By Stephen Downes
July 20, 2004
User Satisfaction Survey
Sorry for
the late newsletter - my wireless hub decided it was time
to give up the ghost and stop sending signals, and I had to
scrounge around the house for an ethernet card - but not
before pulling out a spare computer with ethernet installed
and installing Red Hat Linux. It was a beautiful install,
no problems at all, but sadly my old computer just didn't
have (at 64 meg) enough memory to run the software.
Anyhow. The Government Education Portal (Australia) is
conducting a survey to sample user opinions of their new
design. Of course, such surveys, posted on the website,
attract website readers (and, therefore, people who are
presumably satisfied with the design). With a little note
in OLDaily, though, perhaps we can correct this inherent
bias. Via EdNa. By Various Authors, Commonwealth of
Australia, July, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four
White Space Layouts
I have always maintained
that white space is an important element in web page design
(the same dictum extends to things like email messages).
While not the last word on the subject, this study lends
empirical support to my belief, showing that while people
read pages with margins a bit more slowly, they comprehend
more. And while leading (the space between lines) does not
affect comprehension, readers report dissatisfaction and
greater eyestrain with suboptimal leading. I wish the
article had looked at more things, such as the length of
paragraphs (more than eight lines is pushing it, in my
view) and typestyle. Via Column Two. By Barbara Chaparro,
J. Ryan Baker, A. Dawn Shaikh, Spring Hull, and Laurie
Brady, Usability News, June, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Mediathink Releases White Paper: 'Not Just
for Nerds: RSS - The Next Big Thing
Online'
Watch out for the hype train in this
item, a press release that links ultimately to a useful
White Paper on the market position of various RSS
aggregators (which is the part worth reading). Also worth
noting is the paper's take on the impact of RSS on email.
In a sentence: unless email providers solve the spam
problem within the next few months, they will lose their
entire market to the world of RSS tools and aggregators.
The White Paper also has some good diagrams of the flow of
information in RSS networks; you'll have to use the capture
mode of your image editing software to get them, though,
since the PDF has been (uselessly, but annoyingly)
copy-disabled. By Press Release, Mediathink, July 20, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Salesnet Releases E-Learning
Tool
Best line of the article: "If the
salesforce automation field has learned anything in the
past five years, has to be this: You can lead salespeople
to software, but you cannot make them use it." Overview of
the Salesnet e-learning application with
attention to its focus (increasing sales, as opposed to
management and administration) and the use of a 'sandbox'
to allow applications to be tested before deployment. By
Kimberly Hill, CRM Daily, July 20, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Login
I have been one of those agitating on the
Poynter Online News mailing list against those very
annoying site registrations being adopted by newspapers.
This article is a good overview, looking especially at the
systems that have emerged that allow people to circumvent
registration by providing fake user logins and passwords. I
think that user mandatory user registration is one of those
things that looks like a good idea (and gets good results)
when only a few sites do it, but becomes an unmanagable
mess and a major nuisance when everybody does it. Like
spam. By Rachel Metz, Wired News, July 20, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Technology to widen Amber
Alerts
Off topic but worth noting (with the hope
that this will be forwarded to someone who can make this
happen). What I want: a simple line of Javascript that I
can insert into my webpage that displays nothing most of
the time, but which will display the Amber Alert when it is
invoked. From experience, I know that it would be installed
on hundreds of thousands of blogs and other websites. The
technology is dead simple; all that is needed is a server
that can handle several hundred thousand hits a day and a
simple JS writing mechanism. Anybody wants, I'll provide
the software to do it for free. By Associated Press, Globe
and Mail, July 20, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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