Month: June 2007 (Page 2 of 3)

The saga of TV sta­tion search wierd­ness continues.

For the last few days I have been doing a bunch of search inter­face test­ing on the news sites of our local TV sta­tions. I had a stan­dard list of search sub­jects that I ran through all the sites. One of which was “motor­cy­cle chase”. (Oth­er search­es includ­ed the words: car wreck, truck tire, and boat race.)

I returned to two of the sites this morn­ing to look for the con­tact infor­ma­tion for the news direc­tors. I have a com­plaint to make about their biased cov­er­age of motor­cy­cle safe­ty. Specif­i­cal­ly about their will­ing­ness to swal­low, unchewed, the PR pablum that the Wash­ing­ton State Patrol feeds them. This PSA greet­ed me on KING5’s site.

Obvi­ous­ly KING5’s cook­ie was still hang­ing out in my brows­er cache.

Note with me the irony of the sit­u­a­tion, the car is cross­ing the cen­ter­line. Shows the true state of motor­cy­cle safe­ty here in the fine state of Wash­ing­ton. Idiot cager’s prob­a­bly on the phone.

Some new campers in the cab­in this afternoon.

• xkcd - Sweet, geeky stick fig­ure car­toons. Well, maybe not sweet. Very exis­ten­tial. Very occa­sion­al. Very worth wait­ing for.

• Joho the Blog — David Wein­berg­er’s intrigu­ing and occa­sion­al­ly mad­den­ing­ly insights into all things inter­net and beyond.

• Mod­ern Mechanix — I just love these reprints from our geeky past. Mag­i­cal mir­rors can be so maddening.

• Box­es and Arrows — Essen­tial read­ing for infor­ma­tion geeks and knowl­edge wran­glers. One of the places that you have to go back and read the archives to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

• Smash­ing Mag­a­zine — Annoy­ing large green head­lines and a whole ware­house of web­site build­ing tools tips and tricks. I mean how many peo­ple need all of the “40+ Tooltips Scripts with AJAX, JavaScript, and CSS?” Not many, but it’s bloody use­ful to have them all col­lect­ed in one place.

In the May issue of UXMat­ters Pabi­ni Gabriel-Petit writes about how User Expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als fit into the over­all prod­uct devel­op­ment team. (Shar­ing Own­er­ship of UX) He argues for a prod­uct team made up of three dis­ci­plines: Prod­uct man­age­ment, user expe­ri­ence, and engi­neer­ing, all hav­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for dif­fer­ent aspects of the user expe­ri­ence. As he points out, user expe­ri­ence is often not accord­ed the same kind of respect (or resources) as prod­uct man­age­ment and engineering.

If your job is to advo­cate for the user expe­ri­ence in a less than sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment you will want to read this arti­cle for the sim­ple, clear argu­ments that Gabriel-Petit makes for the impor­tance of the role of user expe­ri­ence archi­tect and the val­ue he or she brings to the prod­uct cre­ation process. As well as the expla­na­tion of the respon­si­bilites of the oth­er dis­c­plines in cre­at­ing a good user expe­ri­ence for a product.

Some­times new words help the peo­ple who have heard it all before hear some­thing for the first time ;-)

Go to the Ambidex­trous Mag­a­zine website.

Click on one of the PDFs on the front page.
Read the nice­ly illus­trat­ed, pro­fes­sion­al­ly type­set article.

Car­ry one of the ideas around in your head for the rest of the day.

Tell me what you saw.

(thanks to DR over at meta­cool for the orig­i­nal link.)

Fol­low­ing on the Web Drag­on’s book review post.

Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has an arti­cle on how Google’s PageR­ank (cur­rent­ly) works. It’s a sum­ma­ry of the things that are known about Google’s PageR­ank algorithm.

It’s good to see a dis­cus­sion of PageR­ank that reminds the read­er the PR is a mea­sure of quality/authority of a page and is not a test for rel­e­vance. PR is estab­lished inde­pen­dent of your search; it’s used after the search results are gath­ered to help in the rank­ing of the results.

The arti­cle is made up most­ly of quotes that illus­trate aspects of how PageR­ank is cal­cu­lat­ed and used. Every quote includes a link to it’s source so you are free to explore fur­ther if some­thing catch­es your eye. There’s a small sec­tion with ref­er­ences to a selec­tion of papers and arti­cle for those curi­ous about the heavy lift­ing and com­plex math­e­mat­ics involved in the algorithm.

If you have your own web­sites and are curi­ous about their PageR­anks you can use one of sev­er­al tools list­ed in the Tools and Ser­vices sec­tion. Be aware that these are links direct­ly to the tools and the descrip­tions won’t help you choose a best tool for the job.

Well worth the 20- to 30 min­utes that it will take you to read it. Def­i­nite­ly some­thing to book­mark for the col­lec­tion of links. If you don’t like to screen read longer arti­cles they have promised a PDF in the near future. I’ll add it’s link to this post when I get it.