January 8, 2009
Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy (Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer Good starting place for competitive and idea analysis. [tf]
Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy (Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer Good starting place for competitive and idea analysis. [tf]
January 7, 2009
“ First the standard caveat: designing a major media site is not as easy as it may appear. It is not like designing a blog and not like designing a standard “web presence” for a company. There are hundreds of internal stakeholders to answer to, millions of daily users to please, and a ton of legacy and third-party code that is often outside your control. Anyone who tries to knock down the virtues of a major media site redesign based on how far it falls short of perfection is making the wrong comparison. The most important benchmark to grade is simply the amount of improvement (or worsening) from the last iteration of the site.
Mike Davidson - Thoughts on the ESPN.com Redesign All hail MikeD. [tf]
A | guardian.co.uk I always forget the Guardian’s excellent index pages. Nice, direct style for topics. [tf]
A | guardian.co.uk I always forget the Guardian’s excellent index pages. Nice, direct style for topics. [tf]
Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results? - ReadWriteWeb … So either Google utilizes a trusted source that is not listed in “more sources” or they really extract that information from the unstructured text at http://ububu.com/BritneySpears.html . Which would make this whole thing quite huge. This is really the crux of the question. To conclude that there is semantic analysis going on just because some of the info displayed appears in subject-predicate-object format would be a mistake (an after the fact, therefor because of the fact fallacy) but if those connections were being discovered by Google automatically when they where not displayed in a structured or straightforward way before - then we could conclude there’s some semantic analysis going on. …
Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results? - ReadWriteWeb
… So either Google utilizes a trusted source that is not listed in “more sources” or they really extract that information from the unstructured text at http://ububu.com/BritneySpears.html . Which would make this whole thing quite huge.

This is really the crux of the question. To conclude that there is semantic analysis going on just because some of the info displayed appears in subject-predicate-object format would be a mistake (an after the fact, therefor because of the fact fallacy) but if those connections were being discovered by Google automatically when they where not displayed in a structured or straightforward way before - then we could conclude there’s some semantic analysis going on. …

January 6, 2009
News as a bludgeoning device | Zac Echola
Highly recommended on RSS today. [tf]
Painfully Obvious: Paginate THIS A redesign of the logic of pagination. Good thinking behind the proposed redesign and original conceptual flaws. I agree with his analysis, though I hope we can avoid pagination completely. [tf]
Painfully Obvious: Paginate THIS A redesign of the logic of pagination. Good thinking behind the proposed redesign and original conceptual flaws. I agree with his analysis, though I hope we can avoid pagination completely. [tf]
Advanced Color Correction Tutorial that will Knock Your Socks Off! | The Design Cubicle
A List Apart: Articles: Semantics in HTML 5

John Allsopp summarizes the challenges of adding new element types to HTML5. Good read. [tf]

We don’t need to add specific terms to the vocabulary of HTML, we need to add a mechanism that allows semantic richness to be added to a document as required. In technical terms, we need to make HTML extensible. HTML 5 proposes no mechanism for extensibility.
January 5, 2009
Hyperlocal Websites will Boom in 2009 as Community Newspapers Fold
I’m interested to see if this really happens, or if the advertising goes to community blogs. Starting up a blog v. starting up a hyperlocal website both avoid the question of who writes the articles and where the quasi-journalistic credibility comes from (if it’s there at all). I’d be surprised if the end of the year shows any progress at all. There’s a play available for hyperlocal news in bigger portal sites, but I don’t see anyone ready to move on it. Particularly if it doesn’t have a traditional journalism backbone. [tf]
January 4, 2009
Rewriting Twitter for web best practices
A tour of programming and app-design best practices by rewriting Twitter. [tf]
John Resig - HTML5 Shiv Thankfully, Sjoerd Visscher mentioned an interesting technique that could be used to force IE to use the specified CSS styling. Specifically, once you create a new DOM element (of the same name as the one in the document) all styling is applied. You don’t even have to inject the element in order for this to occur. That’s…unsurprisingly amazing that that works. [tf]
John Resig - HTML5 Shiv

Thankfully, Sjoerd Visscher mentioned an interesting technique that could be used to force IE to use the specified CSS styling. Specifically, once you create a new DOM element (of the same name as the one in the document) all styling is applied. You don’t even have to inject the element in order for this to occur.

That’s…unsurprisingly amazing that that works. [tf]

Adactio: Journal—The Rise of HTML5
Breakdown of using HTML5 effects and markup for the UXLondon site. (BTW, Craig, it’s got a hell of a lineup. What if we call it a working trip to the London office….) [tf]
Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device Excellent explanation of the design thinking behind wireframes. Worth a read, definitely. [tf, via Spool/UIE’s blogs] I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.

Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device Excellent explanation of the design thinking behind wireframes. Worth a read, definitely. [tf, via Spool/UIE’s blogs]

I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.
January 3, 2009
Eric's Archived Thoughts: An Event Apart and HTML 5
Eric Meyer tries to implement HTML5 markup for the new AEA’09 sites, and runs into some difficulties. Good read for a preview of HTML5’s adoption issues. [tf]
January 2, 2009
Tools for News
Collection of news-related online tools. Nice resource. [tf]