Category: User Experience

  • 2003 Waterside Conference to be in Berkeley

    From my literary agency comes this announcement: The 13th Annual Waterside Publishing Conference will be held April 10, 11, & 12, 2003 in Berkeley, CA. For more information or to register please log onto: http://www.waterside.com/conference.html. We hope to see you there!

  • Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research

    Sébastien Paquet has written an article about the rise of personal knowledge publishing.

  • 'One million dollars!'

    Dylan Tweney hails The Death of the $1 Million Software Package in his latest Business 2.0 column: Back in the late 1990s, a software salesman could look you in the eye and say with a straight face that his company’s enterprise system would cost you $1 million. Mercifully, those days are over. … “Companies are…

  • Because I'm an insane idiot

    I’m downloading pMachine today and I’m going to see if it’s really as easy to install as they say. It seems clear that pMachine is positioning itself as a competitor to Movable Type (it has import scripts for MT and GreyMatter), angling for those who prefer PHP over perl. The implied architecture is impressive. The…

  • Seeing the future of CM

    Mediasavvy says the future of content management is open source (after attending the Open Source Content Management Conference, that is): As the computer industry moves in the direction of selling services, instead of hardware and software, open source begins to look like a great way to improve the value you deliver to customers. Meanwhile the…

  • It's Cory's world, we just live in it

    I was rereading http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/network/2002/03/08/cory_google.html by Cory Doctorow (after following Scott Rosenberg’s link to Andrew Googman on the death of metatags. As I mentioned in Scott’s comments, it’s keyword metatags that have the least efficacy and the most potential for gaming of indexers, although I agree with another commenter who suggested that they have a valid…

  • Blog for hogs?

    Would this give blogs street cred?: Marketing Magazine. Jim Carroll. Corporate weblogs. It likely won’t be too long before we see an official Harley-Davidson blog that features ongoing commentary, news and updates from an “evangelist” within the Harley organization. Featured within the main Harley-Davidson site, the effort will emerge as a powerful means by which the…

  • Tweney: Google should index blog RSS feeds

    Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google’s basic unit of indexing is the…

  • Sample code for focused custom Google search

    The site search feature of Google’s free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I’ve come up with…

  • One solution to Google site search

    Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Cast a question on the waters and the answer (or an answer) generally comes back within 24 hours. Ian Landsman sent me a solution in the comments to my previous post. I’d paste the code in here but even when escaped out it will cause problems…

  • XHTML 2.0 to drop backward compatability

    Catching up with Zeldman sent me off in six different directions, of course, but I especially enjoyed reading Web architecture | XML zone : The Web’s future: XHTML 2.0 at IBM’s developerWorks site. The proposed changes to HTML (I mean XHTML) sounds like steps in the right direction (ditching presentational tags, rationalizing noncontaining tags, dropping…

  • Make your URLs human-guessable

    Web addresses were never supposed to be human-readable. The fundamental hyperlinking concept of the Web is intended to mask the underlying Internet protocols and commands required to retrieve data. But the reality is that we see, store, type, copy, and paste URLs all the time (or else the “dotcom” meme would never have taken off),…

  • The dirty little secret of content management

    Dylan Tweney’s latest Business 2.0 column advises businesses to steer carefully between the six-figure CMS overkill solutions that thrived during the dotcom boom and the other end of the spectrum, reinventing the CMS wheel yourself in-house. I’ve been doing content management-related consulting for the last five years and there’s a big hole in the middle…

  • Blogs a half-baked KM solution?

    In Network Computing’s BuzzCut column, Mike DeMaria talks about blogs as an improvement over e-mail for project updating but as an imperfect solution, at best, for archiving and retrieving links: Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can’t possibly live up to their potential.

  • Business blogs in the news again

    Enterpreneur.com publishes a light article called Who Let the Blogs Out?: With a blog, you can answer questions, post business updates, link to similar sites and receive commentary from users. A collaborative company blog could give your employees one place to go to keep up on business happenings, memos and announcements.

  • Turning data into information

    Charly Z also hepped me to Daniel Danilov’s Reflections, where he recently posted a think-piece about how blogs help impose a mental grid on raw data, part of the process the mind uses to turn that data into relevant information: Anyone who complains about blogs being a waste of space or anything of the sort…

  • New (to me) blog tool: Nucleus CMS

    Strangest of places department: Megan Morrone’s LJ blog talks about her move to Movable Type, and her comments there discuss this move as a trend, recapitulate the “it’s hard too install” meme (Megan’s last post is that she has MT up and running but hasn’t had time to customize the look and feel yet, so…

  • Contrarian view on corporate blogs from InformationWeek's Secret CIO

    (via Unsere Kleine Digitale Welt) InformationWeek warns CIO’s about the risks of blogging in the corporate sphere: If you think your staff spends inordinate amounts of time designing PowerPoint presentations now, just imagine what these would-be artists and authors will do to productivity when their creative powers are unleashed on the world of computerized diaries…

  • Allaire's New Blog

    Jeremy Allaire has joined “the ranks of what Jon Udell calls CXO Blogs” with a mixed personal and professional blog “about media, communications and applications over the Internet.” According to one of his first entries: Over the past six-months, like many other netizens, I’ve become addicted to browsing and subscribing to blogs. My company has…

  • Two Links from the Virtual Chase

    From explodedlibrarian.info (via Research News: The Virtual Chase) come two good blog-related links: On the Net’s The Blog Realm about blogs as a source of information for librarians, and as a content-management solution.(Basic stuff for any experienced blogger but good introa and a reminder that this stuff still requires explaining on a daily basis.) SearchEngineBlog,…

  • Your Resume as a Blog

    Krzysztof Kowalczyk (I love his motto: “Blog or you’ll be blogged.”) suggests that a focused, balanced blog (or k-log, or blog category, or RSS feed, etc.) could be used as a dynamic resume, one that will be much more impressive in retrospect than a dry recitation of skills in a tradition flat resume: Keep a…