August 2004 Archives

When Jakob Nielsen shares good advice with us: Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design:

Designs that support user empowerment are the best way to make money on the Internet. It's an easier sell when you give people what they want than when you try to cheat them.

I would just add that it's not necessarily about making money on the internet, this advice applies to any kind of site, even corporate sites.

And that mastery wins in the end can only please your padawan webmaster ;-).

I like to decipher Apple's Jobs descriptions, sometimes you find little jewels describing the company in there (emphasis mine):

Apple is one of the most popular corporate destinations on the web. For many Apple customers, the web site is the most tangible manifestation of Apple, along with the products, company advertising and the Apple retail stores. The web site is smart and timely. Its voice is informal, colloquial, mildly humorous and straightforward.

And on this one, you can see that the Safari team is really getting serious about HTML editing within WebKit, a change that I spotted at Apple's WWDC in June (emphasis mine):

The Safari and Web Kit Team is looking for a skilled programmer to work on HTML editing inside the Web Kit framework.

The development work will be largely inside the open source WebCore framework, the Web Kit's HTML rendering engine.

I went to see I, Robot tonight and liked it just as much as I like those polished Hollywood blockbusters. Except for one thing, and you've probably read that all over the web already, the stupid product placements spanning the whole movie. Especially those shoes! Now listen, shoe marketers, the only thing you achieved with those repetitive and dumb placements is to make me averse (ah!) to this particular brand. I hope you paid a lot for this very efficient turn off.

And to the film makers, do you really think that after watching the mandatory 20 mn ads before the show we'd like to endure even more commercials within the movie we paid to see?

Welcome to the movie industry, so long for le septième art.

John Robb shuts comments down on his weblog (note that he's also eliminated TrackBacks though his system accepts TB pings):

I have eliminated the comments on this weblog because most people were sending me e-mails directly vs. making comments to my weblog.  It also makes the weblog load faster (by 3-5x).

Of course, this is a personal call that any weblog owner is free to make, but I find the reasons pretty weak -- so weak actually that I wonder if they are the real reasons behind this move. Each time I reacted to one of John's posts, I made a comment, I did not send a private email. That's the point, emails are private, comments are public, they serve different purposes and should both be considered as complementary, certainly not exclusive to each other. I find in general that weblogs without comments have less value that ones where conversations are happening through them. For the record, I also dislike weblogs where there is no way to contact the author in private (whether this is through email or a contact form is of no importance).

And as for the slow-down effect, please! There are plenty of solutions out there where the comment capability has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the loading time! If that's really the case with Radio, this is ridiculous.

For a better explanation on why one doesn't want to open comments on his weblog, look at Jonathan Schwartz' explanations:

Notwithstanding the spelling of my name, or the curious reference to Sun's Java stewardship, I appreciate the various discussions regarding whether I'm using blog comments (I'm not - you can't simply append text to my entries). At least in my particular instance, it's not a simple answer - nor is there an easy way to avoid the spam plague without hiring someone full time to moderate comments. Which seems like a waste of resources (and even less consistent with blog ethics).

From where I sit, the web's full of good ways to engage in dialog - beyond (and arguably more useful than) unfiltered comments. And there are plenty of fine companies assisting with aggregating and connecting that content - from Technorati to Feedster - to PubSub, and many others.

Again, personal weblogs belong to their authors, and they are free to run them exactly as they wish. But when one builds an audience and engages a dialogue with it, one should carefully think about making such choices as shutting comments down when they were open in the first place.

So here I am, making a public post on my weblog to mark my disagreement with John's decision, in public. Because I can, but people without a web site cannot (this limitation equally applies to Mr. Schwartz reasoning about connecting web content).

Did you know that there is a beach in Paris? Every summer since 2002, the City of Paris turns the road along the right bank of the Seine into a beach, and every year this event is more and more successful and popular. The few grumpy car drivers who are forced into the slow traffic road above are rightfully silenced by millions of people who enjoy this unique event, Paris Plage! Please come with me for a little ride.

I've been having some difficulties keeping up with the blogosphere and regular readers may have noticed the slow-down in my posts over the last few months. Let's say that my life recently has been filled with very contrasting moments ranging from great satisfaction down to overwhelming sadness. Actually those visitors who read my French weblog may well know why, however I'm not willing to bother the anglophones about the ugly and heart-breaking parts of my life. With this post I'm already departing from my authoring rule of splitting my writings between two weblogs, the English one being more professionally oriented and the other one making a better use of French as the language of politics and love (even though the francosphere took shots at me with not writing enough technical stuff in French for those English-challenged frogs).

I'm slowly climbing my way back above the clouds, where I can breeze freely again, making efforts to remember to always consider the positive side of things before even thinking of their negative ones (when not inventing them). It's getting better, and I can see the end of the Russian hills, this weird journey where I've been feeling like Leonardo Di Caprio screaming "I'm the king of the world!" at the prow of the Titanic, before being remembered by my own devils how that particular story ends, sometimes way too fast to even feel any grades in between.

I have many great things going on in my professional life, things that I can be proud of and will find great pleasure to write and discuss about (you'll see it soon on this modest weblog and in some other way more classy places). I'm having fun again in the real world with old and new friends. And as for this site, I'm procrastinating over a redesign which would be a welcome change here too (though not dismissing what works).

Life continues, please excuse me while I take my breath to catch up with it.

I just can't believe this:

The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.

The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA). [Source Link]

Granted, the order was cancelled, but IMO the intention was there in issuing it in the first place.

What do you call a state where the central power tries to prevent citizens from having full knowledge of the law, so they cannot use the law against it? Is this the kind of things you'd expect from a democracy? If those guys remain in power after the upcoming election, I really don't know what to think about our beloved ally, the great Freedom Country (pun definitely intended).

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://kalsey.com/2004/08/testing_meme_propagation_in_blogspace_add_your_blog/#more

(2) I found it via Newsreader Software (NetNewsWire)

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.padawan.info/weblog/testing_meme_propagation_in_blogspace_add_your_blog.html

(4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 13:36:12 (CET, Paris)

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Paris, France

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Movable Type

(8) My age is: 38

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Webmaster

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type and NetNewsWire

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 07/12/02

(14) My web browser is: Apple Safari

(15) My operating system is: Mac OS X 10.3

Beta in the age of the Internet:

I think that in many (most?) cases, these on-line "open" betas are really just an excuse for launching services before they're ready.

So what to think about Technorati dropping the term beta on their new facelift (which apparently didn't make it, yet, to the backend) or FeedBurner opening for business in "pre-alpha edition"?

May be I'm being too suspicious, especially for the two examples above (they're startups after all, far from having the same resources than Google), but I agree with Jeremy that there has been a trend going on here for quite a long time -- it started with the habit of some software editors to seed alphas under the name of betas, and the first beta as the 1.0 release!