Category: User Experience

  • Weird modal dialog box put up by iTunes

    Thanks, iTunes! Originally uploaded by xian. Not really sure how to respond to this. Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.

  • Getting fired up for IDEA 2007

    I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design. IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea…

  • Looks like Mash is in beta

    Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis. If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation. Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash…

  • Pushing social patterns

    One of my top priorities in my job as curator of Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is to help polish up and publish to the wider web community a series of social-media oriented design patterns that our community platform team has been working on. The first of this, Vote to Promote (a sort of generic “Digg…

  • Reputation and Patterns at SXSW

    Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the…

  • Build your own search robot at Searchbots

    Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job. I’ve finally checked…

  • My 'social media design patterns' slides from BarCamp Block

    To help edit and refactor the list of social media patterns we brainstormed in the session, drop by BarCampBlock SocialMedia DesignPatterns.

  • BarCamp virgin here – be gentle

    Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto. According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or…

  • Sifry steps down as Technorati CEO

    Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable. I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of…

  • Groundswell author on blogging a book

    Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.) Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li…

  • Podcast of my SXSW panel now live

    If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing…

  • Lessons from failure at Boxes & Arrows

    I am curating a series of articles at the venerable information architecture (and user experience) web magazine Boxes and Arrows, based on the panel I moderated on the same topic at this year’s IA Summit. The first article in the series is Joe Lamantia’s It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time: The…

  • Technorati launches new design

    Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!): > First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag…

  • Twitterific weirdness

    Most of the time when I post a tweet using Twitterific (which I mostly love), I get this strange window popping up: Why does Twitterific want to talk to Skype anyway? Bueller?

  • Answering danah's twitter questions

    In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…): > **First, the practical question. Can i quote you?** >[ ] Yes, and you *must* use my real name. >[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information. >[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.…

  • Avoid Tagged.com like the plague

    On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago. Now…

  • Amazon adds social networking

    Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of…

  • I'm impressed by pobox.com's customer service

    I’ve been using pobox as a mail forwarding service since 1995 (I think I read about it in Wired and I was sold on the idea of a middle layer between my correspondents and my potentially ever changing email addresses). When I started owning my own domains I simply forwarded custom (“vanity”) email addresses from…

  • Blog responses to my SxSW panel

    I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to…

  • My slides from the IA Summit

    Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web: (I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.) And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure:…

  • My slides from SxSW

    These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides. I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich. **Update:** Here are Ted’s slides: