magpie's shiny things

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.

Re the pre­vi­ous two posts.

As I men­tioned ear­li­er today, there’s more than one thing hinky about one of the local TV sta­tion’s web­site. I now know exact­ly how I got myself stuck in mem­ber­ship hell. Follow along:

• open your favorite browser.
• go to www.king5.com
• enter a search like, say, “one car”
• enter anoth­er, “two trucks”
• anoth­er, “three buses”
• anoth­er, “four boats”
• anoth­er, “five bikes”
• anoth­er, “one more than I’m allowed”

oops… mem­ber­ship hell page.

• press the back­space key, nope still here
• click on your browser’s back but­ton, nope still here Continue read­ing “And Now I Know How I Ended Up in Membership Hell.”