In @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion, Margaret Kipp looks at the words people use to tag sites in social tagging applications (like del.icio.us) Most tags are, as we expect, tags that name subjects. Car, cat, calculator, and such. Of the non-subject words there are many that seem to fall into two [...]
magpie's shiny things
shiny things in messy little piles
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Jun 20
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20
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Findable vs. Refindable
Sites like del-icio.us, while providing an interesting (voyeuristic?) look into what sites other people are finding interesting, are primarily about collecting things for myself and making them refindable.
How is refindable different from findable? And further on how can looking at what cues people create for making things refindable for themselves inform what we do to [...]
Jun 15
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BananaSlug – Pacific NorthWet Search?
Quickly folks – it’s almost 5 on friday but I couldn’t pass this up.
Alt Search Engines throws up some odd little SEs on it’s Friday round up and this one just came across the feedreader.
BananaSlug
That’s right our Pacific Northwe(s)t Mascot – the banana slug – has got it’s own search engine. and in keeping with [...]
Jun 15
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TQR – Metasearch Puppy Piles vs. Lone Wolf Search Engines
All search engines are not the same and all search engines do not return the same results. Ask each of the big four search engines the same question and you’ll get four very different sets of answers. Well duh…
But just how different are the results? Different Engines, Different Results, published in April [...]
Jun 14
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TQR – New York Magazine Interview with Edward Tufte
The master has a new book out: “Beautiful Evidence.” There’s an interview with him in New York Magazine.
I suggest reading it on-line for the simple pleasure of reading something on a site that makes reading on-line if not pleasurable then at least possible. (Check out text sizer control just above the title.)
Thanks to InfoDesign for [...]
Jun 13
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Personalization of Your News Coverage – Even if You Don’t Become a Member
The saga of TV station search wierdness continues.
For the last few days I have been doing a bunch of search interface testing on the news sites of our local TV stations. I had a standard list of search subjects that I ran through all the sites. One of which was “motorcycle chase”. (Other searches included [...]
Jun 12
Jun
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Blog Roll Updates
Some new campers in the cabin this afternoon.
xkcd – Sweet, geeky stick figure cartoons. Well, maybe not sweet. Very existential. Very occasional. Very worth waiting for.
Joho the Blog – David Weinberger’s intriguing and occasionally maddeningly insights into all things internet and beyond.
Modern Mechanix – I just love these reprints from our geeky past. [...]
Jun 11
TQR – Sharing Ownership of UX
In the May issue of UXMatters Pabini Gabriel-Petit writes about how User Experience professionals fit into the overall product development team. (Sharing Ownership of UX) He argues for a product team made up of three disciplines: Product management, user experience, and engineering, all having responsibility for different aspects of the user experience. As he points [...]
Jun 07
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TQR- Amidextrous Magazine
Go to the Ambidextrous Magazine website.
Click on one of the PDFs on the front page.
Read the nicely illustrated, professionally typeset article.
Carry one of the ideas around in your head for the rest of the day.
Tell me what you saw.
(thanks to DR over at metacool for the original link.)
Jun 05
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Web Dragons X-Ray: From Smashing Magazine – PageRank Explained
Following on the Web Dragon’s book review post.
Smashing Magazine has an article on how Google’s PageRank (currently) works. It’s a summary of the things that are known about Google’s PageRank algorithm.
It’s good to see a discussion of PageRank that reminds the reader the PR is a measure of quality/authority of a page and is not [...]