14 Apr 2002

Sun, 14 Apr 2002

Microsoft past it's peak?

Microsoft past it's peak?


Jakob Nielsen: "However, there might be a tendency for companies to reach the top of the HCI field when they've already peaked." [useit.com]


An interesting conclusion considering that he gave Microsoft the gold award for the 2000-2010 period. It's also notable that CMU is the only university lab currently on the list.

Posted at: 22:28 | permalink

From my conversation with Dave Winer this evening regarding OPML

From my conversation with Dave Winer this evening regarding OPML


It wouldn't be hard to take apache's mod_index and hack together a mod_opml to make an apache site spit out the equivalent of radio's directory.opml. In fact, a few jboss calls via JMX beans and you could probably enumerate all of the stuff in a running J2EE app server and spit it out there as well. The nice thing about the apache idea though is that you'd cover 70% of the web server market with very little work.

Posted at: 21:08 | permalink

Reaction to Dave Winer's article on google, directories, and OPML

Reaction to Dave Winer's article on google, directories, and OPML


SoapWare.Org: Google, directories, OPML.  [Scripting News]


The outliner as mini website is a useful model but it has problems when you try to exrapolate that to the link structure for the web. For instance, the 2d tree as we see in an outliner or the typical M$ Windows explorer interface is ill-suited to handle the demands of displaying outlinks, inlinks, circular links, redirects, etc. Some combination of concepts will probably produce a usable interface but we're not there yet.


I believe that Ben Bederson's work on zoomable UI at the University of Maryland HCI lab could help in this area. In this regard, zooming could tie to the hyperlinking concept in such a way as to make N levels of Z-order workable for the user. You have to imagine the Windows explorer model where the left pane is occupied by Dave Winer's outliner and the right pane is occupied by Ben Bederson's zoomable UI. You root yourself in the outliner at some URL. The zoomable UI paints a representation of all the pages at the same hierarchical level as your selection in the outliner tree. While we're at it, let's give some slack to Jakob Nielsen by including a full-blown status window in the typical IDE location. In that status window, let's include a detailed display of exactly what the client is doing. I was very impressed with Ben's work when I first looked at it and I still think it's just a matter of time until someone with enough spare cycles puts it to work in a really big way.


 

Posted at: 15:09 | permalink

Language Translation for Radio Users

Language Translation for Radio Users


I noticed that I was getting an increasing number of visitors from foreign countries; countries in which the Queen's English may not be the primary language. I also notice that click throughs from my site appeared to be far less when the visitors were coming from foreign countries. I inferred that perhaps foreign visitors were having trouble reading the link text. So I started looking around for a means to solve the problem of language translation for Radio Users. Thanks to the folks at FreeTranslation.com for providing this great service.


If you're using Radio Userland, you'll find 6 hyperlinks below that'll give you instant translation to 6 languages (French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish) for your Radio site. You can see these in action under my title/description at the top of the page. Just copy and paste the hyperlinks into your Radio Home Page Template under Prefs/Home Page Template wherever you see fit and hit Submit. It would be really nice if each had an icon attached to make it easier to identify but I'm not a graphic artist and I have to finish my taxes! If you can do the icons, please send email. Thanks.


Enjoy!



<A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FFrench&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">French</A> <A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FGerman&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">German</A> <A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FItalian&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">Italian</A> <A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FNorwegian&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">Norwegian</A> <A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FPortuguese&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">Portuguese</A> <A href="http://fets3.freetranslation.com:5081/?Language=English%2FSpanish&Url=<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>%2F&Sequence=core">Spanish</A>

Posted at: 11:57 | permalink

A google oddity - not a google whack but maybe weirder

A google oddity - not a google whack but maybe weirder


This search returns only one result, this page. Why is that odd? Well, for one thing, googleapi.zip is hosted on google.com. This means they're not indexing their own content. I thought that was a little unexpected considering that if somebody searched for googleapi.zip it might be far more useful if they found the link on google and not my site.


Update


Somebody at google must be listening because I posted this 3 days after google released googleapi.zip but now it's indexed on google.

Posted at: 10:35 | permalink