details of a global brain
BlogWalk card walls
Ton Zylstra has photographed all the creative outputs of the BlogWalk sessions from 19th March 2004. There is a lot of ideas to consider.
Sharing is understanding
An unidentifyable blog author explains the value of knowledge sharing: If you have ever taught, then you already know that teaching is certainly the most effective way to master knowledge.When I was a young software developer, I also did some training in C++ language and object-oriented programming. Although I knew enough about C++ to do…
Aaron Marcus on interaction design
Aaron Marcus interviewed by Sharon Poggenpohl: There are design documents which designers make, that convey wisdom and are part of transactions with colleagues from other disciplines, and users. We as designers must talk increasingly with and communicate with other professionals from other disciplines.” In this interview Aaron Marcus refers to his work on “LoCoS” a…
Experimenting with Tinderbox XML
After I sucessfully imported some parts of my old weblog I reconsidered the idea to publish with Tinderbox to a database instead of using it to render HTML. Here is the current idea: A Python script will read the Tinderbox file and publish this into a MySQL database The database will be synchronized with a…
What’s the blogging point?
James Farmer discusses once again the benefits of weblogging in education. He concludes: … in a setting where expression, collaboration, peer support, successful class dynamics, risk taking, sharing and all these recognized characteristics of effective learning are fostered, then personal publishing allows for a revolutionary form of expression and exploration between learners in the same…
Card sorting: a definitive guide
Donna Maurer and Todd Wafel get a hold on card sorting in the design process: “Card sorting is a simple, reliable, and inexpensive method for gathering user input for an overall structure. It is most effective in the early stages of a (re)design. And while it’s not intended to be a silver bullet, when done…
Gurus vs. Bloggers
Andrei Herasimchuk has posted the first Gurus v. Bloggers Design Shootout, comparing the sites of Richard Saul Wurman, Bruce Tognazzi, Peter Merholz, Jakob Nielsen, Edward Tufte, Gerry McGovern, Donald Norman, and Andrei himself against design bloggers Jeffery Zeldman, D. Keith Robinson, Andy Budd, Didier Hilhorst, John Gruber, Greg Storey, John Hicks, and Josh Williams. The…
Open Source software lacks good interface design
Michelle Levesque contemplates about the role of Interface Design in Open Source Software: The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary software’s more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that…
RSS-Aggregator with Twisted
Valentino Volonghi: This is a fully featured RSS aggregator with parsing included. It’s scalable to very high numbers of feeds and can be used in multi-client environment through web using Twisted with a little code on top of Nevow, or can easily be integrated inside every app which uses some of the toolkits supported by…
Unmoderated announce lists and “swarm unintelligence”
One really odd phenomenon on the Internet is announcement mailing lists that are unmoderated. Especially if the receivers of that announcements never have learned that mail list servers have extra e-mail addresses for unsubscribe commands. Here is a true story: An unnamed software vendor announced a new product release through his announcement mailing-list a number…
Virtual Behavior Setting
In an article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Anita Blanchard, Assistant Professor of organizational psychology at the University of North Carolina, shows how Behavior setting theories can be applied to describe interaction within online communities. [via Emerging Communications]
Enhancing HTML with CSS+JavaScript
John Ford does some interesting things on his website with CSS and JavaScript. Look at the “Show” feature on the left and the “Related” link in the top right corner (there is also a funny contact page).
What they didn’t teach me in Design & Usability school
Scott Berkun was program manager at Microsoft for Internet Explorer. He wrote a nice essay about what he missed in university (and what might have been the reasons for it). Looking back on his work experience he summarizes what is important: The challenge is that what makes you credible to a developer, marketing executive, documentation…
Twisted based Weblog system
Alan Green works on a Twisted based weblog system (see here for Twisted). Besides Twisted he uses SQLite (and PySQLite) to store the data. In an earlier post Alan also explains the reasons for Twisted. There I found also a very interesting link to Ian Bicking’s Website Framework Shootout.
Near-Time Flow
This appears to be exactly what I need for my seminars: a simple tool that shares data about websites, RSS feeds and documents among participants of a seminar. Unfortunatly 90% of my students run on Windows – so I will probably not be able to use this software even if it would be free. [via…
New version of wxPython released
wxPython 2.5.1.5 is out. And there is also an Installer for Panther. [via schockwellenreiter]
Donald Norman on mental models
Here is an interview with Donald Norman about the concept of mental models. It contains an interesting (and longer) passage about the possible relation between mental models and emotion: A mental model provides an immediate expectation about what you think is going to happen and the emotional system will evaluate that positively (positive affect or…
IHMC releases CMap v3
The Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) released the version 3 of their concept mapping client/server CMap. We were considering to do a full round of testing of the v2 release during the “Discourse tools” seminar, but developments in the course didn’t leave the time for that. Among a large set of new features,…
Blog styles and antagonisms
Jay Cross compares two blogging styles: journal and reference book. He suggests to further develop the weblog practice (and suggests his own blog as an practice example): The structure of most blogs accommodates their writers more than their readers. It’s time for bloggers to share their goals with their readers. Those goals should inform the…
Between life and death: There are just three design principles
Students love to ask this question: “Is there any common strategy to design?”. Then I usually reply: “Yes, clearly there are three simple common strategies!”. They are: Creating order from chaos Creating chaos from order Copy from the best examples Information designers usually have to create order from chaos. Information overload does not mean “too…
Got any book recommendations?