Archive for March, 2007

During a short flight I devoured Steve Wozniac’s autobiography iWoz which traced his life from childhood with his Dad’s “secret government tech job” all the way to his current philanthropic pursuits. It’s a terrific read, especially if you spent time in the Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s (I did) and worked with Apple (I did.) But Woz has a great way of projecting excitement about being an engineer, discovering, optimizing, and overcoming hardships. This book makes a great pairing for the “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” (another good book) but Woz sticks to his own contribution to the computer industry… which was huge and often overlooked or underreported. Put simply, Steve Wozniac pushed personal computing forward a decade if not more.

The fun thing about was thinking back about some of the engineering grunt work that I did starting my career as Steve talks about his own. Woz starts by discussing his work on the MOS6502 processor (I wrote assembly language for that processor, like he did) and then talking about squeezing insane amounts of power out of small, compact chips (Some of my career was doing this too.) He talked a lot about the Apple II and IIc, which I never owned. I took the Color Computer Route (TRS-80) in High School as the Apples were simply too expensive for me.

Woz’s book gets surprisingly personal, also - he talks about his marital difficulties and quite a bit about how he struggled personally with life.

I enjoyed every bit of it, and strongly recommend the book. I’m looking forward to seeing Steve speak at the Idea Festival this fall.

Ah, looks like the world cup has opened in spectacular fashion in Jamaica, and Google UK has decided to show one of my favorite logo mods to date. Large Bashment, Mon.

I think that the Windstream Support Ticket Autoresponder / CRM was designed by someone who used to work at a music on hold company. At first I thought it was a glitch, but it’s designed to work this way it seems Rather than re-assuring people, I think it would serve only to make people think that there was something wrong with their email. Me, I just think something is wrong with the idea.

But it’s now been at least 12 hours since my last email. I wonder if they’ve lost my ticket!!!???? Oh no.. I better call them.

While I was out, it seems techdirt had this story about a restauranteur who was concerned his business was being affected by a murder story coming up in the organic search results when his restaurant’s name, Cer….no’s Restaurant, was entered into Google. I’ve left out part here so as to not add to the mess.

Well, the publicity in the blogosphere has at least partially solved that problem, replacing the murder story with stories about the story about the story.

Ain’t link-bait amazing?

It’s always a good idea to watch your business name on Google. Even having a small website on your domain name with some nice incoming links that cover your business name are a good idea. Set your title tag and your H1 tags to the name of your business and you’ll have at least a modest defence against this. You can make the site yourself.

Postscript: The Wall Street Journal has since put together a story on Googling Your Own Name which is very similar to what I wrote about, too.

Hey! Another timesaver… the Adwords interface now sports a link to the Google Website Optimizer.

Nice! Oh wait. You can’t use it if you’re logged in via the MCC. There goes the time savings. Oh, well, easy come, easy go.

If there is one thing that I consider the most important feature of any mindmapping tool, it would have to be a lack of friction. You must be able to take thought and put it down quickly. Whiteboards are great for this - if you have working pens - but they don’t work across the miles, which is often how I work. I thought I’d give Thinkature a try. I liked its Ajaxy-interface and ultra simplicity (there are very few tools.) The demo had me excited. It was like whiteboarding … or at least I hoped it was.

What stuck me first was how it looked like I had stumbled upon a great tool for quickly communicating what was in my mind to clients - especially early in design phases, or when we were doing landing page testing. You could rapidly create floating bubbles of information without much regard for their relationship, and then drag them together as your thoughts began to gel.

You can import graphics, so popping screen shots of landing pages into the page made it easy to refer to specific creatives and took a level of abstraction out for the clients I had for which that made sense. You can connect items with arrows very easily to show directonal flow.

But, I think the tool is suffering from its Ajaxy underpinnings. Lots of data seems to be churning in the background for rather small coordinate transformations. I have this hunch it could be optimized a great deal. After using it for twenty minutes or so I started to run into some significant weaknesses. First some observations about what I think thought organization tools are like.

• Most mind mapping tools have feature creep.They have 40 tools when 10 would have done the trick. Nobody wants to use them, so they revert back to their old way of doing things.
• Many mind mapping tools make assumptions about how you use them. The process of creating fluid maps is altered to fit weaknesses in the design, and so the entire tool suffers.
• Some mind mapping tools seem designed with paper output in mind.

So sitting here in O’hare, I thought I’d try to use this with a client to discuss a project we’re putting together. I wasn’t able to.

• You have to pause after every action so that the Ajax tools can write their data. If you get too far ahead, you can make the tool confused at best, and at worst, cause it to say it needs to reload the page - invariablly losing some of your lastest changes. This was definitely less of a problem on my T1 than on my wifi, but it got in the way of sponteniety.
• There is no UNDO. It’s so easy to delete stuff … and if you have several things selected, ouch.
• There is no “group” command. I hesitate to ask for a feature, but this one is key. You cannot group things so that they move together, and the group-select feature is really quite tough to use, especially with a trackpad on a laptop.
• As you get a longish screen of items on your page, it tends to time out and drop out more often. After a while, it took a long time to create a new item. This may have been coincidence, but it went from a minor annoyance to unusable. I was using it around 9:00 AM EST on a Thursday.
• There is no text-only/label command - you have to put all text in a box. This is okay, as you can just make big boxes that are behind other groups, but it would be nice to be able to put up a couple of lables. I’m no good at free-hand writing with my mouse.

I would urge the folks at Thinkature not to add too many features, but not to have too few either. This is a great though organizing tool that is easy to pop up on the screen. I’ve not even tried the voice feature yet, I tend to just pick up the phone or Skype to talk to folks.

I’m really hoping that this tool overcomes these hurdles, as it was one of my more positive Stumbles.

Techcrunch did an article comparing Thinkature to Conceptshare.

Doh!  They don’t bother to think about the title tag or meta description on the temporary page (and no description tag on the REAL page) so I guess few expect them to be found in the search results pages. Brand Nirvana. Not having to care about petty things.

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with my IP address and Google. While Lauren does a terrific job over at Google tracking down that problem, I thought it might be a good time to run over the use of the Google Ad Preview tool, a savior for times like these.

The parameter that does the magic is “&adtest=on“, after which, you can add:

• Target country: use ‘&gl=aa,’ where aa is the
  country code.
• Target region: use ‘&gr=bb-bb,’ where bb-bb is the
  region code.
• Target city: use ‘&gcs=c,’ where c is the name of a city.
  You have to set the region code first!
• Target latitude and longitude: use ‘&gll=latitude,longitude,’ in micro-degrees.
• Target postal code (US only): use ‘&gl=US&gpc=nnnnn,’ where nnnnn is any 5-digit US postal code.
• Target DMA (US only): use ‘&gm=ddd,’ where ddd is the
  US Metropolitan Region code
  

It looks like the US Patent Office will begin to post patent applications and allow for a Wiki/Digg-style system for sorting out comments/objections in a pilot program. This means that a reviewed sort of system could help the patent office sort out the signal from the noise. We’ll see if any of the gaming that happens in some social networks makes its way over there, but you gotta admit, it’s a pretty nifty idea. Microsoft and HP are already planning to take part in the first phase.

With people reviewing these and presumably having an input over their grant or denial, I wonder if patent legalese will become more readable to the average educated citizen? That would be refreshing, as the language used on some patents is really ridiculous. I know that it has evolved over many years within the ranks of patent attorneys, but must it be so difficult?   Will it get better, so that reviewers can actually talk about the patents, or more cryptic, to exclude them from constructive commentary?

Most social comment sites I’ve seen, save, perhaps Wikipedia, are brief, casual, and rather unrefined in their responses. With patent law and its hyper-structured format, this could be an interesting juxtaposition of language. I can see it now….

“A ball cap comprising a plurality of gores forming a body, a sweat band having an elastic sweat portion, and an elastic gore that is stretchable to provide a ball cap that is stretchable to assume a variety of stretched conditions to accommodate a variety of head sizes, comprising a stiffener assembly that continuously supports the elastic gore in all stretched conditions, said stiffener assembly comprising a main body portion sized to underlie the elastic gore in its unstretched condition, a transverse channel housing the sweat band elastic portion, and a pair of folded side wings attached to the side edges of the elastic gore which unfold as the ball cap stretches to its stretched conditions to continuously support the elastic gore and the elastic sweat band portion.”

comment:Â “Is that the part that goes on your head?”

comment: “I don’t like pluralities, those are for girls.”

comment: “I have an Iron Maiden Hat for sale on Ebay [link removed]“

comment: “Iron Maiden rocks”

If you need a model of web design, you don’t need to look further than our own Bluegrass state for one of the best I’ve seen. A measured balance between graphics, clean headings, and well written text greet consumers on every page in a friendly way when it could easily have been overwhelming. There’s an uncompromising style guide in place, good accessibility scores, and tasteful use of, but not dependence on, subtle hues.

The UK Healthcare site was recently honored for its new design by receiving a national Merit Award in the Patient Education Class by the WWW Health Awards. Other honerees were St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and Holy Spirit Health System.

The web, graphics, and marketing team are all to be congratulated on putting the consumer first by avoiding the traps that snag so many developing big sites these days.