Year: 2006

  • 'The User Is Always Right' and other thoughts about personas

    Steve Mulder recently announced to the IA Institute and IxDA mailing list that his book on user research and personas, The User Is Always Right, is now available: If you attended the IA Summit in Vancouver, you might have heard me give a preview of some of the book’s content on adding more science to…

  • I do smell appeasement somewhere.

    Dick Cheney: Some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. ———————————————— DKo: Some in our own country claim conquest of Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the Bush Administration and get them to leave the rest of the world alone.…

  • Brief audio interview with me from last year

    The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.

  • At long last, have you no decency?

    I don’t think Cheney’s getting traction anymore. Average Americans think he’s some kind of vampire/monster. Hillary Clinton and Hairplug Biden have both dissed him openly on the talking head shows. Zach at Hanlon’s Razor has the right idea (Dick Cheney’s heart pumps bile): Saying that Iraq is the War on Terror ad nauseum and that…

  • Stolen phone automatically uploads photos of thief's family to Flickr

    practicalist: authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account: …what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the…

  • The effect of tabbed browsing on web analytics

    There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.

  • How Could I Have Missed the Joke?

    For those of a certain age. Republicans’ comments may hurt at polls, AP “One Republican senator [Burns, MT], described his house painter as a ‘little Guatemalan man.’ Another [Allen, VA], called an Indian man a ‘macaca,’ a type of monkey.” “[T]he comments by Burns and Allen have garnered heavy attention as their party is trying…

  • Need that elusive chinchilla sound effect?

    Now here’s something useful:

  • dotMobi or not dotMobi – that is the question

    CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents. Our sense is that we are…

  • Online project management

    Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information – infinitely preferable to an endless…

  • Axure RP Pro 4.2 is Now Available!

    On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely…

  • Dan Brown on competitive analysis

    Dan, I’m still waiting for the review copy of your book, Brown, published an excerpt from his just released Communicating Design in Digital Web Magazine, called Competitive Analysis, discussing different ways to compare competing sites and present your findings. Some interesting visual thinking there. Can’t wait for the book, hint, hint.

  • Two Red Herrings

    My Google news alerts have whispered to me that two Red Herrings are diverting the focus of media coverage these days. Since I seem to have been programmed from youth to pass on what I think I’ve learned, here’s my guesswork: Iran Sanctions. The solidity of the six-nation alliance confronting Iran is thought to rest…

  • Web 2.0 contrarianism

    I did like Lost in Translation, but I agree with I think about six of the Eight Things I

  • Mobility Today Podcast interview with David Smith

    David Smith is the director of marketing for HTC America, whose site we are redesigning. (We recently relaunched the site with an interim design but we’ve got great things in the works for later this year.) HTC makes incredible smartphone and pocketpc “converged devices” and generated a lot of buzz on enthusiast blogs and websites.…

  • Converged mobile devices = iPod killers?

    This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice. I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the…

  • IE7's CSS fixes

    Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).

  • The Office of The Suspector

    There has been speculation* that somewhere in the national security establishment there is an official known as The Suspector. When someone wants to wiretap conversations with an individual, they bring that person’s name to The Suspector, and ask, “Do you suspect this person of having terrorist connections?” The Suspector says, “Yes.” (After all, you are…

  • MobileCrunch blog

    Since we began working with HTC and since I got my Cingular 2125, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the topic of developing sites for the mobile web, and with developments in the mobile space in general. Recently Dan pointed me to the relatively new MobileCrunch blog, and I’ve become, well, addicted. Recommended.

  • Two good articles in ASIS&T's Bulletin

    Austin Govella writes about rich interfaces on the web (think AJAX, Flex, etc.), and Samantha Starmer explains how to sell IA to executives.

  • The Wiretaps. What was the judge so mad about?

    In the Reuters report on the ruling against warrantless wiretapping, warrants are not mentioned until the eighth paragraph. Court rules secret wiretaps violate rights, Reuters, 8/17/06 Absent the issue of warrants, what was the judge so mad about? She is quoted: The wiretaps “violated…civil rights,” “freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches, and a constitutional…