How soon is now?
Mark Bernstein on Akscyn’s Law and response-times in hypertexts.
The case for plastic pages
The case for plastic pages
In the past I have done a number of websites with page-layouts that
establish themselves at a fixed width, usualy for reasons of
development time, and I supposed [I admit I did minimal research], ease
of reading. Here’s some interesting research about reading on screen
which has made me rethink…
Social networks, web-as-brain, and ‘emergent’
Social networks, web-as-brain, and ’emergent’ infomation architecture
Ooohh – this pushed pretty much all my buttons… again, from today’s tomalak’s realm
“Some scientists argue that the structure of the Web
mirrors the organization of human and animal brains. The brain’s
architecture, a highly connected network of neurons joined by synapses,
is responsible for important functions such as perceptions, learning,
etc. The basic idea is that Web pages act as neurons and hypertext
links act as synapses. Web pages exist in complex patterns and
hypertext links direct the flow of information from one page to the
next.”
Transforming information retrieval on the Web: a new direction
It’s my birthday Surprise me…
It’s my birthday
Surprise me…
David Gelertner interviewed ‘Mirror Worlds’
David Gelertner interviewed
‘Mirror Worlds’ author on GUI operating system deficiencies as they
relate to ‘real-life’ and the organisational power of computingf; and
being blown-up by the Unabomber.
found via Tomalak’s Realm.
Poetic Programming This reads like
Poetic Programming
This reads like a retread of ‘e-services’, asp’s or one of the
other ‘software-on-demand’ visions of the world that have done the
rounds of the last few years. But this article has some nice
turns-of-phrase and take on why this model of software development and
deployment should be driven from the need to reduce complexity rather than any other motivating factor.
“Writing code, he explains, is like writing poetry: every word, each
placement counts. Except that software is harder, because digital poems can
have millions of lines which are all somehow interconnected. Try fixing
programming errors, known as bugs, and you often introduce new ones. So far,
he laments, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the beast of
complexity”
Communicating interaction design Trying to
Communicating interaction design
Trying to find as many schools of thought and techniques for
representing complex interaction design and information/content
architectures – if you have any favourite texts/techniques, please mail me
Semantic Web Here is the
Semantic Web
Here is the Tim Berners-Lee article in Scientific American that seems to have caused a lot of discussion.
Scientific American:
Feature Article: The Semantic Web: May 2001
Survivability in networks Just gave
Survivability in networks
Just gave a talk and participated in a discussion at the london Advance For Design
on what happens next for interaction/experience designers in the
current difficult times. A little random, but I think it went down
well. Some of the org. design I did in my last days at Sapient
(informed by some of the themes in this presentation) seems to be
getting put in place (a year later!) which is encouraging.
Advance for Design London: 11.04.2001: powerpoint presentation: 471k
Five fallacies “Content is a
Five fallacies
“Content is a commodity. Anyone with $99 is a published
author. Anyone with a computer is a publisher. Today’s New York Times
is free online. Your manifold value proposition is being erased. Your
key remaining strength is your historical strength: anticipating what
people want to read and knowing how to sell it to them.”
see also, as per bloody usual, Shirky…
Petafloptimism 