Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.
One of the discount usability movement’s basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the world, and to make this happen we need more people to take on usability assignments.
via Anybody Can Do Usability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
“The budget was about 20 percent of what we normally would charge,” said Greer. “After one meeting with the client, almost all our communication was by e-mail. The script was developed and approved using a collaborative tool provided by www.box.net. Internally, we all could look at the script no matter where we were, make suggestions and get to a final draft with complete transparency — easy, convenient and free. We did not have a budget to shoot new footage, yet we had no budget either for stock photography the old way — paying royalties of $100 to $2,000 per image. We found a source, istockphoto.com, which offered great photos for as little as a few dollars.
“We could easily preview all the images, place them in our program to make sure they worked, purchase them online and download the high-resolution versions — all in seconds,” Greer added. “We had a script that called for 4 to 5 voices. Rather than hiring local voice talent — for $250 to $500 per hour — we searched the Internet for high-quality voices that we could afford. We found several sites offering various forms of narration or voice-overs. We selected www.voices.com. In less than one minute, we created an account, posted our requirements and solicited bids. Within five minutes, we had 10 to 15 ‘applicants’ ” — charging 10 percent of what Greer would have paid live talent.
via Op-Ed Columnist – The Do-It-Yourself Economy – NYTimes.com.
FourSquare is an up-and-coming social web app that provides context to place and people, allowing you to:
- Find your friends
- Get points and badges
- Discover cool things to do
To all those who are endlessly plugging it – many people in the web2.0, social media sphere – I have a few questions:
- Do you have a regular 9-5ish job?
- Do you have a spouse?
- Do you have children?
If the answer is no to all three questions, I understand your passion for FourSquare. Your life probably revolves around your circle of friends, what you’re doing tonight, where you’re going to eat, and who is going to be with you. You’re probably also in your 20s or early 30s. You are a grown-up teenager.
But for many more people, the answer to those three questions is yes. And for those, I think FourSquare is just not that interesting. The first (and probably most important) use of FourSquare – finding where your friends are – is just not as relevant. For these people, they’re busy, they’re eating at home with spouses and kids, they’re taking kids to lessons and practices, etc.
As for the second use – points and badges – umm … are we in grade school again? Get real, buy yourself a used Tamagotchi.
The most realistic use I can see is the discovery feature: what people have done that is cool and interesting and unique … and you want to do it on the weekend.
Am I wrong? Go ahead, flame me.
Everywhere everyone complains about information overload. Forget the 1000-channel universe – we’re dealing with the million-channel universe … times 10.
There’s too much news, too many new technologies, too much information, too many tweets, too many great blog posts, too many ads, too much of everything. As we’ve been saying for years, it’s an attention economy and the scarcity is in our heads.
Here’s how I deal with information overload – mostly influenced by Dave Winer, who invented the “river of news” concept, in addition to a bunch of other interesting and ubiquitous stuff like RSS.
The stream is there. The stream is flowing. I can’t stop right river, and I can’t stop the water. Building a dam is just a temporary solution, as eventually, after backing up, the water will start flowing again, either over my dam or around it.
So …
- when I want some news, I dip a toe in the stream
- when I want some social (yeah, I know that is ungrammatical and sounds weird) I hit Twitter or FaceBook
- when I want to see what people I’ve connected with are saying, I visit Google Reader
- when I want to see what’s hot, I go to PopURLs
And when I don’t have time, I don’t. When I don’t feel like it, I don’t. When I’m too busy, I don’t. And don’t stress about it either.
There’s a simple realization inherent in this: there’s just too much to keep up. Maybe there always has been, in spite of a perception that “all the news that’s fit to print” was in the dead tree thing that appeared on your doorstep in the afternoon. So there’s no point trying. In fact, if something is important enough … it will find you.
Adopting this attitude is a wonderful stress reliever if you are the type (seemingly more common in older generations) that feels a need to keep up with everything.
It certainly has been for me.
Interesting, however, that the agent on the case has a Yahoo! email address … in China.
As I first saw on Twitter, the WWW is 20 years old today.
It’s hard to believe that something so ubiquitous and useful and … essential is only 20 years old. I mean, I wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for the web, and that’s probably true of millions of people today.
Around the web:
C|Net:
Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.
Read Write Web:
Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.
One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so putting raw data in standardized format up on the web.
ZDnet:
The original “napkin” sketch …
Plugged In:
The term ‘Web’ was invented by English scientist Sir Time Berners Lee on March 13th, 1989 and now the wild web has reached 216+ million websites (as per February 2009 data from Netcraft).
TED blog:
Watch Tim Berners-Lee’s talk from TED2009 on TED.com …
Technologizer:
I’m about to board an airplane to go to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, and have been brooding about the fact that I’ll be deprived of the Web for just a few hours while we’re in flight. It’s startling to remember that something as essential as the Web is so new–and that the guy who came up with it is not only still with us but very much involved in shaping its future.
TechCrunch:
The Web is becoming a massive interlinked computer, and computers need data. As more and more data becomes linked across the Web, the more that it can be accessed, analyzed, and computed. As Berners-Lee says, “Data is relationships.”
Thanks, Tim!
I signed up for a Windows Live Messenger account this morning and was struck by the infrequently asked questions:
The title says frequently asked questions, but they’re obviously not. They’re actually questions Microsoft wishes people would ask …
What ordinary person – Joe in the warehouse, Betty in accounting – has ever asked: How do I create a strong password? Betty is much more concerned about creating one that she can actually remember.
And Joe has never wondered: How can I create my mobile credentials?. Seriously now … what on earth are those? I’m not sure I know, and I’m a COO and architect for a software company!
These are FAQs that have never been asked. Someone, somewhere, has been told: write some FAQs so we have some help on the website. Go figure out what people might want to know.
It might be easier to … just ask people what they want to know. Or check your logs and figure out what seems hard. Or watch a couple of users interacting with the system.
It’d certainly be better.
From the Google blog:
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
Awe is a good word – one trillion is a big, big number. Wow.
UPDATE Feb 21: pls note Trisha’s gracious reply below …
I can’t believe believe people are still sending out link exchange requests:
Hello,
Recently I contacted you regarding a link exchange request. I was hoping that you’ve had the time to review this request and consider my proposal. We are developing a reciprocal link area on our website and would be happy to trade text links with your website. You links will be on the PsPrint.com website, although we are not entirely sure where at this point in the project.
Please let me know if you are interested in discussing this further. You can contact me at trisha@psprint.com or 510.224.2106. If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter. Thank you for your time.
Trisha Fawver
Marketing Manager
PsPrint.com
510.224.2106
Create. Print. Mail. Faster.
This is now the third email I’ve gotten from Trisha, which is starting to approach spammishness. Note the veiled threat in this statement:
If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter.
In other words, I’ll continue to receive unsolicited emails until I say yes or until I waste my time composing an email saying no.
If you ever needed a visual explanation of how marketing can shoot itself in the foot, see this:
First line: PROFESSIONAL WEB HOSTING (emphasis added)
Third line: Starting at $4.95/mo (emphasis added)
. . .
. . .
‘Nuff said.
Job warehouse Monster has had an ongoing security nightmare, with hackers infiltrating the database and pilfering usernames, passwords, and email addresses with which to launch phishing attacks.The worst part? Monster doesn’t know how bad the problem is! From an email sent to me this morning (note the bolded portion):
As you may be aware, the Monster resume database was recently the target of malicious activity that involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for some of our job seekers with resumes posted on Monster sites. Monster responded by conducting a comprehensive review of internal processes and procedures, and notified those job seekers that their contact records had been downloaded illegally.The Company has determined that this was not an isolated incident. Despite ongoing analysis, the scope of this activity is impossible to pinpoint. Monster believes illegally downloaded contact information may be used to lure job seekers into opening a “phishing” email that attempts to acquire sensitive financial information. This has been the case in similar attacks on other websites.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
