Found this via Tomalak. Shneiderman says that visual interfaces will let us master complex information systems. I think being comfortable with a complex system is very different from ‘mastering’ it. More momentum moving us to Neal Stephenson’s oral/visual culture?

“Shneiderman thinks visual tools are what will let humans master computers. If he’s right, the next-generation Internet may have fewer software “robots” than most pundits predict. Or if software agents do catch on, visual tools may be how we control them.

Control, after all, is what Shneiderman thinks is still missing from the computing experience. Computers and the Internet are too darned frustrating, he says, and the only way to put people back in control is through new software designs that are more human-centered, chiefly by leveraging our powerful visual sense.”

» Washtech.com: A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future

You are Optimus Prime!

Vast, red and ready to turn into a lorry at the slightest provocation, you are a robot to be reckoned with. Although sickeningly noble, you just can’t resist a good interplanetary war, especially when Orson Welles is involved. You have friends who can shoot tapes from their chests. Tapes that turn into panthers. And other friends who are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs who jump out of planes. Will you have my children?

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Following on from the Jon Udell article, Paul Hammond pointed me to this blog/biological crossover from Mark Bernstein.

“There’s still a lot nobody really knows about weblogs. How do you get, and keep, a great audience? Does the future hold a million small weblogs, or two really big ones?

I’m hoping to learn about weblogs from an alife simulator I’m building. In the simulated world, we have 600 little artificial writers (I call them weblets) with 600 artificial weblogs. If traffic is the currency of the Web, each of the weblets wants to get rich.

Some have big blogrolls (so lots of people will think well of them). Some have lots of daily links (so they can reward their friends quickly). Some hoard traffic, some spread it around. We’ll see who wins.”

Sorry about all these blog-related posts. I don’t want to become one of those boring sites that just bangs on about blogs the whole time, but there is a lot of stuff looking at the second-order effects of the blog ecology at the moment.

» Mark Bernstein: May0201

Some fascinating (and as the author points out, somewhat “fashionable”) analogies drawn in this article by Jon Udell, looking at the feedback loops being created by referrer “backlinks” displayed on weblog pages.

“The information trails written in backlinks are, of course, new grist for Google’s mill. They also enable an emerging breed of software, the social network analyzer, to visualize patterns of group formation.

The fact that groups are not readily identifiable seems at odds with the notion that blogging is a collaborative effort. In forums and newsgroups, well-defined groups interact directly in shared spaces. In blogspace, individuals control autonomous spaces. Groups are fluid coalitions. Interaction happens in more indirect ways. These are hard rules to play by. And that is why life took so long to achieve multicellularity.”

» O’Reilly Network: “Blogspace Under the Microscope” by Jon Udell 05/03/2002

My proposal has been accepted for a “birds of a feather” session at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference next week:

User-Experience Design and the Next Levels of the Web
Date: 05/14/2002
Time: 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Bayshore

Moderated by: Matt Jones, BBC New Media

Web services, The Semantic Web, P2P, WiFi – the emerging technologies being discussed at this conference are being examined primarily within a business and technology context.

This BOF session will try and explore the user-experience, usability and design issues that they throw up.

We’ll try and have some informal talks about the technology – and get beyond the buzzphrases. Construct scenarios that look at the design opportunities they present, and also the challenges to the skillsets, mindsets and practices commonplace in the design community today.

If you’re attending the conference, please come along and contribute. Should be fun!

In an article on About.com:

“When you add it all up, BBCi Search certainly does provide a different user experience than Google’s own sites, even though the results are nearly identical. If you use Google for its combination of power, speed, relevance and detail, you won’t find anything of interest at BBCi Search. But if you like the idea of a powerful search engine so simple that the entire “how to search” instructions amount to six sentences and one graphic, this may be the one for you — especially if you have an interest in UK-specific material.”

Also has some links to stories in the British press about BBCi Search and the fuss it has caused.

» About.com: “BBC Joins the Search Engine Fray, Users Win”

as Le Corbusier put it, is further warned against here in a piece about Karl Popper. The emphasis given in the quote below is mine.

He criticised what came to be called solutioneering: the jumping to solutions – reorganisations, replanning – without spelling out what the problem was, or if there was one. At the back of this lay “holism”, the belief that problems must be tackled “as a whole”. He showed that the holistic method turns out to be impossible. The greater the changes attempted, the greater their unintended and unexpected repercussions, forcing upon the holistic engineer the expedient of piecemeal improvisation – the “notorious phenomenon of unplanned planning”

» The Guardian: “A legacy of swans left to science : Karl Popper”

The search engine I’ve been working on and talked about at The ASIS&T IA Summit has gone live on the homepage of BBCi

Go team!