Since the whole world's gone tab-crazy with Firefox and whatnot, here's another useful little bit of freeware called ExplorerXP.
It adds tabbed browser (among a bunch of other cool features) to your Windows Explorer. Give it a whirl.
Via Waxy.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 22, 2005, 03:52PMFor all you cheap bastards out there, here's a neat little listing of the best freeware on the Internet. Go nuts.
Two quality publications, the Financial Times and The Economist, have decided to hop on the RSS bandwagon. You can find links to their respective feeds here and here.
Good stuff.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 21, 2005, 07:12PMThe freaks at Google are at again with the third version of their toolbar for Internet Explorer.
There's been some buzz of late about enriching data that is submitted into systems with tags. The social bookmarking site Deli.cio.us and the photo management site Flickr are some of the best examples of gathering and utilizing metadata (in other words, data about data). They both provide view of which topics (or "tags") are hot at any given time. This is great because it's a glimpse into how viral a topic or link is based on their respective users' use of the application. Unfortunately, the information-gathering aspect of phenomena is pretty archaic, if not badly flawed.
The task of gleaning and making sense of collected metadata, while a challenge, is more or less solved. If a particular topic is hot, it's simply referenced by a lot by people. The challenge is less about what to do with metadata and more about how to get it. The problem, as far as I can see it, is that the collection of metadata is far too disruptive in its current incarnation. Sure, you can ask users to enter some tags or descriptive text about a piece of information, but from an end-user's perspective this is little more than a nuisance. Any part of the experience that is not tied to the user's end-goals diminishes the user's experience.
In my opinion, the holy grail here is to somehow steal metadata from the user's interaction without disrupting that experience if possible. We rely heavily on technology today, and so we're constantly "talking" to machines. Beyond our own interactions, technology already exists that allows us to gather a lot of metadata without asking the user a single question. Consider the following examples:
Of course, questions can be asked of users - and will be tolerated - so long as there is some immediate or near-immediate perceived value to the user. In addition, users may be willing to sacrifice some of their time and effort for a larger cause (sort of the same way some users install screensavers that steal CPU cycles for cancer research).
Privacy is another potential issue. Before you steal metadata, you should ask the user if it's ok to do so - especially if that information is being taken back to a centralized place for public consumption.
It's becoming more and more difficult to make sense of the massive oceans of information and ideas that are flowing through the Internet. One way to elevate the information worth elevating is to ask users to categorize it - a clear violation of user-centered design. I think we should be focusing more on devising systems that pay attention to metadata around our experiences with them. Much can be learned if the systems simply chose to listen.
I will be speaking at one of the sessions at this year's Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, Canada.
The presentation is called Information Objects and you can learn a bit about the subject matter here. In a nutshell, it's an attempt to introduce an alternative methodology for creating useful and effective user interfaces. It applies object-oriented thinking and some concepts grounded in cognitive psychology to deliver a supplementary approach to user-centered design.
The presentation is on Saturday, March 5 at 5:00PM. If you're attending the conference, feel free to join us. I promise an interesing and life-altering experience (ok maybe not life-altering, but pretty damn close).
If you're attending and can't make that particular presentation for whatever reason, shoot me an email anyway and let's try to meet up.
For those that follow this blog, you'll notice (if you visit the site and not just read the feed) that the look & feel has drastically changed.
This is because Movable Type's database became corrupt and I could no longer post to the site. I was forced to export the postings and start from scratch. All of the previous postings are back and online.
I could spend the time to recover the old templates, but frankly, I got tired of the old design very quickly. And so...here is basement.org in dramatic minimalist form.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 12, 2005, 10:15AM
The studs at Onfolio have taken another stab at feed reader glory with Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release. I’ve got to say, this thing is really starting to come together. Onfolio is one of a few in-browser feed readers out there and this time around, they’ve really nailed the value of a three-pane feeds > feed entries > newspaper browser view. It snaps into both Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as a “Deskbar”-style application that sits on your desktop. I’m liking it.
Only one snag: when I was refreshing my feeds in Firefox, the whole browser (and all instances of it) came to screeching halt. As I’ve mentioned before, FeedDemon’s speed has really spoiled me. I’ve tried many feed readers and I don’t think any are as fast as Demon.
In other news, I still can’t get C|Net’s Newsburst to import my OPML feed.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 10, 2005, 01:38PMYahoo has released its popular toolbar for Firefox. Groovy. Of course, if you’re hard core like me, you’ll just go install the Firefox Ultrabar and tweak it up like a madman.
Don’t wait for Google to do the same. You’ll probably get a whole new browser out of them at some point.
The number of feed aggregators out there is starting to get crazy. C|Net (oddly) has decided to chime in with Newsburst.
I tried to get it going by importing my OPML file that I dumped out of FeedDemon. After trying to upload, the thing froze up on me. Mind you, my OPML has over 150 feeds in it, but so what. We’ll give C|Net a little time to get the kinks out before we publicly lynch them.
While you’re at it, check out Lektora, another new feed reader tool that lives in your browser (IE & Firefox supported). I didn’t play with this one much. It’s similar to Pluck’s and Onfolio’s interfaces.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 5, 2005, 07:15PMI could’ve sworn that Yahoo! or Google were gonna be the suitors for Bloglines. Turns
out Ask Jeeves (that weird search engine with the butler) is acquiring Bloglines./p>
I’m a bit surprised Bloglines didn’t hold out a bit longer. I don’t think feed readers/blog popularity has peaked at all.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 3, 2005, 09:45AMThere's some talk going around about how annoying it is to subscribe to feeds that muddle together different types of content into one feed.
The gripes are completely valid. As feeds become richer, the one-dimensional nature of RSS starts to buckle. We need a better way to quickly and easily apply characteristics to items within a single feed.
Well, there is a better way (is this starting to sound like an infomercial?).
About a month ago, I drafted an RSS 2.0 module called RSS Traits that provides a simple way of applying traits to feeds and thus enabling clients to provide filtering and sorting capabilties.
Of course, drafting a spec is one thing. Getting people to actually commit the time and effort to implement it is another. In this case, it may be even tougher than your typical specification because it requuires cooperation by both content providers and the developers of feed readers/aggregators.
Everyone's going bonkers with all the flavors of search features that are cropping up everywhere. The latest is Yahoo's new contextual search tool (shorthand Y!Q). Here's an example of it in action.
Search Engine Watch breaks it all down very nicely with some beefy analysis (as usual). News.com also reported on it.
Is it me, or is all this stuff coming out of the big three search engines starting to sound more like noise and less like anything really useful? Google and Yahoo let you search videos (um why?), A9 (Amazon's bastard child of a search engine) let's you walk up and down streets in major cities (no, really). Everyone needs to just take a deep breath and calm down.
I need to be kicked in the you-know-what's for not knowing this 12 months ago.
It turns out you can reference a style sheet from within the XML of an RSS feed. This way, if users hit your feed from within a browser, they'll see a prettied-up version of the feed rather than the ugliness that is XML.
Pete Freitag takes care of the ugly details.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 2, 2005, 02:25PMI'm a big fan of using icons as an effective visual mechanism for interface design.
I just stumbled on this excellent (and relatively old) article on the art of icon design. Good stuff.
While we're at it, I should pass along a plug for Boxes & Arrows, a solid resource for information architecture articles.
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 1, 2005, 09:15AMI think I'm bordering on redundant at this point, but it's good to see some other observers pointing out the near-fatal flaws with the World Wide Web. Bill Thompson chimes in at Opendemocracy.net.