Wednesday, July 17, 2002

bOING bOING provides the linkage for this superb implementation of the Amazon API. When I search Amazon I typically get the results I'm looking for (when I want to browse, I go to a bookstore, however). So how about a nice Google-like interface? Excellent. 9:31:31 PM

Courtesy of Tomalak's Realm, an article from New Architect describing The Culture of Usability. At companies where usability testing is a low-key, but constant, part of routine business, people regard it differently. Because it's done frequently, it's perceived as less special. Month after month, as results come back from test after test, everyone on staff begins to understand at a very basic level what usability testing is good for, what sorts of designs work well for the user base, and, most importantly, how to incorporate the findings into the product. 9:28:07 PM

Another editorial, this one from The Boston Globe, on Operation TIPS: Ashcroft's informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. 4:07:53 PM

From The Washington Post, an article on how using the internet as a research tool can lead to a whole lot of cursory glances and not much depth. You bounce from search result to search result. That's one of the points I was trying to make about Google, and it continues to be the general problem with any search engine. People tend to do a lot more searching than they do finding. Anyone can post anything on the free Web, and anyone frequently does. A student who typed "Thomas Jefferson" into the Google search engine would get 1.29 million hits; rap star Eminem would bring up 1.37 million. Narrowing one's search to certain words may not help. The gamelike quality of screen and mouse encourages students to sample these sources rather than select an appropriate text and read deeply into it or follow an argument to its conclusion. The result is what Cooperman, who teaches both Davis and Flynn at Maryland, calls "cocktail-party knowledge." 3:57:34 PM