IE 7, Why bother
I’m glad other people are taking the time to find out that the new Internet Explorer 7 is not worth the time. Saves me the effort:
Archive for April, 2006
How users see web content
Here is an interesting study by Jakob Nielsen on reading patters on the web. I imagine that this applies to any reading on a computer monitor, and validates much of what I’ve picked up from other sources. And what it says to me is lots of text on a computer monitor doesn’t get read! So if you want to communicate something with text do like Jakob says:
Classcaster
Lately I’m feeling a little overloaded, trying to keep track of all the new products in the web 2.0 world — its kind of nuts. Many will disappear almost as quickly as they appear, and I think as products consolidate it will help spread the adoption. Remember back in the good old days when there were a dozen or so web search engines, and you were never quite sure which one was the right one to use. Then some sites created mega-search pages that ran the same search through multiple engines. Isn’t is so much easier these days when you know you just have to use Google? So how many podcasting, rss feed readers, blogs, social bookmarking, content management systems, etc. do we really need? Probably not quite as many as there are brewing currently .
Trust in online communities
At a Nercomp presentation by Yale’s own Jane Alexander on building online communities in blended courses. And in this presentation she discusses the time requires to build an effective community is longer than the standard 14 week class. This collaboration diagram from the Mopsos blog nicely presents the idea that the level of trust in a community is related to the amount of interaction engaged in. IM requires a lot of trust, newsletters require very little.
Firefox Scholar
This sounds like something to watch closely. A version of Firefox being developed at George Mason University (I used to work there!) that will ease access to scholarly resources and museum collections. It is true that for my work the web browser has now become my primary research tool and I’ve often through if enhancements I would like it to have. I even started looking at how extensions were created with the idea of trying to work some stuff up, but I never got to it, and now it looks like I won’t have to. Procrastination ain’t all bad.
Social bookmarking revisited
What a crazy icon soup, huh? Well its a new wordpress plugin, and I’ll give it a try for a while. My own experiences with social bookmarking has run hot ‘n cold. I have gone through a couple of periods of actively pushing FURL on my classes and classmates, and using it a lot myself. But I really didn’t find the social part of it very useful. I also started getting confused about whether I had bookmarked a page in Firefox or loaded it into FURL. I’ve also looked at Del.icio.us a couple of times (I even have the taglett on my Firefox toolbar) but never felt like starting it unless I could migrate my FURL bookmarks over there. So at the moment I’m in-between being social — but maybe its time for another look.
