You want it to look familiar to your audience. If anything, you may want to preface some of the email content with the person's name who sent it ('Jane wants to know >', Carl commented >', 'Here's my suggestion >', .....)
7. Before you invite the audience in, take a step back and ask yourself "If I was looking at this for the first time and someone was expecting me to understand it or contribute something, would I get it?" Probably not, so start tweaking it a little and add some introductory comments on the HomePage

...

Here are the top 10 most common passwords (though it's a bit UK-centric):

10. Thomas (person's name--always popular, so easy to crack)
9. arsenal (football--soccer--team, the UK-centric part)
8. monkey (almost my favorite)
7. charlie (oh, look, another person's name)
6. qwerty (and we all know where that one comes from)
5. 123456 (*totally* my favorite)
4. letmein (you know, 'let me in')
3. liverpool (another football team--apparently they're a very popular one)
2. password (yeah, this just screams--I forgot my password and the admins had to reset it for me)
1. 123 (which beats out '123456' but you know when all the '123' people are forced to go to 6 character minimum passwords they're going to use '123456')

If you are using any of these passwords or anyone's first name, or anything that resembles these passwords--wow--change now because these have all been Dugg.

From Ionut Chitu:

1. If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.

...

3. A better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.

...

7. Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.

...

9. Find the color of a word. "Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color."

eBay uses 2 petabytes of storage daily and adds 10 terabytes of additional storage every week.

Think about this:

• The Library of Congress is 20 terabytes of text
• 50,000 trees worth of pages is 1 terabyte
• All the US academic research libraries is 2 petabytes

All the information in the world? I'm not entirely sure, but I have to say that this article is actually more fascinating than the one that prompted this post in the first place.

• Did you know that North American's use 11,916 sheets of paper a year (Europeans only use 7,280)?
• Also, the entire World Wide Web comprised 167 terabytes of information in 2003 (probably a bit more now, just from eBay)
• Voice telephone traffic accounts for the largest information flow in the world by a large margin over the Internet, television, and radio.

Wikipedia has refused to censor themselves in China, however, it appears that the Chinese government has unblocked Wikipedia:

"We'll see how long this lasts," said the company on its site. "Chinese Wikipedians have expressed fears about the detrimental effects that a permanent ban would have. First of all, the block deprives a useful resource from the majority of Chinese speakers in the world. Moreover, since Mainland Chinese form a significant portion of the Chinese Wikipedia community (46% of all users in March 2005), a long-term block could severely stunt the growth of Wikipedia similar to the block in June 2004."

The Chinese government still can and indeed appears to be, blocking certain articles within Wikipedia, but Wikipedia itself has consistently refused to take censor Wikipedia themselves. It should be noted that both Google and Yahoo have acceded to Chinese government demands that they filter their searches for the Chinese market.

In case you were interested:

In 1888, Thomas W. Holley, a 24-year-old paper mill worker in Holyoke, had an idea for how to use the paper scraps, known as sortings, discarded by the mill. Sortings were anything trimmed away as scrap or considered of lesser quality than the writing paper eventually packaged and sold. Holley's notion was to bind the scraps into pads that could be sold at a cut rate. Convinced he had a winning idea, he founded his own company to collect the sortings from local mills (Holyoke was then the papermaking capital of the world) and began churning out bargain-price pads.

The legal pad's margins, also called down lines, are drawn 1.25 inches from the left edge of the page. (This is the only requirement for a pad to qualify as a legal pad, though the iconic version has yellow paper, blue lines, and a red gummed top.) Holley added the ruling that defined the legal pad in the early 1900s at the request of a local judge who was looking for space to comment on his own notes.

That, at least, is the story AMPAD tells. Holley never filed a patent for his invention; no other company in the legal pad market has ever come forward with a competing claim. Like many origin myths, AMPAD's answers some essential questions but leaves others unresolved. It doesn't, for instance, explain the emergence of yellow as the standard legal pad color. Holley is thought to have created white pads, not yellow ones. Yellow paper is about 10 to 20 percent more expensive than white paper, due to the cost of dye and the additional cleanup the dyeing process necessitates, an extravagance the thrifty Holley would likely have dismissed.

...via BoingBoing

No one writes paper and envelope letters anymore, but everyone shops online. Although the number of first class mailings has dropped significantly for the US Postal Service over the last few years, the number of packages they delivered has managed to pick up a lot of slack:

At a recent conference that attracted 15,000 eBay enthusiasts to Las Vegas, the main sponsor was a big advocate of online shopping: the U.S. Postal Service.

"I have one message today for the entire eBay community," Postmaster General John Potter said in a speech. "We love every buyer, every seller, every power seller. Thank you for shipping with the United States Postal Service."

As people send e-mail and e-cards instead of handwritten letters and greetings, as they pay more of their bills online and file their tax returns electronically, the Postal Service has started to seem outdated.

Yet the Internet is actually injecting new life, and sorely needed revenue, into the Postal Service. And it is happening with packages, millions of them shipped every day, in a journey that starts with a few mouse clicks and ends days later at a customer's door.

...via Smart Mobs

Well, not putting blog entries up, that's for sure.

We recently provided the IT support for the first-ever National Special Olympics held in Ames, IA July 3-7.

Almost immediately after that, I bought a new house.

However, I hope that regular blogging will be returning soon (like, this week).

From Infothought:

1. Google query syntax underwent some subtle changes over the years.
Not too long ago, you couldn't enter more than 10 words into the Google search box. Or to be more precisely, you *could*, but subsequent words were ignored. I bet the Google founders were thinking "10 words ought to be enough for everyone," and mostly there were right – but for some advanced uses, especially with the Google Search API, a little more is helpful. Then, a while ago, Google increased the words limit to 32 words. This is probably OK for a few more years!

Another change is that Google ignores stop words nowadays. Stop words in search engines are words like "the" or "a" which are too tiny or common to be useful additions to most searches. However, Google is now accepting them as semi-normal words (one remaining difference being that they're not highlighted, or linked to the dictionary). This means in Google.com, you get different results when search for [the tale of a cowboy] vs [* tale * * cowboy] vs [tale cowboy]. (I'll be using square brackets around search queries – they're not to be included in the search.)

Another operator changed its functionality during the years; a couple of years ago, you could only query Google for [site:something.com], but not [site:something.com/something/]. Today, you can add folders to the site operator.

Here:

There are seventy four books on the desk about evolutionary theory. A laptop is open on the desk.

> look laptop

There seems to be a dissertation chapter on the laptop.

> read chapter

It is long-winded and boring. You do not want to read it.

> read chapter

It is obnoxious. You hate it.

> read book

Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.

> read book

Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic.

> work on dissertation

You spend two hours searching the OED for the usage history of the word devolve.

> work on dissertation

You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.

> work on dissertation

You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.

> tear out hair

Taken. You find the Elvish sword.

> in my hair?

I don't understand that.

> work on dissertation

You spend five minutes playing online poker.

By special request I'm moving the Eagle cam up to the top of the page. I'm also posting the link on the left so it's easy to find.

If you haven't visited, check it out.

In BusinessWeek online, an article on how Steve Jobs makes dynamic presentations :

Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More
Jobs takes nothing for granted during product launches. He reviews and rehearses his material. According to a Business Week article on February 6, 2006, "Jobs unveils Apple's latest products as if he were a particularly hip and plugged-in friend showing off inventions in your living room. Truth is, the sense of informality comes only after grueling hours of practice." The article goes on to say that it's not unusual for Jobs to prepare for four hours as he reviews every slide and demonstration (see BW, 2/6/06, "Steve Jobs' Magic Kingdom").

Keep It Visual
Speaking of slides, there are very few bullet points in a Jobs presentation. Each slide is highly visual. If he's discussing the new chip inside a computer, a slide in the background will show a colorful image of the chip itself alongside the product. That's it. Simple and visual.

From CNN--How I Work: Bill Gates

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I'm reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I'm working on something, and to bring up a link that's related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I've ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren't on my permission list or individuals I don't know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.

...via Digg

Did you know that someone has registered DIDYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NAME.com?

This and other interesting facts about .COM domain names can be found here. Including:

• 538 registered domain names are 63 characters long
• The most popular length for domain names is 11 characters
• All three letter domain combinations for .COM domains are already taken
• The most common letter to start a domain name is 'S'. Q, X, Y, and Z are the least common.

...via BoingBoing

Streaming video of a Bald Eagle nest.

Basically because it's cool

From Firefox developer, Ben Goodger:

It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:

Making important points up front
Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
Writing clearly and succinctly
No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

...via digg

Podcasts now outnumber radio stations. This isn't really surprising, but I do find it interesting:

There are now more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide, matching a prediction made on an Irish blog site last year.

In November of last year on his blog Podcasting News Ireland, Brian Greene forecast that, with new podcasts growing by more than 800 per week, they would outnumber radio stations by St Patrick's Day 2006. He said that although podcasts are strictly speaking shows rather than stations, they are independently distributed and subscribed so the comparison holds true to an extent.

A study recently found that Web users basically visit the same six sites each time they're online:

The study found that half of internet-using Britons (51 per cent) visit just six or less sites on a regular basis.

Three quarters of people questioned say the internet is indispensable to their daily lives and more than nine out of ten (95 per cent) say they go online with a specific destination in mind. People are now using the internet more smartly, visiting a handful of destination websites that have emerged as 'Supersites' due to their importance to people's lives.

The research suggests that using just one banking, shopping, travel information and holiday website is enough for a person to keep their life well-managed.

...via digg

Word is that Mozilla (makers of Firefox) made $72M last year:

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.

What an amazing business: make a kick-ass browser for $10-15M a year in expense and make $72M (and growing) in revenue. It's such a good business that the folks at Flock.com are trying to do a similar thing by building a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox.

...via digg

From Paul Purcell at About.com

• Record parking spot locations.
• Engine repairs. Send a pic to a mechanic who may talk you through a quick fix.
• Business or service function and hours. Copy posted business hours or listed service functions (and pricing) for later review and recall. You can also report price gouging.
• Child custodian. If you can't get to your kids at school or other function, relay a picture of the person who is coming to pick them up.
• Info on injured or hospitalized people.
• Hotel room number and location.
• ID your evac gear. Take a picture to prove ownership.
• Photo scavenger hunt. Give kids a short list of things they should take a picture of.
• Identify the close-up. Take a really close up picture of something while the kids aren't looking....

...via Smart Mobs

From a Wired News article:

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance," says Epley.

From eric cogan:

#1 http://www.meebo.com - A small upstart company that has brought trillian (http://www.trillian.cc) like features to the web. You can access Yahoo! Messanger, Jabber, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ and MSN directly through the web in a desktop like enviroment that supports multiple connections to different IM networks much like trillian.

#2 http://www.rememberthemilk.com - Another cool web 2.0 creation. If you are like me you tend to forget to do things. Also if you are like me you are connected to the world in some fashion no matter where you go (my cellphone has yet to leave my side in years). Remeberthemilk is excellent because it supports reminders via cellphones, email and instant messaging.

...via Digg

...then mobile phones:

About an hour into a typical show on U2's Vertigo tour, Bono tells the crowd to hold up their mobile phones, in what has become the modern-day equivalent of flicking on a lighter. Instantly, thousands of blue-tinted screens illuminate the darkness as he marvels at the spectacle.
...
Then the band launches into the song "One," and Bono encourages the audience to use their phones to send a text message (also known as an SMS) to the one.org Web site, a sort of digital petition voicing support for poverty relief in Africa. Later, during the encore, the names of all who did so are scrolled on the same screen, and each receive a message of thanks from Bono on their phones.

This is one of the most visible examples of how the mobile phone is being used as a communication tool between artist and audience, turning the concert event into a much more interactive experience.

...via Smart Mobs

Google is pilot testing free internet at Heathrow Airport:

According to Google, the average airline passenger spends over 9 hours a year waiting for flights. Half of British passengers surveyed said they typically spent this time eating, drinking or shopping, while 71 per cent of respondents said they would like to use this time to find out more information, such as maps and weather forecasts, about their destinations.

The Google Space terminals, in addition to internet access, provide additional tools such as a digital photo editor. A sample of the Google Space terminal features is available online at www.google.co.uk/googlespace.

,,,via Smart Mobs

Interesting Wired News article on outsourcing IT to rural US communities rather than over seas:

Today Rural Sourcing claims 20 clients, including Mattel and Cardinal Health, $1 million in revenue and 50 full-time employees at five IT centers in Arkansas, North Carolina and Missouri.

White started the company two years ago with $2 million of her own money in partnership with her alma mater, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where she earned a bachelor's degree and MBA while raising two small children. She hopes to employ 100 full-time consultants by the end of next year, and 1,000 within five to seven years.

The company charges $35 to $50 per hour for IT expertise, which may cost around $100 in New York City. While this is no match for outsourcing rates in India, clients benefit from local accents and similar time zones -- not to mention the absence of stigma sometimes attached to farming jobs out to foreign countries.

...via Slashdot

--Egyptian Pyramid locations

--Homes of the Celebrities

--Endangered Species Sightings

From the Belfast Telegraph:

A small but growing segment of today's dearly departed are preparing themselves for the afterlife with the latest electronic gadgets, with mobiles at the top of the list, according to funeral director Seamas Griffin of Kirwan's funeral homes in Dublin.

...

"I've seen it a few times. It's not a big trend but it is going on. I've seen people buried with all kinds of things, even a pager," he said.

...

"Some other people may be terrified they'll wake up in the coffin, so they take along a mobile to ring for help to get them out," he said. However, certain rules would apply, including making sure the mobile is switched off or on silent before it accompanies the deceased.

eBay's founders are donating money to start a microfinance fund at Tufts University:

EBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela on Friday said they gave $100 million in eBay stock to Tufts University to create a fund that will invest in international microfinance, or lending to people who are too poor to qualify for traditional loans.

...via Smart Mobs

Tracking Whale Songs

Plate Tectonics

The Highest Points in all 50 States

Dig to the Other Side (if you actually dug that hole through the center of the earth, where would you end up)

Stanford on iTunes provides university-related audio conference via iTunes. Content includes lectures, music, sports, etc. There are also plans to include a restricted area where students can get lecture notes, etc.

...via BoingBoing

So, today is the day you start that new project?

Here's a list of things Not-to-Do from 52 Projects:

• Do not decide to organize your cd rack.
• Do not freak out that you have no money.
• Do not go into the bathroom and give your Academy Award acceptance speech.
• Do not put on Prince and party like it's 1999. (Well, okay, maybe ONCE, just to get you fired up about your project.)
• Do not start going through all the papers on your desk.
• Do not make a list of all the things you have to get done at work.
• Do not go to IMDB to see who that actor was in that movie you saw the other night. Or what that girl from that show from way back when is doing now.
• Do not start perusing your own bookshelves.
• Do not organize your computer files.

Great post at 43 Folders on how to make your e-mail worthwhile and manageable for the recipients:

Before you type anything into a new message, have explicit answers for two questions:

1. Why am I writing this?
2. What exactly do I want the result of this message to be?

If you can't succinctly state these answers, you might want to hold off on sending your message until you can. People get dozens, hundreds, even thousands of emails each day, so it's only natural for them to gravitate toward the messages that are well thought-out and that clearly respect their time and attention. Careless emails do not invite careful responses.

Think through your email from the recipient's point of view, and make sure you've done everything you can to try and help yourself before contacting someone else. If it's a valuable message, treat it that way, and put in the time to making your words count.

Google is launching Google BlogSearch:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

...via BoingBoing

For example:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones. Of course there is great variation among open and closed office types, but the most extensive research in the area (from Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims) suggests that while most knowledge workers prefer closed offices because they are better able to concentrate, they communicate informally and build trust and social capital more easily in more open office environments (even high-walled cubicles, they say, restrict interpersonal communications). They note: "Our research, done with employees in job functions ranging from software development to marketing and business development, indicates that the more open the 'open' plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process."2 Becker and Sims are undeniably experts on this topic, but I feel that, like many corporate executives, they downplay the need for concentration and quiet when knowledge work is done in office environments.

...via elearningpost

...for 4.1 billion dollars

...via BoingBoing

eBay began as Auction Web ten years ago and was renamed eBay in 1997. Some key milestones:

• Auction Web starts charging users a percentage of the sale fee in February 1996, becoming a real business for the first time. The feedback system, allowing buyers and sellers to rate each other, is introduced
• Monthly revenues reach $10,000 in June 1996, prompting Mr Omidyar to leave his job and run the site full-time
• In 1997, the newly-renamed eBay marks its 1,000,000th sale - a Big Bird toy, based on the Sesame Street TV character
• Meg Whitman joins as chief executive in 1998. Later that year, the company goes public - more than one million people are registered users and 8% of the items on sale are Beanie Babies
• eBay sets up local sites in the UK and Germany in 1999 and overcomes a serious crash that closes the site for 22 hours
• Surviving the dotcom bust, it overtakes Amazon as most visited e-commerce site in 2001 and buys the Paypal online payment service in 2002 - but suffers a setback in Japan, withdrawing from the market after losing out to Yahoo!

Get Real reports that the current rumor is that Technorati will be sold to a 'large search company' in the next week or so.

Uji in Japan is pilot testing RFID tags with information for touristsi:

According to Kyoto Shimbun, the city of Uji in Kyoto prefecture and the city of Hikone in Shiga prefecture will test RFID-based information services for sightseers. RFID tags will be embedded in the environment and sightseers will use mobile phones and PDAs with integrated RFID readers. Delivered to these devices is information about nearby sightseeing spots and stores. Hitachi and KDDI will join this project.

...via Smart Mobs

According to ElectricNews.net, teenagers are starting to spend more of their money on technology and less on clothes:

Mobile phones, MP3 players and hand-held computer devices continue to threaten the traditional hold of the clothing industry on spending in the youth market. Younger consumers are seen as the largest growth segment for the wireless industry based on data supplied by Simmons Market Research Bureau.

Older teenagers are driving an exponential increase in text messaging volumes and Packaged Facts estimates the youth market has a spending power of USD485 billion. "Marketers should note that women in the 15 to 24 age group are more likely to use a computer and more likely to own a mobile phone and use it for text messaging," Don Montuori, Packaged Facts acquisitions editor said.

...via Smart Mobs

Via Shiny Shiny: these dogs will start shaking their heads and singing a few seconds before the phone actually rings. I guess the actual ringing doesn't give you enough prep time before you answer.

Interesting National Geographic article on the things that make Lance Armstrong the winner that he is:

Early in his career Armstrong showed only average muscle efficiency—the percentage of chemical energy that the muscles are able to harness to produce power. Higher muscle efficiency means greater production of power.

From 1992 to 1999, the year of his first Tour de France win, Armstrong was able to increase his muscle efficiency by 8 percent through hard and dedicated training. Coyle says Armstrong is the only human who has been shown to change his muscle efficiency.

News.com has a good article on the interruption environment technology helps us create:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

The result, says Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," is a situation where the digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished.

Also:

The problem appears to be getting worse. A study by Hewlett-Packard earlier this year found that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail--checking messages during meetings, after working hours and on vacation. Half of workers felt a need to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being "happy" to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.

...via Smart Mobs

A Fast Company article on Cirque du Soleil and innovation:

It's this willingness to take creative risk that is Cirque's original genius and the key to its competitive success, says Renee Mauborgne, coauthor of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (Harvard Business School Press, 2005) and professor of strategy and management at INSEAD. Cirque combined the thrill of the circus with the high production values and intellectual sophistication of the theater or ballet to create a new art form and, along with it, a new "blue ocean" market. The company's future, she says, will depend on its ability to sustain that culture of risk taking, particularly as competitors enter the market. "The danger is that when you begin to be imitated, you start entering into red-ocean competition, where your focus is on outcompeting rivals rather than on creating the next blue ocean," says Mauborgne. "Then the competition, and not the marketplace, sets your agenda

...via elearningpost

Great article at T.H.E. Journal Online on the skills that every educator should have today:

1. Word Processing Skills
2. Spreadsheets Skills
3. Database Skills
4. Electronic Presentation Skills
5. Web Navigation Skills
6. Web Site Design Skills
7. E-Mail Management Skills
8. Digital Cameras
9. Computer Network Knowledge Applicable to your School System
10. File Management & Windows Explorer Skills
11. Downloading Software From the Web (Knowledge including eBooks)
12. Installing Computer Software onto a Computer System
13. WebCT or Blackboard Teaching Skills
14. Videoconferencing skills
15. Computer-Related Storage Devices (Knowledge: disks, CDs, USB drives, zip disks, DVDs, etc.)
16. Scanner Knowledge
17. Knowledge of PDAs
18. Deep Web Knowledge
19. Educational Copyright Knowledge
20. Computer Security Knowledge

    ...via The Shifted Librarian

Google Maps Mania reports on how people are using Google Maps' API.

You can:

Find the landmark
Check out injuries from running with the bulls
Recent worldwide earthquakes
...and many more

...via BoingBoing

According to this article, Seattle and San Francisco are the top cities for wireless web access in the US currently.

...via Smart Mobs

Via Smart Mobs--United Airlines will be offering wi-fi on flights:

UNITED Airlines has become the first US carrier to get regulatory approval to offer wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi access, on its airborne domestic flights in the US.

United said the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval for the service to be offered by Verizon Airfone for passenger and crew use of wireless technology.
United and Verizon said that approval was granted after the two companies successfully demonstrated that the usage of the wireless technology known as 802.11 within the cabin does not affect the aircraft's operation.

National Geographic has footage from inside a tornado.

...via BoingBoing

Nichole, Floyd and I--along with Ray Kimsey and Kevin Gamble--gave our talk this morning on Sharing Content Through Syndication. Our talk had been moved several times and attendance was a little disppointing (I think we had six people, including Brian and Beth Raney, who left another session early to be our session host).

We talked about the aggregation system that we developed (Nichole did much of the programming; Ray and Nichole worked on the web services part).

If you want to see the slides, they're here. You may also want to check out the site itself.

And I have now seen the Alamo...

Elaine has blogged the keynote speaker this morning so, you know, I don't have to...

I also went to talks on eXtension, our CMS development process (good talk!), and talked to Blair Fannin about podcasting in Texas.

I have walked most of the Riverwalk, but have not seen the Alamo yet.

I got to San Antonio last night about 9. The ACE/NETC conference is at the Marriott Rivercenter right next to the San Antonio River Walk. I had good flight connections and a trouble free flight (go here to read the adventures of those who traveled by bus.

Today I attended an all day meeting for the eXtension IT Advisory Committee. We discussed history of, future plans, infrastructure and next steps. Earth-shattering decisions were saved for a later meeting. There's a lot of potential for technology and collaboration--I'm looking forward to what we can do with it.

I haven't seen much of San Antonio yet though I did go on the boat ride on the river. It's cold (very, very cold) in the hotel and hot and humid outside. Talks start tomorrow so I'll try to catch up with those, post the slides for our talk on synidcation on Thursday and other updates on the conference (no pictures though unless someone feeds me them from another source--I haven't got a camera or even a camera phone--so behind the times...)

Chicago Crime is using Google maps to pinpoint the location of crimes committed in the city of Chicago.

They also have RSS feeds providing the latest crime information for a particular beat or block.

...via Smart Mobs

There's a Time Traveler Convention at MIT on Saturday. Tell your time traveling friends.

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.

Unfortunately, we of the present (2005) don't have time travel, and so we only have one chance at observing the convention. If the time travelers don't leave us their secrets, we won't be able to go back in time and see our convention in all its glory unless it is publicized in advance.

...via BoingBoing

This year's nominees are now up.

Or, actually MP3 players in general:

• Some 11% of American adults say they own an iPod or other type of MP3 player. That amounts to over 22 million people.
• Men are more likely to have iPods/MP3 players than women. Some 13% of men have the players, compared to 9% of women.
• Minorities are more likely to own iPods/MP3 players than whites. Some 16% of African-Americans and English-speaking Latinos own iPods/MP3 players, compared to 9% of non-Latino whites.
• Almost one in five (19%) of those ages 18-28 have iPods/MP3 players. Fully 14% of those ages 29-40 have them; and 11% of younger Baby Boomers (ages 41-50) have them. That compares to 6% of older Baby Boomers (ages 51-59), 6% of those 60-69 and 1% of those 70 and older.

Also, more than 6 million Americans are listening to podcasts

Standards for online content authors

Style

Be very concise: aim to reduce text by at least 50%
Use plain English.
Frontload headlines, paragraphs, links and lists.
Use short sentences (21 words maximum).
Use short paragraphs (65 words maximum).
Use "you" and "we" whenever appropriate.

...via elearningpost

43Folders offers April Power Hacks!:

• Pencils are a great way to write things down.
• Sharpen new pencils soon after you’ve bought them, so you can use them to write things down more easily.
• Make sure you put gas in your car, or it won’t run very far after you’ve bought it, and then you’ll have trouble getting to work.
• When you get letters from people, you can send a response by using some paper and one of the pencils I mentioned a little earlier. (Just make sure they’re sharpened!)
• If you have a long list of things to do, make sure to do some of them sometimes. Make pencil marks by the ones that are “finished.”
• When people ask you how you’re doing, it’s okay to say “Great! How about you?” They’ll probably have some kind of response, though, so be ready.

Guessing these are 'specially suited to April.

Ben Hammersley says that the new competition for Google turns out to be Yahoo:

Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.

Google's API was also a thing of beauty when it launched. For programmers, the ability to query Google from inside your own programs was immensely useful. And just as Amazon and eBay have done with their APIs, the Google API produced an ecosystem of applications and programming techniques that relied on, and fed, Google's success. It was unique.

But not now. Yahoo's own API is out, and it's better. It has more features, it's more complete, it's technically more elegant, and it's easier to use than Google's alternative. Two-nil to Yahoo.

...via BoingBoing

Cory Doctorow reports on the Life Hacks presentation at O'Reilly's ETech conference:

HACKERS <HEART> PLAIN TEXT

Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain
text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and
extraction, cut and paste. All you need in a filing system.

--

MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN

If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like
mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in
~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share
with others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.

--

SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND
LIKE IT. OH YES.

(don't put this on your car)

Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing
everything -- put it in public and the public organizes it for
you. Put it on a Wiki and others will fix it.

This is just cool

Desktop wallpaper setup to make the screen(s) look transparent.

...via BoingBoing

Mobile PC has a great article (with pictures) outlining the evolution of mobile computing:

1975
IBM 5100 Portable Computer
The first computer with a built-in display, this 50-pound monster was swept under the rug after the PC came out in 1981.

1981
Osborne 1
Adam Osborne's labor of love was an overnight success ... and an overnight failure. Today it is remembered fondly as a pioneer in portability.

1982
GRiD Compass 1100
The first mobile computer with a folding screen, the GRiD Compass was a coveted survivor for more than a decade.

1982
Epson HX-20
The world's first "laptop," designed as a slate with no folding display.

A few months ago, one of our retiring specialists brought back twenty years' worth of luggable, portable, and laptop computers. Looking at the twenty-five plus pound original machines with their two 5.25" floppy drives, I'm guessing we shouldn't complain too much about carrying six and eight pound computers around.

Yahoo! is buying Flickr:

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

Woohoo! What does this mean? It means that we'll no longer have to draw straws to see who gets paid, schedule conjugal visits between trips to the colo....wait! That's not what you want to know. This is what you want to know:

What is going to happen to Flickr?

Flickr will be continuing on the path it's on -- to Flickr 1.0 and beyond. We'll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We're going to grow and change, but we're in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team.

Column Two has an article on things to do with online staff directories:

• Include more than just phone numbers
• Provide an effective quick search
• Deliver a dynamic organisational chart
• Provide self-service capability
• Usability test the staff directory
• Ensure the staff directory can be printed
• Include all staff
• Provide extensive cross-linking

...via elearningpost

There's much ongoing discussion on the new Google Toolbar Autolink feature. Cory Doctorow on Boingboing summarizes some of his reasons for thinking it's a good thing and points to other posts, both pro and con.

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

...via The Obvious?

Mind Hacks points us to the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

...from Groupware Bad by Jamie Zawinski

Google now has a map feature.

Cutting Through points to Beyond bullets, which talks about research by Virginie Van Wassenhove, concerning the importance of visual communication:

In an age of online this and virtual that, it's nice to hear a little news about the value of a face-to-face. What about webcasting you say? According to Virginie,

"If visual movements lag (instead of naturally preceding) the auditory signal by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds, the benefit of having visual speech is already diminished."

The average webcam hasn't quite reduced lag by that much, so while you're waiting for technology to catch up, the next time you have a face-to-face, pay attention to the visual speech you see, and how much it contributes to the auditory speech you hear. You just might find that you can understand quite a bit by reading someone's lips, not to mention the rest of their face.

Norm Carr and Tim Meehan talk aboutusing 'use cases', which look at actors (those who will use a site) and their goals, to help deliver a website:

The crucial benefit of use cases is the way they encourage a directed method of considering project requirements. From the very beginning, we are designing a product by concentrating upon the needs and wants of those who will use it.

...via elearningpost

The Shifted Librarian quotes from a New Yorker essay, The 1992 house:

I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry….

Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’ in the library – on videotape. I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called ‘notes’ and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught….

Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah, has some words of wisdom for those who want to reorganize IT.

I don't agree with him on everything--or, more precisely, probably, everything doesn't apply necessarily to all organizations, but it's interesting stuff:

While I think there’s some merit to reorganizing State IT functions, there is much that could go wrong here. There are a 1000 ways to do this wrong and only a few that will ultimately work.

Danah Boyd writes about the pleasure of browsing paper course catalogs and some of the ways digital catalogs don't measure up.

GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz, is blogging, too:

What would you do if you had a brand whose customer service reputation was that high for that long despite having a narrow, aging product lineup? I, for one, would first get down on my knees and thank the Maker for the finest retail network in the industry. Then, I would set to work replenishing the product portfolio.

That’s exactly what we’re doing with Saturn. And that’s precisely why my hopes for the brand are so high. We won’t let the brand fall victim to the tyranny of the “or.” It’s not a case of having a great retail and customer care program or having great products. It’s possible to have both, and we plan to do so. Finally.

An interesting article about a project to bring affordable broadband to a province in India:

According to Ajay Sahni, joint secretary, IT department, the Aksh consortium will also utilise the existing optic fibre lines of companies like Tata Teleservices before establishing its own optic fibre network across the state. Among other customers, the proposed broadband network will provide broadband services to 40,000 government offices across the state. This will enable the government departments to deliver various citizen services through eSeva centres, Rajiv Internet Village Kiosks and web-based online services. The network will also enable the rural folk to access video-conferencing, internet surfing among other facilities.

...via BoingBoing

Ron Avitzur explains how the Graphing Calculator came to be:

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

A weblog set up to collect information about relief efforts.

...via BoingBoing

Joe Gandelman gathers blogger accounts of the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean coastlines:

2004 decided not to go quietly today when the biggest earthquake in 40 years struck deep in the Indian Ocean, triggering massive tsunamis -- wiping out Asian coastal areas and instantly drowning and killing more than 12,000 people.

In a grim reminder that the well-laid plans of holiday goers, governments and politicians hinge on a higher power, the earthquake -- an estimated 9 point magnitude -- struck quickly and without mercy, decimating coastal areas some 1,000 miles away in a record-setting catastrophe. Far away, yet even with newspaper accounts the Internet made it seem MUCH closer...because some local weblogs instantaneously started telling bits of the horrific story...

...via blogdex

Science News has compiled their list of Science News of the Year 2004 including:

Hot stuff An Israeli site yielded the oldest evidence of the controlled use of fire in Asia or Europe, from around 750,000 years ago (May 1, 165: 276*).

Human origins A skull found in a Romanian cave boosted the controversial theory that Neandertals interbred frequently with people (May 22, 165: 328*). Other evidence indicated minimal or no genetic contact between Neandertals and ancient people (March 20, 165: 181), and Stone Age Homo sapiens may have had better memories than Neandertals did (Sept. 18, 166: 183).

Sleep on it Sleep showed signs of improving memories and problem solving (Jan. 24, 165: 53*). Scientists linked an inner-brain structure to the enhancement of spatial memories during sleep (Nov. 6, 166: 294).

Bad traffic Spending time in traffic dramatically increases a person's short-term risk of heart attack, a study found (Nov. 13, 166: 316), and diesel fumes suppressed immunity in rodents (March 13, 165: 174).

D'lightful Benefits linked to vitamin D were extended to anticancer effects, muscle preservation, diabetes prevention, and mitigation of autoimmune diseases (Jan. 31, 165: 77; Oct. 9, 166: 232*, Oct. 16, 166: 248*).

...via BoingBoing

Bruce Sterling gives a Felix Burda Memorial Lecture on 'Shaping Things to Come'.

He begins by discussing six major trends in technology:

1. Interactive chips which provide identity
2. Global Positioning Systems
3. Search engines
4. 3D virtual models
5. Rapid prototyping
6. cradle to cradle recycling

Betsy Devine tells everyone what happens when your husband wins the Nobel prize for physics:

Nobel Prize and math

There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics*--but there's lots of math involved in Nobel Prizes.

Word problems....

1. If 7 of us fly to Stockholm on the redeye, plot our best distribution onto airplane seats, bearing in mind that Amity's husband Colin has very long legs and neither of Frank's parents should have to sit immobilized for too long.
2. Which will be harder and take more time: to find the required white-tie-and-tails Nobel outfit in Boston and lug it to Stockholm, or to figure our how to take 8 different measurements of my husband and then convert them all into metric so that someone in Stockholm can rent the outfit for him?
3. Rank these four events in order of probabability: Lightning will strike Mel Gibson, Lightning will strike Mel Brooks, Betsy Devine will have triplets nine months from now, Frank Wilczek will need to wear white-tie-and-tails to some event unrelated to Nobel Prizes.

Show all calculations, and remember, neatness counts.

...via Jim Moore's Journal

Check out Google Suggest, which guesses at what you're typing, makes real-time suggestions including how many matching items.

...via Dan Gillmor and The Shifted Librarian

Wired offers their guide to cool tools for 2004

Mark Hurst at Good Experience provides a gift guide for parents of geeks.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book on a blog--that is, the writing project is on a blog and it's about (proposal stage currently) blogging in corporations.

• Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
• Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
• Over 30 clusters
• 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
• One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue
• Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
• An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
• No complete system failure since February 2000

...from an article at ZDnet on Google and how it all works.

...via JoHo the Blog

The City of Philadelphia has signed an agreement with Verizon to provide wireless internet access for the city:

The city of Philadelphia and Verizon Communications Inc. struck an agreement Tuesday that would allow the city to provide wireless Internet access as a municipal service even though Gov. Ed Rendell signed legislation giving Verizon the power to scuttle the project.

Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents.

This is an exception to the new law that's passed in PA which says that cities can't offer municipal wireless for a fee without the permission of their local phone company.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says:

Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."

From the RSS in Government blog comes news that the National Hurricane Center is offering RSS feeds on tropical storm maps and forecasts

Another article, this one at Red Herring, on IM in the workplace:

A recent report by Pew Internet and American Life Project showed that 11 million people use an IM service at work, and 53 million have used it at home or in the office. But those numbers have yet to translate into a lucrative market. By the end of this year, IM conversations will generate $131 million in revenues. But by 2008, that figure is predicted to jump to $413 million, according to the Radicati Group, a technology market research company in Palo Alto, California.

I've been on vacation for the last two weeks. Had a lovely time.

Things should be getting back to regular updates real soon now...

Amy Gahran at Contentious suggests that proper grammar and punctuation on the web is evolving:

These considerations can help guide grammar and punctuation choices in your online writing:

It's not print. Most formal rules of English grammar and punctuation were developed to suit written (printed) communication, and they still work very well in that environment. However, print is only one medium -- and in coming decades it may cease to be the most common communication channel in many geographic regions or sectors of society.

It's a challenging visual environment. Text and images (both visual vehicles) are the primary ways to transmit messages via computer. Unfortunately, today's computer screens remain a more difficult physical environment for reading, thanks to lower resolution, flicker, lighting, etc.

Small punctuation gets lost. Look at your keyboard -- the most commonly used English punctuation marks are small. In print, punctuation marks serve to enhance the perceived flow of words. However, on a computer screen commas, periods, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, and many other common punctuation marks are simply hard to see. Therefore, less punctuation and bigger punctuation marks are usually more effective in online content. This is why the em-dash (a long hyphen: --) tends to be used more liberally online than in print. SimSimilarly, semicolons (;) tend to be used sparingly in web content – they’re too visually innocuous to play the key structural role that they often do in print.

...via elearningpost

Yesterday, Floyd and I gave our presentation on Extending Information Services through Syndication at the NETC conference. After that, we were on the road all day driving back to Iowa and this is the first chance I've had to blog the presenation and put our Powerpoint slides online.

If you're interested in the slides, you can find them here.

Basically, we talked about syndication (specifically RSS, Atom and Web services that use RSS feeds to exchange information automatically) and how people in extension can use it to extend their information services. We talked syndication from two perspectives--as a tool for finding information and as a tool for distributing information.

Many syndication tools are freeware, free online services, or inexpensive shareware. So, syndication is something that can provide a high impact on content availability at a low cost.

More information can be found at the ACE2004 weblog that I did with Ray Kimsey and Blair Fannin. It's got lots of links to aggregators and articles and other resources.

We had good attendance, lots of good questions and could have spent more time on what other people are doing with syndication too.

From the NETC conference, Floyd Davenport and Dan Cotton are presenting through Breeze to the Iowa State University Extension Annual Conference. The setup is on one computer and then they're connecting via another computer.

It's a demo of Breeze and a discussion of e-Extension.

We're connecting from the Stewart Center at Purdue to the Scheman Center at ISU. Floyd is talking about the technology of Breeze Live. We're just beginning to use this technology at Iowa and plan to use it for online collaborations, program delivery and both live and recorded presentations. The biggest issue that we've had with Breeze Live and are still learning to work with is the lag in video and audio. This lag goes up and down so that sometimes the talking isn't completely related to the video. Breeze Live does allow freezing the video, which sometimes works better (plus cutting down on bandwidth).

Floyd is demo-ing the pieces of Breeze including uploading content, videos, Powerpoint presentations, polling, chat, documents, etc.

Dan is going to be talking about e-Extension, a variation on his keynote talk yesterday. Today's talk for ISU's Annual Conference will be geared less toward the tech side that appeals to the NETC audience and more toward Extension in general. And Dan's talking now...

We've switched to slides/audio only for this portion of the session which eliminates such things as--is he looking at the camera, is the voice and video synced, etc. And it makes the slides larger on the remote screens.

I'm not going to repeat the e-Extension talk here. But I will see if there are any questions and report on those when we get to them...

Questions--

(comment) people would have liked to see a video with the slides (we went to slides only during the presentation (video can be distracting...but no video can be boring...)

(question) can I use Breeze with stuff you don't support (yes, but , remember, if it's stuff we don't support, we don't support it)

(question) can our clients download stuff to use it (there's nothing to download--they just need to know the link to get to it)

(question) ok, missed this one, but the answer has to do with how much bandwidth you need

(question) talk about how to set up a conference--how can people who aren't extension use the system. (deb hopes we're not just going to turn people (non-extension people, that is) loose on it (yikes!) Floyd says we will get accounts for Extension staff and then they can deliver it to their clients, provide information on how to access, etc.)

(question) ok, missed this one too. Something about who gets to be a presenter.

And the presentation is over (or nearly).

I like this live-blogging, kind of fun...

So, I’m at NETC and if I were a good blogger, I’d have been carrying my laptop to all the sessions and blogging live (there’s wireless and everything). But I am far from the perfect blogger and although I can and do take lots of notes during presentations (mostly questions that occur to me but may or may not have anything to do with the talk at hand) I rarely am able to write my conclusions until I have time to walk away and think about what was said, what notes/questions I’ve written down and how it all works together. Sometimes, unfortunately, I never have time to do formulate conclusions or write them down. Sometimes, I suspect, that’s why bloggers live-blog--write it down and move on--leave it to others to do with it as they will.

But, back to the subject at hand, the keynote speaker for today’s (now yesterday, actually, when this is posted) session of NETC was Dan Cotton who is the new director of e-extension. E-extension is a concept that’s been under discussion for several years, a tool that will help make Extension’s expertise and services available to new audiences in ways that are convenient, immediate, and accessible. It’s a concept that’s been much discussed and much planned and yet, in the way of new electronic things, is still very much an amorphous, not-really-sure-yet-what-it-is thing (and, to be honest, I think that’s its best feature at present).

It’s good stuff and it’s cool that it’s happening and in a time of difficult budget issues, it’s a big commitment by extension to fund e-extension. In addition to Dan Cotton as the new director, Kevin Gamble will be the Associate Director for Information Technology, Carla Craycraft and Craig Wood will be Associate Directors for Content. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what Dan said. If you want to know more details visit the website. From here on in this post, I’m going to talk about stuff I’d like to see in addition to what’s generally talked about in the context of e-Extension.

Three things I’d like to see:

• A blog for anyone in extension who wants one
• Emergent capability (never forget this: on the internet what gets used is more important that what’s excellent; or, looked at another way--what gets used determines what's excellent)
• Online dialogues on controversial research topics (extension as facilitators for dialogues about things that affect people’s lives)

There should be as little governing policy as necessary to do the job (look at Harvard, University of Minnesota Libraries, Sun Microsystems, and Robert Scoble's Corporate Weblog Manifesto

‘Seeking information’ is only a small part of what people are doing online. We cannot be successful simply as a dispenser of information. Or, more accurately, we can be successful if we put a lot of effort into it and do it very, very well, but we will not be astonishing. I want to be astonishing.

We will also be much more successful if we expand our vision beyond what people will receive from us--we must be ready to receive knowledge from them as well. The web is a conversation. e-Extension is our opportunity to embrace that conversation. Dan Gillmor (We the Media) says that the thing it pays for him to know as a journalist--to embrace, really--is that his readers know more than he does. We need to embrace this too. We may have many experts, but if we look at all of Extension’s clientele and at everything they bring to the table, collectively they will always know more than we do. And that’s a good thing.

One reason this is so important is that we don’t know what the next great important thing is that Extension can do for people or that people can do for us. No one knows. Being open, flexible, self-organizing, and emergent will make it less necessary for us to know upfront what the next great thing is--we can’t know anyway; no one knows until it’s there--so our best shot at being successful will be to put in place systems that give us room to try things and see what happens.

It’s about the contact, the conversation, and the community as much (or more) than the content. It is also about putting things out there, encouraging energy, taking risks and seeing what will happen. People won't come to us because we're never wrong, never untidy, and never less than our best. They'll come because they trust us. And they will trust us because they know us, because we're there with things they want when they want them, and because we're engaged in conversation with them everyday.

Dan said today that he wants e-Extension to be a remarkable thing. I want it to be more than that, I want it to be a place where remarkable things happen.

===

This is not at all as coherent as I would like it to be and it definitely doesn't include everything I wanted to say (for one thing I want to go on a bit about communities of practice at some later point) but I’ll leave it here for now.

I'm in West Lafayette, IN at the NETC 2004 conference. We're staying at The Union Club Hotel on the Purdue University campus. Today is pre-conference stuff (registration, tours, and kickoff panels). Tomorrow the bulk of the conference starts. Our talk is on Wednesday (which I think I mentioned before, but I'm too lazy to go back and check).

The Shifted Librarian talks about instant messaging's broader social implications for libraries:

Which, of course, is where libraries come in. Back in the 1990s, libraries debated whether email was a valid use of public computers, and now we're having that same discussion about instant messaging.

And you know what? The answer is the same - patrons using the internet to communicate, connect, exchange information, or just plain chat is indeed a valid use of public terminals. We have to get over this issue now because when we don't let them IM in the library, we're telling them that we don't value their preferred method of communication, whether it's with their friends or with librarians. We're telling them that the library is not a place for instant messaging, so go somewhere else to do it.

Except that they are going to go somewhere else and do it (at least, those that can), and they're not going to come back and they're not going to think of the library when they think of instant messaging. Would your library find that attitude acceptable if we replace "IM" with "email?" How about if we replace "IM" with "telephone?"

I quote the whole long piece above because I don't just think it's applicable to IM and libraries but to where people get their information, who they talk to, who they trust and who they want to bring education and services to their communities. It applies to Extension and to universities. We need to continue to think about weblogs and RSS and IM and email and other ways of distributing information and, most importantly, of having conversations with people. If we don't continue to adopt new methods, even ones we're not completely comfortable with, people will go elsewhere to get the information they want and the expertise, learning, and personal and community development they're seeking.

You know those pictures where the eyes seem to follow you around the room?

Well, it seems research has revealed why that happens:

“The core idea is simple: no matter what angle you look at a painting from, the painting itself doesn’t change. You’re looking at a flat surface. The pattern of light and dark remains the same,” Todd said.

“We found that our visual perception of a picture also remains largely unchanged as we look at it from different vantage points. If a person in a painting is looking straight out, it will always appear that way, regardless of the angle at which it is viewed.”

It was probably cooler when we just thought it was magic...

I keep sticking things in here in draft format that I want to post or comment on or do something with, but I've been too busy to actually get them published. But I haven't disappeared and I'll get caught up soon....

There's a geek truth that says something along the lines--all applications expand until they include email. The non-geek corollary is that everything you do/receive/respond to on the computer should be able to be accessed through email because that's the first program you fire up in the morning and the last one you shut down at night.

So, it's not at all a surprise that everybody gets way too much stuff in email, that they have trouble keeping track of it, and that people who have no business doing so, spend way too much time sending us things we never asked for and don't want.

Phil Windley says that, really, we need a bunch of other better stuff:

I've been thinking since I got home from a ten day vacation and had to process 2100 email messages about how much of my life is lived in my inbox. Of the 2100, almost 1700 of them were Spam and I'm not too concerned about those. SpamAssassin did a pretty good job and I have a feeling it or other technologies will eventually solve the Spam problem. What interests me are the 400 messages that were not Spam. At least 75% of those were messages that didn't really require my attention or could safely be ignored. Even of the remaining 100, many of them were more about coordination than real information. This has got me asking "what would it take to eliminate email from my life completely?"

I am a huge RSS fan--all those websites I used to click around to all the time--especially the ones that don't get updated very often, now come to me instead. I'm always looking for more information to flow to me via RSS. I've also reacehd a point where I lose stuff in email either because it's been mislabeled as spam or it scrolls off my screen or it gets lost in the incoming flood. So, I think Windley's new apps couple with dashboard idea is potentially pretty nifty:

One problem with moving from a single general purpose tool like email to multiple special purposes tools is split focus. To understand what I mean, think about RSS. RSS has reduced the number of mailing lists I subscribe to and consequently reduced my email traffic. Perfect application, except that now I have to remember to fire up my feed reader in addition to my mail client. I generally treat it as lower priority and so I'm reluctant to get high-priority information delivered by RSS. What happens when there are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just a linear email list?

I think the answer to this problem lies in creating a task dashboard and having the various applications, including email, post control messages to the dashboard so that I have a single place to manage the various messages that are coming to me, albeit outside email. I'm envisioning something more flexible that a simple dashboard. I want a rule engine, easy graphics, templates, and so on so that I can customize it to the way I want to work. There's lots to think about here.

On the other hand, one of the primary reasons people lose focus, don't respond, or overload is because there is too much stuff. Organizing stuff better doesn't actually eliminate this part of the problem. We have too much information coming at us, most of us are too busy, and we've created a 24/7 response expectation whether something requires that kind of response time or not (you didn't read your email yet? I sent it to you on Sunday?) Having too much stuff that's really, really organized doesn't eliminate the 'too much stuff' part of the equation. The more I work, the more I see that productivity and creativity would be improved exponentially by insisting that everyone walk away from the computer for at least a ten day to two week stretch once a year.

Yahoo News reports thatthe city of Philadelphia is considering offering free wireless:

For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.

The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city — probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers.

Once complete, the network would deliver broadband Internet almost anywhere radio waves can travel — including poor neighborhoods where high-speed Internet access is now rare.

...via BoingBoing

Jakob Neilsen talks about Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design:

Behind a website's superficial appearance lies its fundamental understanding of user behavior in an interactive service. Choices such as whether the "buy" button is red or orange or whether the navigation menu runs across the top or down the left side are much debated, but make at most a few percent difference in usability. In contrast, the design ideology can make or break a site.

...via elearningpost

Here's something from Common Craft on why a weblog is not a message board:

Perhaps the most compelling difference in weblogs and message boards is the locus of control. Weblogs are individual or small group resources- the control of content and value is driven by a single person or small group. Message Boards are group resources- the control of content and value is shared equally across all users.

...via elearningpost

Feedster has an Olympic blogger aggregator

Yeah, I'm kind of late on this since the Olympics has been going on for awhile. What can I say, I'm slow....

...via blogcount

Dan Bricklin has a good piece on What we learn from the Convention blogging:

The Convention brings in a new element. There are 15,000 paid professionals covering the event. There are live and edited TV feeds produced by thousands more. These full-time people had time to prepare. They are used to covering such events -- that's what they do for a living year after year. What should the role of the blogger be? Their readers may or may not have seen any of those other reports. How do you integrate that in?

Bloggers who are used to commenting on a day-by-day world, thrust into covering a huge event, need to adjust. Unlike a normal conference or family event, with a single speaker, a single party, and a single hall to schmooze in, a convention has high-power meetings everywhere, media extravaganza presentations with waving signs, and thousands of interesting participants including some you only see on tabloid covers or the evening news and many, many others whose personal stories are gems. And it's something new for almost all of the bloggers.

I've been following some of the blogs from the convention and have some thoughts myself which I may expand on later, particularly on what we get from reading weblogs that's different than what we get from the traditional media. Bricklin said that one of the things that distinguished bloggers from print media was emotion. Bloggers aren't objective; they don't claim to be. Bloggers provide both a camera-eye and a tight-third POV and it's usually easy to tell them apart. Corporate spin and cynicism and 'just another event' aren't yet big factors for bloggers (and, one hopes, they won't ever be because when they are, it won't be blogging anymore).

Jeff Jarvis posts some thoughts about how a programmer's society would differ from a lawyer's society:

Lawyers are necessarily a suspicious breed. They live by rules. They think in terms of us vs. them. They think contention. They argue for sport. They always think they can appeal to a higher authority. They aim for victory. They are patient.

All those traits have an impact on American society -- many or most of them not good. The fact that lawyers run government is at the root of many of government's problems: Government has become all about arguing, little about serving.

But now imagine if former programmers start rising to the heights of American business and government and cultural life.

Programmers are logical. They believe in cause and effect. They believe any problem can be solved if you just find the cause. When they do battle, it's with a mistake, not a person. They live in the details. They believe in openness and transparency. They also believe in following rules but the rules of reality -- what a machine can and can't do -- over the rules man made up. They believe in planning. They, too, are patient. What else?

Interesting followup comments from Ernest Miller at The Importance of... and Rick Klau at tins (quoted below):

For me, it’s all about transparency. If Jeff’s right (and I’d like to think he is), then the biggest difference will be a shift from the old-boy’s guild that the legal profession maintains to the open source model that encourages disclosure, rewards iteration, and hides nothing.

Privacy is one of the biggest issues in making the web as interconnected as we hope someday that it will be--and in particular, privacy that is under the user’s control. In face-to-face interactions even people who know our names don’t know all of us. I present a different ‘face’ to my boss than to my mother. The people I go tracking with on Sunday mornings know different things about me than the writer’s group I meet with on Sunday nights. The internet, which has the potential to interconnect everything, to remember everything and to make it searchable can reveal parts of me that I would prefer not be revealed. Things that are not private, but are not public either. Things that for most people could be filed under--none of your business. The different facets of our persona is ours to reveal or conceal as we wish; it shouldn’t be constructed by web spiders with equal emphasis on one-time rants and lifetime dedications.

And yet, reputation systems are becoming increasingly important as ways to help people cut through information clutter, to provide ranking mechanisms for goods and services and for other uses that we haven’t realized yet. At Many to Many, Clay Shirky points to a post by Ben Hyde on an anonymous reputation system that relies on group recommendations:

Let's say I have an excellent reputation in some community. I request that community write me a letter of introduction to the anonymous community. This letter says nothing more than the bearer of this letter is a good guy. I take the note to the anonymous community and they provide me with an reputation/identity that I can use to on anonymous actions. Recipients of those actions can then check that anonymous reputation. If I act badly in that persona then they place bad marks on the anonymous reputation; but it these do not go back to my original reputation - there is no back pointer. The only back pointer available is the link to the original community. I have damaged the reputation of my home community, and only that.

It's an interesting cryptographic design problem. Could we design a system where sufficiently bad actions on the part of the anonymous actor can be feed back to his original persona but that does not require that we trust the anonymous reputation communities to guard his privacy otherwise.

For discussion of persistent identity and privacy, see this post from last year on the Augmented Social Network.

At Many-to-Many, Liz Lawley points to an online journal, Into the Blogosphere, with a wealth of academic articles on weblogs and the nature of the blogging community.

Articles include:

• Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project
• Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere
• Weblogs and the Public Sphere

And, BTW, the University of Minnesota offers weblogs to any faculty, staff, or student who wants one through UThink, University of Minnesota libraries project:

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community.

An interesting article on situational control and design.

[Been out of the office and upgrades have been performed, including moving Movable Type to a new server. But I haven't forgotten that I still have three more reasons to talk about]

We like to talk about young people online, but some of those 'young people' have been online for twenty-five years, starting with FidoNet and BITNET and others. They represent people our Extension mission tells us we want to reach--lifelong learners, community participants, those who can't get out, and those who live in places there is no 'out' to get to.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life report on America's Online Pursuits (pdf):

• 63% of adult Americans use the internet
• More than 8 out of 10 Internet users have searched the web for answers to specific questions
• Over half of all Internet users have done research for school or training online

In the talk I mentioned previously about characterizing an online audience, the presenters indicated that 75% of the people who asked questions on the web and responded to their followup survey were new to Oregon State Extension.

In Counting on the Internet (pdf), another Pew Intenet & American Life project report, the principal authors claim three important conclusions:

• most people expect to find key information online
  
• most do find the information they seek online
  
• many people now turn to the internet first when seeking information

The Internet can't be our only tool. Weblogs can't be our only tool on the Internet. But weblogs can provide fresh content that people want, can help build communities of experts and trusted others, and can bring new voices and participants to the table. People can't find us if we aren't visible in the places they look. Organizational web pages are critical to this effort--they provide stability, high production values, and clarity. In addition to these organizational webpages, blogs can ialso ncrease our visibility to online audiences (given, for example, the other reasons I've been talking about) in ways that organizational web pages don't.

I've mentioned this fairly frequently, but The Cluetrain Manifesto said it first--markets are conversations.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

Or, in broader online terms--the web is a conversation. Sure, e-commerce makes things convenient and quick and available. But the 'energy' applications (those things that people contribute their energy to rather than demanding energy from) on the web are centered around interaction. Most of the most successful e-commerce operations (Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo) promote conversation and community.

At the ACE conference last week, I attended a session on characterizing an online audience. The presenters, who were from Oregon State, said that with the deployment of their new website, they began to get questions to the web master about any and all subjects--farming and dog training and wild animals in suburbia--that were covered somewhere on their website. Why? Why didn't people just go to the web pages and get the information?

Because people want conversation.

Or, as the presenters at the conference said, because they want contact. They want an interaction--to build relationships, to process information, to learn, and to build both their own capacity and the capacity of the organization they're interacting with.

Weblogs are generally conversational in tone, provide links to other experts, provide space for comments, and have some capacity for trackbacks (conversations and connections that spread across several web sites). Weblogs can update information quickly, respond to comments as they come, and even to lurkers, they can give the flavor of an ongoing, interested and enthusiastic conversation about things of interest to the people who visit. Weblogs, even group weblogs, can easily make it clear that there are real people with real ideas, opinions and conversational styles behind the large organizational website.

It's been common knowledge among bloggers for awhile that blog posts will generally rank high on Google in any particular topic area. And it's generally acknowledged by most everyone that if you want to be seen online, you want to be seen on Google.

What makes blog posts so attractive to the Google search engine? Several things, which are laid out well in this Microcontent article from way back in 2002: Google Loves Weblogs: How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches a Week

According to the article there are two primary reasons that Google loves weblogs:

1. Google loves links
2. Google loves fresh content

Weblogs are an interesting combination of freshness and persistance. The 'front page' of a weblog changes everyday as new information is added, but the automatic archives provided by most weblog software ensures that earlier posts persist. In many ways this is ideal for a search engine--fresh content and links that don't rot.

At the ACE conference I attended last week, it occurred to me that I didn't hear people talk about Google page rank as a marketing tool (there may have been talk, but I didn't hear it). And I think Google page rank is important. Not to the point of obsession, but if we want Extension to be the 'go to' place for educational content and information on certain topics, they we have to be the 'find it' place when people go searching for that educational content and information.

If you think maybe this isn't a good enough reason for weblogs in Extension all on its own. That's okay. I have 4 more reasons to offer over the next couple of days....

My commentary for the June, 2004 issue of the Journal of Extension, Weblogs as a Disruptive Technology for Extension, is now online. Check it out:

Weblogs are everywhere. Technorati watches over 1.2 million weblogs every day. Blogcount estimates 2.4 to 2.9 million currently active weblogs. Weblogs influence journalism, technology transfer, knowledge filtering, research, and business-to-customer communication. In the fashion of disruptive technologies, weblogs underperform by traditional measures, but they also create brand-new possibilities and eventually change the measures entirely.

Here's a link to a new tool called Amplify, which looks like it provides a way for you to create custom 'favorites' pages for yourself or to share with others.

At Digital Web Magazine, Didier Hilhorst talks about the Apples and Oranges of user research and design.

User research--such as usability testing--is, without a doubt, imperative, but it certainly isn' design. It identifies problems, but doesn't, except maybe at the most detailed level, suggest adequate solutions. Designers have to visualize and refine broad and detailed solutions, while user researchers supposedly extract facts from identified situations. The two fields quarrel when, rather than representing or reporting facts, user researchers put forward solutions.

...

Designers have to deal with an assortment of constraints, such as what the technology will allow or the time frame in which they receive information. Similarly, user researchers may be aware of the role of design, but in effect fail to understand the constraints designers have to work with. Therefore the problem seems to be of a structural nature, rather than rooted exclusively in stubbornness or disrespect.

One way for me (neither a designer nor a user researcher) to relate to this is through short story writing. I write a story, polish it and make it shine (so I hope). I give it to a group of intelligent readers who will give me feedback. They can identify places in the story that they had problems (didn't convince me, hated this character, have no idea what's going on here) and they can even suggest solutions, but the 'real' solution to the issues they uncover must be mine. Like the designers, I know the constraints I'm dealing with and ultimately what I'm trying to do.

...there is sometimes an absence of, or limited attention to, design in the early stages of the process. Let me say this loud and clear: design is not optional. Design is not simply retro-fitting elements of style and aesthetics. More often than not design seems to be closer to reverse engineering than actually being an integral part of the process. Failing to acknowledge design in early stages is not taking your product, customers or business seriously.

Related to the quote above, one thing that's puzzled me for years is how songwriting teams work. I can't imagine, though I've tried, how the words and the music can be separated such that one person can write the words and one the tune. To me, they can't exist, one without the other. And yet they do. Creating songs and words is an intricate collaborative project which requires communication and trust. It's most successful when tune is not privileged over words and vice versa. In the same way, even though user research seems safely 'objective' and therefore easier to elevate to a position of greater importance, design can't be neglected or tacked on later. The result is stronger when it is integral to usability, content, and focus.

I'm on two panels, along with Blair Fannin from Texas A&M and Ray Kimsey from NCSU, about RSS at the ACE 2004 conference in Lake Tahoe, NV. ACE is the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Lfe and Human Sciences. The panels will discuss what RSS is, how it's used, what RSS can do for content providers, and how to create RSS feeds for your content.

I've set up a weblog for the panel to plan the presentation and to post references and links. Matt Heerema did the design work, which is awesome!

I'll be posting my part of the presentation and, I hope, links to the rest once they're done.

So you've got your aggregator and you're getting news and blog updates and other cool stuff delivered right to your desktop and you can't help but wonder...what else can I do?

The Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine, points out sites that are delivering books via RSS, a page or a few pages a day.

You can get Samuel Pepy's diary, the notebooks of Leonardo daVinci, and now (or starting on June 16th if you want to celebrate the 100th anniversary) James Joyce's Ulysses.

Fast Company says design matters.

Why?
Design is about emotion, the first visceral impact of a new product. Good design tells you what a product is, what it stands for and why you want it.

So who are the Masters of Design?
Fast Company lists 20 people they consider tops in the field, dividing the group into Peak Performers, Impact Players, Game Changers, Collaborators, and Next Generation.

The Masters, in turn, provide five lessons or ideas for incorporating design principles:

1. Design is the differentiator
2. Those who write the rules, rule
3. Confront the unfamiliar
4. Make it real
5. Get emotional

From CIO Magazine and article by Jerry Gregoire on The Vanishing IT Department:

There are three immutable and unpleasant truths about information technology staffing and retention that make outsourcing the dodge of choice for the incompetent and lazy: 1. Turnover is expensive; 2. Retention rate is the most accurate indicator of leadership quality; and 3. Recruiting is the hardest job an IT manager has.

It is far easier to "order" a programmer, as one might order in a pizza so as not to have to cook, than to sell someone on joining the organization. We pay dearly for outsourcers and consultants that arrest the development of our organizations' internal capabilities and cause us to place the future well-being of our company in the hands of people who have no emotional stake or connection to our business.

So, what kind of IT organization do you aspire to have? If you yearn for adequate results on vanilla systems in pursuit of dial-tone regularity, forget about talent shortages and go find yourself a good contract lawyer. If, on the other hand, you still believe IT can make a competitive difference and that even the more mundane tasks can be a channel of competitive advantage given a little creative effort, then developing and retaining a professional organization should be your number-one goal. If it is, I thank you and wish you the very best.

...and even sometimes when it doesn't.

Wired News has an article on Phishers:

Phishing scams use phony e-mail messages and fraudulent websites -- phishers like to pose as PayPal, a favorite tool of eBay customers, for example -- to dupe people into divulging personal financial data, especially credit card info.

According to a Gartner report published in mid-May, there have been 1.8 million reported scams in the United States. Over half resulted in the fraudulent use of credit cards or other financial data. More than 57 million Americans have received phishing e-mails, and phishing has accounted for $1.2 billion annually in credit card scams, according to the Gartner report.

...via cyfernet_technology

Tame the Web: Technology and Libraries offers Ten Tips for Technology Trainers in the Trenches including:

• Be prepared
• Know your audience
• Don't miss a chance to show off new technologies

Movable Type's recent announcements have created much interest in other blogging software. Here's a Blog Software Breakdown from Asymptomatic.

The table includes software that's user/server installed and not services or service/software combos like Blogger and Radio Userland.

OS News has an interesting piece on why, with all the Sassers and Netsky's and other Windows security issues more companies don't just go with Apple:

This isn't the first time that those widely-publicized Windows security issues have bitten this company. When you think of both man-hours trying to fix the problem, and the combined loss of productivity in a company this size, the cost must be amazing. So the question must be asked: how can this company -- indeed, any large corporation -- rationally choose to support a Windows infrastructure?

The answer is complicated, and has as much to do with inertia, ignorance and comfort level as it does with dollars and cents.

Among the reasons cited: Enterprise IT hates surprises, Apple doesn't have a dedicated enterprise IT sales force, enterprise IT wants solutions not 'stuff.'

Learning Lab Denmark has created Hazardcards a learning game that looks at the outcomes of technological disasters.

Learning Labs Denmark is a research organization interested in learning, competence and knowledge building. Looks like they have other interesting projects too, but the site is kind of slow so I'll have to go back another time and browse.

The Webby Awards: 2004 Nominees & Winners are available. As always, it's a nifty look at what people are doing on the web in a variety of categories.

Strategy+Business relates the 10 principles for chanage mangement. Most important is to remember that not just processes, but people have to change. Everyone needs to be involved, needs to understand the changes, and needs to 'belong' to the process if the change is to be real and lasting:

Most leaders contemplating change know that people matter. It is all too tempting, however, to dwell on the plans and processes, which don’t talk back and don’t respond emotionally, rather than face up to the more difficult and more critical human issues. But mastering the “soft” side of change management needn’t be a mystery.

...via elearningpost

JD Lasica has written a book called Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television which he is now inviting others to help him edit online via a Darknet wiki and a Darknet blog:

I'm nearly done writing it, so we're at the stage where it's time to bring in "the former audience," as Dan Gillmor puts it, and invite the blogosphere to participate in the book's editing (before it makes its way to its final editor).

Darknet, the book includes interviews with such new media power houses as Larry Lessig, John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold, Cory Doctorow, Mike Godwin, Clay Shirky, and Ed Felten, along with Jack Valenti and many others. It's about the rise of personal media and the conflict between traditional entertainment media and the digital technology available to the individual.

From the Introduction:

Darknets refer to underground or private networks where people trade files and communicate anonymously. But there's a deeper meaning as well. Darknet serves as a warning about a world where digital media become locked down, a future where the network serves not the user but the interests of Hollywood and the music industry. The Darknet is where many of us may wind up if current trends continue.

The next few years will prove pivotal in the war on creative expression. As Joe Kraus of the public interest group DigitalConsumer.org warns, “This battle will affect consumers’ rights for the next fifty years.”

In this culture war, the major entertainment companies and their allies on Capitol Hill are trying to exert control over digital technologies, while users do everything within the law—and sometimes outside the law—to escape those restrictions. The clash, intensifying by the day, is playing out in legislative chambers, courtrooms, and increasingly in the design of the consumer electronics devices, media players, personal computers, and digital television sets coming into our homes.

Only one player’s voice has not been heard: yours. The sensible middle ground has been lost in the noise. But now that the battle has been joined in our living rooms, the public is beginning to stir. A vanguard of online activists and others have started to push back against digital restraints. What once was an obscure set of public policy discussions may be burgeoning into a populist movement.

Darknet will draw you into the secretive world of the movie underground, where bootleggers and pirates run circles around Hollywood and law enforcement. But piracy and file sharing are only subplots. Instead, this book profiles people from the future. To see where society is heading, futurist Watts Wacker once advised, find people from the future and study them. You will meet many people from the future in these pages—early adopters of the digital lifestyle, pioneers of next-generation television, game-makers creating virtual worlds, all of them wrestling with the law or confronting powerful forces seeking to maintain the status quo.

inf@Vis! has an article on Digital Dashboards:

Digital Dashboards are real time visualisation tools of critical business indicators that help in decision making. Its use is spreading and advancing from the executive elite towards the ubiquity of weblogs and personal computing.

...including some links to additional information.

...via elearningpost

Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, has an interesting op-ed piece on A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer. It's a good introduction to thinking about security in practical rational ways.

PC Magazine presents Top 100 Web Sites you didn't know you couldn't live without, including:

• Longhorn Blogs
• Tech Support Guy
• The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
• Lake Superior State University Banished Words List
• Arts and Letters Daily

...via BoingBoing

What we all know:

• The first activity in any project is to identify the scapegoat.
• The proper course of action can always be determined from subsequent events
• No matter what has to be done immediately, there is always something else that has to be done first
• If you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there.

The Shifted Librarian and Library Stuff have a .pdf file up on an introductory blogging presentation that also covers RSS and its uses as well.

The presentation provides these reasons why librarians (and plenty of other knowledge workers) should blog:

• They act as information filters to help you handle information overload
• They allow you to easily disseminate your ideas, thoughts, or information
• Community, networking
• Publish without trade publications

I'm going to have an article on weblogs--Weblogs as a Disruptive Technology for Extension--published in the Journal of Extension.

I don't know the pub date yet, but will post here again when it's up.

BoingBoing (which is just full of good stuff today) provides a pointer to the first Human-Computer Interface Rap at OK/Cancel:

After that generate a lot of designs
run them by some users even just 2 at a time
iterate and iterate and soon you'll oblitherate
any interfaces which are wack or inconsiderate

that will help you mitigate support costs or generate
website hit rates and orders. So check it:
you'll be taking profits instead of mounting losses
'Cause you brought us in at-the front of the process

But you should really listen to it to get the full effect.

at Auburn University has started Extension Daily, "A Weblog of News and Opinion."

Recent entries include:

• Thrips Threaten Onions
• Closing a Chapter on BSE
• Living Longer by Eating Less?

Boxes and Arrows has an article on Managing the Complexity of Content Management:

...the issues are many, spanning strategy, design, content, technology, training and several others. One conclusion we can make is that content management has become a very large category—attempting to include content authoring, metadata authoring, database-backed websites, workflow management, and even thesaurus management—and instead of making CMS a goal you might start by focusing on which of these functions you need. Otherwise, the general complexity becomes the central problem facing any content management project.

The article goes on to list some things that can help make the process manageable, including:

• Keep the team small
• Don't try to fix everything at once
• Build only what you need
• Buy the right size

web award finalists

I've been out of the office a bunch lately so I'm not just behind on blog posting, I'm behind on the whole news-reading that leads to blog posting, but I'm hoping to get caught up again soon so let's hope people have been doing interesting stuff and I can make a veritable flurry of interesting and fascinating posts here soon.

...or maybe it could be.

The Edge asks the question--what laws of life ought to be named after you (you know, like Kepler and Faraday and Murphy):

Bruce Sterling

Sterling's Law of Ubiquitous Computation

First, your home is a constant, while the Net is a place you go; then the Net becomes a constant while your home is a place you go.

Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law

Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.

Marvin Minsky

Minsky's First Law

Words should be your servants, not your masters.

Minksy's Second Law

Don't just do something. Stand there.

Mike Godwin

Godwin 's Law

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Andy Clark

Clark's Law

Everything leaks.

...via BoingBoing

Check it out. The Google Year-End Zeitgeist.

Most popular news queries include;

• Iraq
• Laci Peterson
• Kobe Bryant
• Jessica Lynch
• Korea
• Dixie Chicks

LiveJournal publishes regularly updated statistics

1,414,441 total accounts
63.5% female
93.9% free accounts
Top State--California

And, btw, if you're over 30? You are so not the average LiveJournal user.

...via BoingBoing

Every since weblogs became popular, marketers have been trying to figure out how to use them to, well, market things. Here's a stab at getting some Spiderman 2 promotion through blogging. The site provides Spiderman templates for Blogger and Live Journal and instructions for setting up your own blog:

Step three
Now that your blog is set up, it's time to start posting. To get and keep an audience, you'll want to write interesting things and post often. If you use the Spider-Man 2 templates, you don't have to only talk about Spider-Man. Current events, music, art, your social life - any of these can be good subject matter. But the better the quality of your writing, the more people will stay interested and keep coming back for more.

...via BoingBoing

In the past, we have brought to your attention many interesting, and occasionally even useful, USB devices. On Slashdot, here's a listing of strange devices that can be powered through the USB port on your computer, including:

• Hello Kitty USB hub (you can all pitch in and buy me this one, please :-)
• USB light
• USB electric razor

Bruce Schneier talks about how MSBlaster may have affected critical computer systems involved in the east coast blackout:

Let's be fair. I don't know that MSBlast caused the blackout. The report doesn't say that MSBlast caused the blackout. Conventional wisdom is that MSBlast did not cause the blackout. But it's certainly possible that MSBlast contributed to the blackout. The primary and backup computers that hosted the alarm systems failed at the same time MSBlast was attacking Windows computers on the Internet. What operating system were the alarm computers running? Were they on the Internet? These are interesting questions worth knowing the answers to.

John Patrick says some good things about blogs and business:

So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before.

People won't go to the company intranet to search for information. Instead, they'll look in blogs see what people they trust and respect have to say. The company intranet simply doesn't have that kind of credibility, nor ever will at many companies. Further, blogs aren't old, like an HTML document that's been there since 1997. Instead, blogs are very likely to be something that interests [the blogger] greatly. Bloggers are writing all the time about what's current in various contexts and subject categories. Blogs are off-the-cuff, candid, real—and now.

He doesn't really say anything that most people using blogs for both providing and getting information don't already know, but it's something that can be said over and over because many people still don't get it:

I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

I like to think of blogging as a new way to communicate. And there are many ways to think about this. Some people like to say this enables everybody to be a publisher. In fact, a lot of people said that about the Web back in 1994 and 1995—that it's a document-publishing phenomenon and that now, everybody can publish. In theory, that was true—but only if you knew HTML and if you knew how to set up a Web server and a lot of other ifs. What's new with blogging is that anybody can do it.

• An essay on intellectual property in gaming and its implications for the greater world...from LawMeme

• A report on a public policy dialogue on California education.

• An article on lessons learned about e-learning and the importance of upper administration/executive involvement (real involvement, not mere lip-service)

Boxes and Arrows discusses defacto design standards on the web.

Design elements used by more than 70% of the sites studied included:

• A logo in the upper left corner linking back to 'home'
• Global search equating to a text field and button
• Top or horizontal placement of top-level categories
• Text rendered as a graphic for top-level links
• A cart metaphor for the View Cart function

Less common on sites were breadcrumbs (45%) and underlined links (62%).

The Center for Democracy and Technology has an informative report on background and policy proposals on the 'spyware' problem:

The vast majority of writing about the spyware problem to date has focused on the privacy dimension of the issue. Privacy is one of the major concerns raised by spyware, but the larger issues are transparency and control. Users are typically unaware that spyware programs are being installed on their computers and often unable to uninstall them. These programs can change the appearance of websites, modify users' "start" and "search" pages in their browsers, or change low level system settings. They are often responsible for significant reducations in computer performance and system stability. In many cases, consumers are mistakenly led to believe that the problem is with another application or with their Internet provider, placing a substantial burden on the support departments of providers of those legitimate applications and services. Even in cases where theses programs transmit no personally identifiable informatin, their hidden, unauthorized use of users' computers and Internet connections threatens the security of comptuers and the integrity of online communications. Arguably, a better term for many of these applications would have been "trespassware."

...via Freedom to Tinker

Posted by dcoates at 10:19 AM

A CNET News report on why Johnny can't blog (which is actually about whether heavy investments in technology pay off):

While such reports are promising, few education experts expect computer instruction to translate directly into better grades--a factor that could pose problems for federal funding of technology programs down the road, depending on how heavily the Education Department's evaluation program relies on test scores.

"No one will say, 'Give me technology and I'll guarantee test scores will go up in two years,'" said Saul Rockman, founder of San Francisco-based technology education consulting firm Rockman Et Al and former head of education research at Apple. "The feds are saying, 'Prove that it makes a difference.' The fact is, technology programs don't have the weight to raise test scores."

Technorati, which offers curent info on who's linking to who, what they're talking about and other blogging stats, has been suffering some growing pains. Mostly because the rate of growth in the number of weblogs is huge:

Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.

HBS Working Knowledge offers an article on IT Investments that Pay Off:

Our research revealed, in particular, that three practices distinguish the companies that were most successful in their IT investments. First, such companies targeted their investments at the productivity levers that mattered most for their industries and themselves. Second, they carefully thought through the sequence and timing of their investments. Third, they didn't pursue IT in isolation but rather developed managerial innovations in tandem with technological ones. Let's look more closely at how these imperatives drive productivity.

invisiblog.com provides the means to publish a weblog anonymously:

invisiblog.com lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us. You don't have to trust us, because we'll never know who you are.

Popular Science talks about what's best of what's new in 2003, including:

• 802.11g Wireless
• Intel's Centrino mobile technology
• The Apple iTunes music store
• Instant Replay binoculars
• A DNA Lab for kids

...via Gizmodo

Matt Locke tells us the things that Wired has promised in the past would become things of the past:

• Incessant calling and voicemails might become a thing of the past
• Housework is already a thing of the past
• Paying royalties for George Gershwin tunes could become a thing of the past
• Remembering long lists of website passwords [will be] a thing of the past
• Fear of public singing in karaoke bars may soon be a thing of the past
• System outages should become a thing of the past
• The concept that a writer will get paid for writing may soon be a thing of the past

...via BoingBoing

...or, Sometimes Redundancies Aren't

We talk a great deal in Extension (as almost all large organizations do) about 'eliminating duplication.' We want to be as lean and efficient as possible. This isn't a bad goal; we want to do as much as we can, spread our resources as far as we can, and be as effective as possible.

The problem arises when this works better in the all-mental abstract than it does in the rubber-meets-the-road concrete. In particular, when our definition of 'duplication' is not specific enough to identify things (for example) that look the same, but aren't. Sometimes eliminating 'duplication' that isn't really duplication, when--for instance, two groups do the same thing, but serve very different audiences--eliminates the ability to serve either audience rather than making the organization as a whole more efficient.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about processes:

If the acquiring company's processes and values are the real driver of its success, then the last thing the acquiring manager wants to do is to integrate the company into the new parent organization. Integration will vaporize many of the processes and values of the acquired firm as its managers are required to adopt the buyer's way of doing business and have their proposals to innovate evaluated according to the decision criteria of the acquiring company. If the acquiree's processes and values were the reason for its historical success, a better strategy is to let the business stand alone, and for the parent to infuse its resource into the acquired firm's processes and values. This strategy, in essence, truly constitutes the acquisition of new capabilities (pg. 198)

Of IBM's acquisition of Rolm:

This situation is reminiscent of IBM's 1984 acquisition of Rolm. There wasn't anything in Rolm's pool of resources that IBM didn't already have. It was Rolm's processes for developing PBX products and for finding new markets for them that was really responsible for its success. In 1987, IBM decided to fully integrate the company into its corporate structure. Trying to push Rolm's resources--its products and customers--through the same processes that were honed in its large computer business, caused the Rolm business to stumble badly. And inviting executives of a computer company whose values had been whetted on operating profit margins of 18 percent, to get excited about prioritizing products with operating margins below 10 percent was impossible. IBM's decision to integrate Rolm actually destroyed the very source of the original worth of the deal. (pg. 199)

This approach and occasional miscalculation are not just perpetrated via company acquisition. Let's look at an example in the university environment that I'm familiar with:

We often talk, at the university, about 'centralizing services.' For example, the idea that we should centralize computer support services in one shop. On the surface, this immediately looks like a way to gain efficiencies without much tradeoff. After all, support's support, right? And it's possible to make this kind of centralization work, but it's important not to over look two vital things:

• All support staff are equal and,
• All support staff are not the same

In other words, computer support services are not necessarily duplicative.

All support staff are equal in the sense that they all have valuable skills and knowledge. No group--departmental, outreach, central--is a subset of another group. We often make the mistake of thinking central support staff know all about central services, as well as all the more local services, but this is almost always not so. For example, outreach support services on our campus, support a state-wide network that isn't relevant to central services. Most of the expertise to support that network resides with the outreach support group, not the central support group. The different support services, then, are neither heirarchical or duplicative. They are different. Simply merging without recognizing the different processes and value systems would likely result in loss of services to all groups and not provide the efficiencies you expect.

All support staff are not the same because the focus of a departmental support person (for example) is necessarily different than the focus of a central support person. To a central support person a deparment faculty member is 1/25,000th of users. Within the department that same faculty person might be 1/300th of users or even 1/50th. Department units often support different software, provide more hands-on service, include one-on-one training, are available more quickly, and are local.

Sometimes something has to go. Budgets get cut; resources are no longer available. But it's important to look at whether the things we want to eliminate are resource that are the same--desks and printers and offices--or whether it involves eliminating processes and knowledge that are actually not duplicated and which are vital to the system in some important ways.

Diego provides an awesome introduction to weblogs if you're looking for something to share with people who ask you, 'So what are weblogs, anyway?'

Among other things, he details some good practices for weblog posting:

• Links are good for you. Always link back to whatever it is you're talking about, if possible. A hugely important component of weblogs is the context in which something is said, and links provide a big part of that context.
• The back button rules: Never repost a full entry from another person without their permission. "Reposting" implies to take someone's text and include it in your own entry. Usually this is done to comment on it, but I think it's better to send people to whatever it is you're talking about, with quotes when necessary to add specific comments, rather than reposting everything. All web browsers have "back" buttons; once someone's read what you're talking about they can always go back and continue reading your take.
• Quote thy quotes: Quotes of another person's (or organization's) content should always be clearly marked.
• Thou shalt not steal. Never, ever, ever, repost a full entry that someone else wrote without at the very minimum providing proper reference to the person who wrote it. Even then, try to get permission from the author. See 'the back button rules' above.

...via Scripting News

Matt at Exposure liveblogged his daughter's birth

UPDATE 6:32 PM Unfortunately, the hotspot petered out just as The Wife was about to start pushing, and she was oddly unsympathetic to my bodily contortions as I wheeled around the room trying to get a signal. So, I had to wait. THEN, we got into the Post-Partem room and no hotspot at all. Sooooo punk. Now I'm home: I ate and showered quickly, I'm typing this as fast as I can, then I'm heading back up to the hospital with Chinese food for the wife.

I've been asked to give a presentation at ISU's Professional Development day in March and they needed a description of the talk by the end of last week. I said sure, it'll be easy to write a description since I've recently done talks at a couple of conferences.

Of course, I couldn't find any of those descriptions when I went looking so I had to write a new one:

Title: Blogging--What is it and Why should I care?

Over 2 million people are using weblogs (or blogs) to voice their opinions, brainstorm, update projects, tell stories, filter knowledge, create circles of trust, and connect and communicate. Bloggers include journalists, academics, students, librarians, CEOs, lawyers, and many, many others. A weblog is a personal publishing system that comes with pre-defined templates and arranges entries chronologically with automatic archiving and easy search and update notification capabilities. We'll be talking about what weblogs are and how they can help you communicate, build networks, provide information, build your own expertise, and stay up-to-date with less effort.

There...now, I'll be able to find this one if I ever need it again.

BTW, I recently gave a talk to a group of people at Texas A&M. It was supposed to be a videoconference, but the video didn't work. So, we tried to hook up via a different mechanism but only half the audio worked (me talking to them). Fortunately, I'd sent my presenation to them earlier and chat worked so I talked to them, they followed the presentaation there and occasionally gave me words of encouragement via chat. I'm not sure how useful it was for the folks in Texas, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

Here's the presentation I gave (.ppt file).

According to a Salon article, which reports on a Education Department study:

The Ghost cam

...via the Shifted Librarian

Acerhas a new wireless initiative for K-12 schools:

With the support of Intel Corporation, Acer America will canvas and select one school in each qualified school district for "Wi-Fi 101", with up to 120 schools participating nationwide for the program. A simple site inspection will determine if a candidate school has an appropriate network infrastructure in place to support the wireless environment. The installation of the wireless access points requires no funding or manpower contribution on the part of schools or district personnel. Interested schools are invited to fill out the form below for additional details.

CNN reports that Execs who are tech dummies seek secret training:

Shaheen, 32, is a computer tutor to corporate big shots, giving pointers in the fine arts of opening e-mail attachments, navigating Excel spreadsheets and performing other PC chores the executives' minions probably can do in their sleep.

"You'd be surprised by what they don't know," Shaheen says. "And they're not comfortable asking the IT person in their company because then they show weakness to their staff."

I would hate to break it to them, but I'd bet their IT staff already know....

Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek just moved to new office space. These were the 'system requirements' for the offices for the developers:

1. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.
2. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever.
3. It should be possible to do pair programming.
4. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls.
5. The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you're meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office."

Looks like nice work if you can get it....

...via Windley's Enterprise Computing

Posted by dcoates at 02:04 PM

Fast Company reports on IDEO's method cards, which are designed to share some of IDEO's strategies for coming up with such concept breakthroughs as Apple's first mouse and stand-up toothpaste tubes:

The secret, it turns out, reduces to one of those touchy-feely terms that make MBAs squirm: "empathy." In the Ideo universe, great design doesn't begin with a far-out concept or a way-cool drawing. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of the human condition. The first step for any Ideo team on any project is to try to empathize with the people who might use whatever product or service that eventually emerges from its work.

Inc.com has an interesting article on brainstorming, including why you get some of your best ideas in the shower (actually, I get my best ideas in the car, but, you know, same thing)

Next time you're thinking your dialup is a little slow check out the Bongo project at Algoma university where a group of students implemented TCP transmission via bongo-drums.

...via BoingBoing

Via BoingBoing comes a pointer to 1,2,3... Sports au Plessis ;-), a collective moblog created by 7 to 11 year olds reporting on their outdoor sports center.

The 404 Research Lab shows nifty 404 Not Found pages, including the horizon 404 (odd but interesting) and the Egads! 404 (Egads! The amazing patented web browsing machine was unable to locate the file you requested).

...via BoingBoing

Fortunately, How Much is Inside hasanswered this important question so we don't have to:

• CDs labeled: 968
• Total distance marked: 1,800 feet

Boxes and Arrows has a new article on sitemaps and site indexes:

How do you know if your site needs a sitemap or a site index, or both? On very small sites, it is unlikely that either would be needed. Most likely the global navigation can provide direct access to all areas of the site. Most medium- and larger-sized sites should probably include at least a sitemap. Text-based sitemaps require few resources to create and maintain and can provide big benefits for your users. Unless your site is a directory like Yahoo!, a sitemap is the only place where a user can see all the categories and top subcategories in a single place. This is especially important if your site navigation uses expanding and collapsing menus that hide options until a mouseover. Ecommerce as well as informational sites can be improved with a sitemap.

Most medium- and larger-sized sites can also benefit from an index of some type. For extremely large sites, it would be unrealistic to include absolutely everything in the site index. It would simply be too large to use efficiently. Only the most important and most used information should be included. Informational sites benefit more from a site index than the average ecommerce site because the content is generally richer on an informational site. However, ecommerce sites with%2

...via elearningpost

Interactive Narratives provides a place to find web pages which include different media, extensive use of graphics and Flash to education and inform. Some of the sites gathered there include:

• The Visual Thesaurus
• Olivia--Our Town
• At the Tomb of Tutankhamen
• State of Denial

...via elearningpost

A presentation on Flash Accessibility from Bob Regan at Macromedia.

...via elearningpost

HBS Working Knowledge provides some tips on project planning:

• Beware certainty
• Build the community
• Work backward
• Aggressively manage expectations

Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and current candidate for President will be guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig's blog this week.

Daniel Will-Harris has an interesting article on working with a designer:

Preconceived notions are just one of the mistakes people make when they work with a designer. A good designer%u2019s work will make something:

• Work better
• Sell better
• Shed new light on old subjects
• Look better

...via elearningpost

Posted by dcoates at 03:36 PM

The Berkman Center is redoing their home page (I think this may still be a prototype) so it's more blog-like.

They also have an RSS feed.

...via Scripting News

Phil Windley has an interesting post on Why IT doesn't Matter Anymore: Living in the Red Zone. The 'red zone' includes those projects that are both expensive and don't provide any competitive advantage. Things like support, reliability, security, local area networks:

The tough thing about living in the red zone is that its not sexy. Its hard to do and no one's going to come up to you and say "Hey, I noticed the computers didn't go down again! What to go!" Its thankless work and it difficult to convince people to spend much on it. The goal is achieve operational excellence and do it as efficiently (read cheaply) as possible. Focusing on it requires different priorities, a different culture and organizational changes. But "red zone" work is the foundation on which everything else is built and success in other areas of the business is unlikely to come if its ignored.

I gave a presentation on weblogs, RSS, and news aggregation at the CYFAR (Children, Youth and Families at Risk) conference in Minneapolis, MN on May 14, 2003.

I created a weblog for the presentation that not only included information from my Powerpoint slides for the presentation but also additional information for attendees to reference later. This was also a hands-on session and I asked people to blog their impressions of weblogs or another presentation at the conference.

Schools are using eBay to sell surplus inventory:

Unloading everything from vacant buildings to old buses and even fire trucks, schools and other municipalities have found that the internet greatly increases the number of potential buyers who can bid on used equipment and%u2014in some cases%u2014is more cost-effective than holding a local charity auction.

Ed Cone provides some guidelines for journalists who also blog. They're useful ideas for anyone who are considering combining weblogs and work in positive ways:

Try not to be a jerk If you publicly trash your job, your publisher, your co-workers, your last article, and so on, don't complain when you get fired or shut down for doing it. Work with the boss if you can If your publisher thinks your weblog is too close to what you do on your day job, try to get the publisher to adopt the weblog. Make it a win-win. If CNN had co-branded the Iraq weblog maintained by reporter Kevin Sites instead of shutting it down, it would have been great for CNN, Sites, and %u2013 oh yeah, them %u2013 people trying to learn about the war.

...via Scripting News

Via Mobitopia, the news that mobile spam is already here. There's both SMS spam and voicemail spam. Right now it's probably a bigger problem in other countries than in the US (where they use more text messaging). But sooner or later, it will come here too.

The Roving Librarian is a "pilot project that brings library services into the areas of students' everyday life. Using a wireless laptop, Reference Librarians take HOLLIS, the Harvard Libraries portal, Research Guides, and Finding Aids %u2013 many of the primary undergraduate research tools -- out of the library and into non-academic spaces where students spend time. The Reference Librarian is available to answer questions, assist in research, help locate material, and encourage the students to keep the library and librarians at the forefront of their research. "

...via Library Stuff

According to a recent article at Information Week:

Internet users skeptical of junk E-mails promising easy money, miracle cures, and dream dates are right to be wary: The government says two-thirds of the spam messages clogging online mailboxes probably are false in some way.

Brad Templeton says it's the25th Anniversary of Spam:

That first spam was sent by a salesman for DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation. Today, you may not know DEC, since it was bought by Compaq and is now a unit of HP, but in those days it was the leading minicomputer maker, and its computers provided the platform for the development of Unix, C and much of the internet, to cite just a few minor events.

By 1978 the Arpanet (as the internet was then known) had already provided network E-mail to a large number of folks at universities, government institutions and universities for over 6 years. E-mail was the biggest source of traffic on the Arpanet. A few years prior, Dave Farber had created "MsgGroup," the first network mailing list. (Though Plato and other timesharing systems had laid the foundations for online community and conferencing some years before that.)

The DEC salesman, Gary Thuerk, identified only as "THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO" (There were no dots or dot-coms in those days, and the at-sign was often spelled out) decided to send a notice to everybody on the ARPANET on the west coast. It trumpeted an open house to show off new models of the Dec-20 computer, a foray into larger, almost mainframe-sized systems.

This was a spam, though the term would not be used to refer to it for another 15 years. The spammer didn't do a very good job. He simply typed addresses into his mail program, or possibly included them from a file. The mail program would only take 320 addresses. The rest got simply shoved into the top of the body of the message.

...via Dan Gilmor

Here are the instructions.

Two telecom companies in New Zealand recently settled a dispute over access to a mobile radio network by arm-wrestling for it:

Bosses at New Zealand telecoms firm TeamTalk have been arguing with radio communications company MCS Global Digital over access to their mobile radio network.

But, worried over the time and fees involved in court hearings, TeamTalk boss David Ware challenged MCS chief Allan Cosford to settle the dispute through an arm-wrestling contest.

Mr Cosford accepted, and agreed to a duel before spectators in a gym near to his firm's Auckland-based headquarters.

Cosford won.

Ware's comment in defeat? "I guess losing ws tough...[h]owever, it's not nearly as painful as dealing with lawyers."

American FactFinder at the US Census Bureau provides access to 2000 Census data, including a snapshot of your neighborhood.

Just enter a street address to find information on ethnicity, age, household population and more. It includes maps of each area as well.

These Social Mobiles (prototypes, not real) won a grand prize in the 2002 Media Arts Festival of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs. They're designed to answer the question of how to make cell phones less disruptive in social situations.

Personally, I like the electro-shock phone...

A snowflake maker

Check out the AgoraPhone project. It's a sculpture on the MIT campus which anyone can call up (the phone number's on the web site) and talk to passersby.

Check out Moving Images at the Internet Archives for a really nifty collection of ephemeral films--advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films. The films are particularly noteworthy for the view they give of the times in which they were produced.

If you enter 'http' as a search string in Google, it will list entries in order of their PageRank:

1. Yahoo
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. Adobe
5. Alta Vista
6. My Excite
7. Amazon
8. CNN
9. Lycos
10. Go

Note that 7 out of the top 10 are search engines...It seems that the web is more about finding stuff than it is about the stuff itself.

Personally, I think this is cool because it tells us that people are finding things whether they're associated with a giant consolidating portal or not. A year or two ago we thought it would be only a matter of time before it all came down to AOL or Yahoo. Weblogging, the new face of search engines provided by Google, wireless networking, and other changes have taken things in interesting new directions.

CIO Magazine reports on a Portal project at the Unviersity of Maryland.

goodexperience.com currently has an interview with Google product manager, Marissa Mayer

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

Also, comments on maintaining Google's simple interface, text ads vs banner ads, user testing.

Doonesbury turns its comic wit to blogging.

According to a recent survey conducted by Jupiter Research, American's top online activities consist of:

• 93% E-mail
• 79% Search engine
• 63% Research products/services
• 60% Local information
• 48% Online bill viewing
• 41% Chat
• 32% Online audio listening

Women were more likely to send e-greetings, while men visited sports sites and free software download sites more often. Age gaps occurred in the amount of time spent instant messaging, visiting health sites, and chatting online.

The Theban Mapping Project is a Flash enabled website which contains archeological and image databases of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Visitors to the website can click on any of the mapped tombs and get a guided tour complete with historical references.

At Edge, Howard Rheingold talks about Smart Mobs.

Using rapidly updated websites, cell-phones and other modern communicatin tools, people are able to organize demonstrations, gather for parties, respond to deadlines, and act together.

Rheingold has a new book--Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution--coming out on this topic.

A seven round Head to Head Powerpoint competition

The Philip Glass engine, that is.

The Philip Glass website has online a deep navigation tool called 'The Glass Engine' developed as an ongoing research project at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.

The Engine allows you to navigate the collected musical works of composer Philip Glass based on a number of criteria: year, length, emotion, etc. and how the criteria interact with one another.

The engine requires IE 4.5 or higher and works best in a higher bandwidth environment.

The world's flags get letter grades and a brief critique.

Freedom Ship (TM) - City at Sea is a proposal for a floating city of up to 60,000 people. The ship would circle the globe once every two years and include schools, offices, warehouses, a library and housing.

Want to know how teleportation, firewalls, lock picking and air traffic control work?

Try out the How Stuff Works web site for everything you wanted to know about things you didn't even know existed.

Scientific American has recently announced the Sci/Tech Web Awards for 2002. The editors at Scientific American have selected 5 sites in each of ten different categories that they think are particularly useful and worth visiting. Categories include:

• Archeology and Paleontology
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Computer Science
• Earth and Environment
• Engineering and Technology
• Mathematics
• Medicine
• Physics

Check it out.

Why doesn't everyone read user manuals?

According to a recent article in The Washington Post, ome people would rather take a class, some would rather call a support line and get an immediate answer without all the bother of flipping pages. Most people just want the 'thing,' whatever it is to just 'work.'

...Americans "won't read cell-phone manuals, any kitchen appliance manual" -- and forget the VCR manual," Laermer said. The PR executive knows what he's talking about. "Personally, I've bought a lot of stereo equipment, and I know they came with manuals -- I've got a whole file drawer full of them -- but I haven't read a single one. I want something that comes out of box that I can just plug in and it works."

The problem with wanting everything to 'just work,' though is that everything has gotten more complicated. Attempts at solutions include brightly colored stickers, computer interfaces, and condensed instructions with graphical illustrations. And those 800 numbers may also be part of the problem: "It appears that when a lot of people see that an 800 number is available, they find it much easier to call than to sit down and read the manual."

Want to see who links to who in the world of web logs?

Visit the Picture of Weblogs.

Customers often don't know what they want until they see it or use it. Sometimes they don't have the words or expertise to articulate their needs in a way that leads to the right product.

An article in HBS Working Knowledge suggests that rather than supplying them with products that attempt to meet ill-defined needs, organizations provide tools for customers to design and develop their own products. This approach can involve developing new relationships with customers and xtensive research in developing an effective and useful toolkit. It can also lead to new innovations and products.

Vischeck has come up with an algorithm to 'Daltonize' images, that is, shift the colors and contrast in a digitalk image so that the differences between objects are more visible to color blind users. The algorithm can adjust for different types of colorblindness.

Possible applications include: digital microscopes, digital video recorders, computer displays, and print media (especially where legibility is particularly important--maps, public safety documents, etc.)

Vischeck also allows you to check any web page to see how it looks to anyone with specific kinds of color blindness.

Janice Fraser at Adaptive Path has a list of tips for setting priorities:

1. Make a "Big List of Things to Do"
2. Organize the list according to Dependencies (can't do X until Y) and Baseline items (absolutely, positively must be done)
3. Have the appropriate co-workers score each item according to:
• Technical feasibility
• Creative feasibility
• Importance to the user
• Importance to the business
4. Graph the overall scores

A task that shows up with both high feasibility and high importance scores should be done first. Something that gets low feasibility and low importance scores probably shouldn't be done at all. The tricky tasks will be those that fall in the category of: high importance/low feasibility meaning that they're important, but difficult.

Not that I think millions visit regularly, but in case you stop by and wonder, I'm on vacation for the next two weeks.

Regular updates will resume when I return.....

Dan Bricklin talks about riding a Segway, the new two-wheeled scooter that's supposed to be almost like walking...only faster. According to Bricklin the Segway is remarkably stable, rugged, and versatile.

Segway has some video on their site, if you want to see the scooter in action.

Looking for the history of games on the Internet or biographies of some of the pioneers or even the history of Napster?

Try NetHistory 2.0, which has all that and more (early browsers, email, web development, USENET).

Restructuring. Downsizing. Reengineering. The result of all this reorganization has been employees who are more exhausted than empowered.

We talk and talk and talk about the importance of skilled, motivated people. Study after study agree that treating employees well pays off. And yet, companies don't always seem able to follow this simple principle. According to a recent article at HBS Working Knowledge, some of the problem may llie in outmoded strategic perspectives.

In knowledge-intensive situations people are the key resource and people can't be managed like office supplies.

The hardest mind-set to alter is the longstanding, deeply embedded belief that capital is the critical strategic resource to be managed and that senior managers' key responsibilities should center around its acquisition, allocation, and effective use.

In today's world, the burst dot-com bubble notwithstanding, capital is available. It's talented employees that must be sought, nurtured and sustained. One of the outcomes has been to recognize that, like shareholders, employees are also holders of scarce resources. This means that senior managers need to work to define a community that workers want to belong to.

According to an article by Gerry McGovern called, Is your content being read?, 80% of the content on one of the largest and best-known websites around is never read.

What can you do to make sure your content is accesible and usable and actually being used? Some ways to increase the odds that your content will be read include:

1. Expiration dates


2. Review at publication


3. Periodic review

If eighty percent of your content is never read, think of how much more efficient and manageable your website will be without it. Think of how much easier it will be for people to navigate and search for content. Less is more

Posted by dcoates at 09:01 AM

David Weinberger has produced a kid's version of his new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, called, What the Web is For.

Weinberger, who co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined, live on the web, posting each chapter as he wrote it, soliciting feedback, revising it and reposting the new version. The final version of Small Pieces Loosely Joined is still available on-line as well as in traditionally published (Perseus Press) hardcopy.

John Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox, says, don't forget that humans use computers. In an interview at Forbes.com, he talks about looking for ways that virtual connections can augment the physical connections that already exist.

We refer to changes we have to keep up with, things we don't want to give up, and forget that we are in charge not the technology. We should continue to use things that work well and adopt new technologies that allow us to do things we want to do but couldn't before or to do things in better, more useful ways.

ASAP: What's your favorite technology, and why do you use it?

Brown: My favorite technology is a very, very lightweight printer. It weighs about an ounce. It never runs out of batteries, even though it's portable. It prints at astounding resolution. Here, I'll give you one if you like. [He throws a pen down on the desk.] This is a beautiful example of friendly technology. I spend a lot of time finding good pens.

People like to print things. What looks good--and may be totally necessary on a web page--doesn't always make the best printed page.

Printable pages should:

• Eliminate unncesessary navigation
  
• Be served up on request--not by default
  
• eliminate color wherever possible
  
• Include the original URL
  
• Contain identifier, copyright, and update information
  
• Still have links that act like links
  
• Have the same title as the original
  
• Not contain ads (color, unclickable, annoying)

Style-sheets can be very useful in producing printable versions of on-line articles.

How does web design affect the bottom line?

Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine on information architecture and design, looks at the evolution of Amazon's, Barnes and Noble's and Borders' web pages. Amazon sells far more books online than either Barnes and Noble or Borders (though B&N and Borders are larger booksellers overall). Are there differences in their web pages over time that help explain the differences in sales?

Analysis:

• All three sites use very long screens to display content on their home page
  
• All three sites evolved to use three-column layouts
  
• Amazon has consistently placed more links above the fold.
  
• Through the years, the density of links on Borders.com was half of that on Barnes and Noble or Amazon
  
• Amazon communicates using images and links rather than text descriptions
  
• All sites eventually included navigation targeted at specific audiences.
  
• Invitations to subscribe to an email newsletter were offered inconsistently

One conclusion is that successful design elements emulate familiar off-line shopping experiences. For example, the long homepage provides an opportunity to browse, the high use of images also encourages browsing. Also like brick and mortar stores the web sites change incrementally rather than drastically maintaining familiarity and trust.

It's common practice in the web logging community that when posting new items to your web log you acknowledge the blog that pointed you in the direction of the link in the first place. I tend to accumulate links as I go and write up the entries when I have time so I've often forgotten how I found them by the time they percolate back up through the list.

So, here's a list of web logs I check regularly:

o BoingBoing
As the sub-head says, "A Directory of Wonderful Things"
o elearningpost
A collection of links on online learning, knowledge management, community building and instructional design
o Ordinary-Life.Net (A Web Designer's Journey)
A Web Design Web Log
o Privacy Parts
Privacy and Technology
o meryl.net
Web design and style sheets
o SiliconValley (Dan Gilmor's e-Journal)
A technology journalist's web log
o Boxes and Arrows
Information Architecture, User Design
o JOHO, the Blog
The Blog version of Journal of the HyperLinked Organization
o O'Reilly Network Weblogs

The new version of Movable Type (version 2.0) is now available. We upgraded this site from 1.2 to 2.0 yesterrday. Among the new features (some were available in the pregvious version 1.4) are new style sheets, searching capabilities, support for multiple categories, and a number of other new features.

Snazzy, eh?

As part of the Arteplage Yverdon-les-Bains for Swiss EXPO 02, a group of architects called team extasia have designed a building made out of fog.

The building is a media pavilion on Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The building itself is created from filtered lake water shot through 13,000 fog nozzles.

Visitors will approach via a 400 foot long ramp. Each visitor will answer a questionnaire/profile and receive a 'braincoat.' The coat protects visitors from the damp environment, but it also changes color depending on whether nearby people are compatible (red) or incompatible (green).

According to an article at ANANOVA, a recent poll discovered that many people hit their computer or their desk in frustration when they have trouble with the Internet. But 2% of the people polled said they actually hit the person sitting next to them.

What provokes Internet users to violence? Waiting too long for pages to load, help buttons that don't help, and excessive requests for personal details.

A clock created with pictures and Flash.

It's oddly addictive....

A recent article published in PC Magazine, lists 100 web sites that are useful or entertaining and that most people don't know about. They include:

Netcraft.com which provides information about any web site's operating system, type of service and netblock owner.

Surprise.com which helps visitors pick out gifts by choosing occasions and/or personality traits.

Airsafe.com a database detailing every fatal aviation even for the last 31 years.

UselessKnowledge.com, a massive compendium of information, including quizzes and a random trivia generator

Visual Elements Periodic Table displays the periodic table graphically with information about each element. The graphics are fantastic!

From USA Today, an article in Tech news:
A new report from the federal government says that the digital divide is disappearing. The basis for this conclusion is that Internet use is growing at a faster rate among the poor and minorities and in rural areas.

Critics of the report say that a faster rate of growth doesn't mean there isn't a problem. If the poor, minority and rural users are very small in number then anything that increases that number, even if the total remains small will lead to a larger rate of change.

Additional information can be found in a news release at the Benton Foundation web site.

iCivilEngineer.com, an internet portal for Civil Engineers has a special section on the World Trade Center.

Topics include:

• Cause of Twin Towers Collapse
  
• Aftermath
  
• Cleanup
  
• Rebuilding WTC
  
• Background Information
  
• Pentagon Building Damage
  
• Debate on Highrise Buildings

  
  

  Posted by dcoates at 08:34 AM

I can't actually define this site. One pointer refers to it as a meme catalog

You'll have to visit yourself. . . .

The SXSW Website Competition Finalists

Categories include:

Here's an article in the October, 2001 Washington Monthly that says that Qwest, the telecommunication company, and the other 'Baby Bells' are one of the big reasons the economy isn't doing so well right now.

The article also discusses the lack of understanding in the current government for the differences between technology/telecom companies and energy companies, massive overbuilding of telecom infrastructure, slow adoption of broadband technology, and subsequent bankruptcies from companies failing to deliver.

Interesting read.

--Write simply
--Get to the point
--Stop when you're done

In an article called, The Need For Simple English on the Web, Gerry McGovern says that, "complexity is often a mask behind which the writer who doesn't quite understand what they are writing about hides."

In these days of too much information, it's even more important than ever before to communicate in a clear accessible way. People have a ton of other places they can go for information besides your web site. If yours is annoying, hard to understand and full of unnecessary words, they'll go elsewhere.

Here's an interesting site.

Go. Look. Report back.

The Lumina Foundation has recently issued a report entitled, Funding the InfoStructure, which discusses the disparities in technology infrastructure at different colleges and universities and the need to fund technology as a regular part of doing business rather than an 'add-on' expense at the end of the year.

The report lists four factors that impede financial planning for technology:

• Failure to establish effective asset-management programs for technology
  
• Failure to adopt a life-cycle approach to technology replacement
  
• Failure to segment longer term costs into groups to match available revenue streams
  
• Failure to develop methods to measure Return on Investment from technology ue

Larger universities have generally done better than smaller institutions at integrating technology and developing and maintaining a technology infrastructure. They have greater resources and more flexibility in how technology is financed.

Revenue options discussed in the article include:

• Debt financing
  
• Vendor arrangements
  
• Leasing equipment
  
• Revolving funds
  
• User fees
  
• E-commerce
  
• Spinning off for-profit subsidiaries
  
• Other arrangements (consortia, partnerships, etc.)

Will McCarthy, in a recent article in Scifi Weekly, says that if we wanted to, we could make the One Ring that Frodo went to so much time and trouble to toss into the fiery pit from whence it came:

Many people write to me asking, "Hey, Wil, couldn't we make one of those One Ring thingies using technology, and rule the world in an orgy of stupefying eeevyil?" The answer, happily, is yes.

The most notable characteristic of the One Ring is that it turns its wearer invisible. . . .NASA and the U.S. Air Force have already experimented with "video camouflage" which places cameras on one side of an object and video screens on the other side. The object "disappears" before our very eyes, like the alien trophy-hunter in Predator, and with the hoped-for advent of projective holography, this technology can only improve.

The One Ring also seems to extend the lifespan of its owner, while causing gradual behavioral changes such as irritability, light-sensitivity, modified diet and megalomania. . . .This effect is consistent with various forms of heavy metal poisoning, combined with a slow release of the chemical superoxide dismutase (SOD), which has been implicated in the long lifespans of certain genetically modified worms.

Of course, McCarthy goes on to say, if we were to make an object with the One Ring's capabilities using modern technology it would likely weigh in at several hundred pounds and be way too big to wear on your finger. It would be better incorporated into something like, say....a Humvee.

Want to foster a creative environment in the workplace? Encourage people to defy their superiors and fight amongst themselves.

According to an article entitled, Think you Manage Creativity? Here's Why You're Wrong, in HBA Working Knowledge, some of the most innovative breakthroughs at companies like 3M (Scotch tape) and HP came about when employee's ignored orders to stop working on a project.

In addition, truly innovative work is often best done in isolation and, in particular, far from critical, evaluative eyes and outside ongoing concerns about money.

William Coyne, former vice president of R&D at 3M, remarked in a speech at Motorola University, "After you plant a seed in the ground, you don't dig it up every week to see how it is doing." In an age of customer centricity, this may border on the heretical. But if you want to develop new products and services, I urge you to keep your creative people away from your biggest customers—and for that matter from critics and anyone whose primary concern is money.

Finally, in a creative organization, the only 'bad' thing is not doing anything. According to research by Dean Keith Simonton creativity results from action. People recognized as creative don't have a greater percentage of successes, they have more total attempts.

So, what are you doing in your organization to foster creativity?

Elegant Hack is a web log devoted to information architecture.

If you're interested in user-centered design, usability, understanding what the web is good at, and other elements of creating usable, functional web sites, it's worth checking out.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, Germany has turned the upper eight floors of the Haus des Lehrers building into an interactive computer display called Blinkenlights.

Check it out. You can dial in on your cell phone and play pong or put up letters.

The Korean government is planning to move 120,000 civil servants to Hancom Linux deluxe from Windows in the next year. This represents approximately 23 percent of its current Windows base.

Beijing, China also recently awarded major contracts to local vendors, including Red Flag Linux, beating out Microsoft in the bidding process.
...from The Register

The Museum of Online Museums includes such stalwarts as The Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

It also includes:

The Museum of Air Sickness Bags
Fading Billboards
Etch-a-Sketch Gallery
Manhole Covers Arranged by Country

I particularly recommend Manhole Covers Arranged by Country.

Google has published a summary of the most popular search terms were for the year 2001.

Among the top twenty gaining queries for the year were:

• Nostradamus


• CNN


• World Trade Center


• Harry Potter


• Anthrax


• WindowsXP

In decline for the year:

• Olympic gymnastics


• Florida secretary of state


• Florida Supreme Court


• Big Brother


• Napster

The top three women people searched Google for were:

• Britney Spears


• Pamela Anderson


• Jennifer Lopez

Top three men:

• Nostradamus


• Osama Bin Laden


• Eminem

The site also includes a time line showing the rise and fall of certain search terms over the course of the year.

David Gelernter of Mirror World Technology, says Scopeware will replace the desktop metaphor for retrieving information on your desktop.

Gelernter calls Scopeware a 'narrative information system,' basically a diary metaphor where every file is store chronologically in what appears on-screen as a tiling stack of file cards. Placing the cursor over a card brings up a quick preview, double-clicking on the card brings up the entire file.

Inxight, a Xerox supported startup, is working on a desktop alternative called Star Tree. Even Microsoft is trying to replace the desktop metaphor or at least refine it into something with increased usability for large storage systems and has invested in research projects that use 3-D graphics representations of data such as Data Mountain and Task Gallery.

Fathom, an online learning source, has put together A Special Fathom Learning Center on Terrorism, Political Violence, and Religious Extremism.

To learn about--and learn from--the events of September 11th, we must acknowledge the complexities and interdependencies of the modern world system. A notable feature of the Learning Center, then, is the inclusion of learning materials from a very wide range of disciplines. If, as many analysts argue, terrorism has traditionally risen in part from the disillusionment of people who feel they are not the masters of their own fate, then we must look closely at phenomena such as fundamentalism, imperialism, nationalism and democratization, along with issues such as economic development and the status of women. And while the World Trade Center was a proud symbol of New York City, there are those who considered it a symbol of US hegemony and globalization. Because we want to explore the multifaceted links betweeen globalization and the causes, but also possible resolution of, the present crisis, we have devoted an entire section of the learning center to the study of globalization.

The learning center contains pointers to online seminars and classes, online articles, and points to additional resources, like books.

In addition, RAND, a Fathom consortium member, is offering a free seminar called Insurgencies and the Role of Refugees: Focus on Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Jakob Nielsen
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20011125.html

The top 10 (without links at present because the article didn’t include links):

Andersen: Business Radar 3.0
BC Hydro: HydroWeb
Cisco Systems: I-deal (tristream)
Fidelity Investments Canada
Interactive Applications Group: Community [apps]
Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
Pearson Technology Centre
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC): ISSAIC
silverorange
United States Department of Transportation: DOTnet

Full report at:

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2001/