details of a global brain
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Visual Design Elements of Weblogs?
Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright:Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs [DOC] Conclusion: One pattern clearly emerging as a result of this research is that individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. This confirms one of the predictions / observations leading to this study: that ‘significant’…
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Content vs Context – a contradiction?
Peter Baumgartner reminds us about the role of usage context for quality assessment of learning materials: In all the projects funded by the German BMBF we have tried to deliver excellent e-Learning content. As chairman of the “audit commission” I led a group of experts who recommended the ministry a change of gears: Instead to…
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More critic on Nielsen
Andrei Herasimchuk wrote an open letter to Jakob Nielsen in response to this Alertbox story: […] Mr. Nielsen, I respectfully request you stop posting articles like this. You do yourself and the usability field a disservice by speaking in terms that are vague, not backed up with research data, and filled with hyperbole. Further, until…
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Using the 5Es to Understand Users
Whitney Quesenbery has a very memorable explanation about usability: The 5Es are helpful in planning your usability testing, because each suggests specific techniques:
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Spike
Spike is a a cross-platform shared clipboard (OS X, Windows 2K+).
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SOAP in Python
Here is a good place to start learning about SOAP in Python (written by Mike Olson, Scott Archer and Uche Ogbuji). There are five Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 [via Daily Python-URL]
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TinderDo sample file
I have added a sample file for a ToDo list management with Tinderbox. It is basically implementing the description of “TinderDo” by Gordon Meyer. Unfortunatly he did not include a sample file to start directly. So I made one myself. You can add tasks (and nested tasks) in the ToDo container and after entering a…
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When user interfaces fail
Some people like to do “designer bashing” from time to time. I was just in the mood to do some “developer bashing” today. There are a number of reasons why user interfaces of many software packages fail. I assume (slightly unfair and inaccurate), that in many cases there is no interface designer involved with user…
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Educational scenarios
Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture: Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and…
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Tinderbox 2.2
Eastgate released Tinderbox 2.2. Many PC users don’t know about Tinderbox. There is a Windows version coming soon.
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I mix & you mix, we all mix for iMix
Today Apple released iTunes 4.5 for Mac and Windows with a number of new features: All the artist/album names and song titles in my library have a shortcut into the music store now. And there is a party shuffle mode where you can control the flow of the songs played and see which song recently…
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A closer look at why people blog
Here is a paper (PDF) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz about motivations for weblogging: We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no…
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John Seely Brown website
George Siemens: I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website. [via elearnspace]
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Apple boosts professional digital media authoring tools
Apple releases Apple Motion and DVD Studio Pro 3. Motion ($299) seems to be rivaling Adobe After Effects ($999). I have seen Final Cut (now with high definition support) shooting out Adobe Premiere long ago and even boiled Avid Media Composer with ease. DVD Studio Pro is to my knowledge a very good DVD authoring…
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Free culture
Lawrence Lessig convinced his editor to release the book under a creative commons licence. Now Aaron Schwartz took it and put the complete book online – as wiki, so anyone can contribute and change the content.
Got any book recommendations?