is the name of Mike Kuniavsky’s blog. Mike was the first person I ever met who did user-testing, and invited me to my first user-test. I was visiting San Francisco and he was working at HotWired, where Pouneh (an ex-colleague at Delphi) worked.

It was the first time I saw designers squirm on a (threadbare) sofa when confronted with a live feed of real people using their designs; and even though it was nothing to do with me, I empathised: with them, and the subject. A scenario repeated far too often for me since!

So MikeK. has a blog – I’m sure it’ll be as instructive as that first meeting with him!

» Orangecone: Mike Kuniavsky’s blog

THAT’s where you’ve gone!. Starting to get really fed up of finding out that mates of yours have gone over to Typepad, and hence have a new URL, but you have no idea.

The Trotts should build in a “change of address” card feature.

Molly and Mike have whipped-up The Interaction Architect Job Title Generator in response to the latest venerable trolls about “what it is we call ourselves when we are doing what we do”. A swift click on it generated the title of this post as my new-new job description.

I was travelling in a cab on Sunday evening and the cabbie asked what I did, and I replied in the usual way – this conversation plays out this way most often:

Me : “I’m a designer”

Cabbie: “what sort of thing do you design”

Me : “Websites mainly – on the internet. Do you use the Internet?”

Cabbie : “nah – not that much, my wife and kids do”

Me : “Right, right”

Cabbie : “so where do you do that then?”

Me : “at the BBC”

Cabbie : “Oh yeah? Yeah the wife likes that, the BBC website”

Me : “oh… good!”

Cabbie : “so you do the graphics then? How it looks and that?”

Me : “Sometimes, but more often I work on how it’s going to work, so that it’s easy to use – and does what you want it to do.”

Cabbie : “Ahhh, right. Could do with more of that on the internet. Things are too bleedin’ hard for me to bother with most of the time.”

Me : “Just here anywhere on the left is fine for me. Cheers”

Anyway. My point is – it’s not so hard to explain what we do, and for people to understand the point off doing it. Discussing what that’s called is just bores me to tears.

Semi-daily (it seems) news of sufficiently-advanced technology.

» The Forbes / Wolfe Nanotechnology blog
[via <a href=”http:/www.boingboing.net”boingboing]

…can now be found over at /artifacts. First of a cascade of apologies: I haven’t got permalinks functioning there at the moment…

Along with Hecklerandcoch, I think Tesugen.com is my favourite read at the moment. The writer, Peter, has been reading both Feynman and Christopher Alexander. A heady cocktail, but one that is leading to insights such as this one:

“Nobody has a perfect image of what it is that needs to be built. One’s vision is affected by what one learns by analyzing, building, and experiencing the yet to be finished artifact. New ideas come; some old ideas are discarded. Building is an exploration. Blueprints and prototypes always fall short of the (even unfinished) artifact.”

» Tesugen.com

On the Google weblog there is a little widget for finding out what Google’s AdSense program would place by the way of relevent advertising on your site.

The BBC doesn’t carry advertising, but if to supplement the licence-income it makes, it decided to take the 50c click-thru bounty from Google’s adwords, then it would have a pleasant surprise.

Google thinks the most relevant ads for the BBC’s website are for BBC merchandising…

The Demos Greenhouse blog is warming up nicely, and has a RSS feed here (not full posts unfortunately)

Tom Steinberg at iWire on the brou-ha-ha about blogs, power-laws and Clay‘s part in it all:

“the blogosphere environment actually conspires against the successful evolution of difficult ideas, unless they get programmed into a form of application. This is a flip side to the creativity of the blog world, where the same constraints (i.e. noise and miscommunication) can often lead to serendipity and innovation.”

Not sure I buy everything Tom says there, but it’s a thought-provoker to be sure. Once we’re up-and-running with a decent, active population, we’ve definitely got our own ‘pearls-in-the-mud’ problem on our project. We’ve got a couple of things we think might help.

One is that we will have a strong geographical focus – so that the big national power-law curve of what people are working on becomes many smaller domains. These will have their own zipf curves I’m sure, but more comprehensible and accessible. Themes within these smaller local domains can, and will go TransLocal, which is when things get interesting.

Secondly, these smaller domains will have access to human editors: acting in sherpa-not-censor mode; who can cluster quicker, smarter and cheaper than an algorithm; at least while we are in start-up mode – also giving feedback and encouragement to those building and sailing their ships.

Thirdly – the ‘t’ word. Taxonomy. We have a large, but discrete problem domain, which gives us a large, but discrete taxonomy we can generate. Done well, it will give people structure to build their own ideas around, go translocal and ultimately the ability to improve that structure based on their experience.

We’re trying to get just the right amount of mud for good stuff to happen, but some killer pearl-detection officers and equipment on hand for everyone to enjoy.

Can we have our cake and eat it? The next couple of months will show us.

» iSociety: Scaling Clay Shirky

Mike Lee’s blog continues to delight. Here he goes on a digital-imaging-ubicomp-step-regression-feedback-spree.