Robot Wisdom auxiliary

[Sky-map.org]

[Java]

[Planet Wheel]

[Flash movie]

[Space.com]

[Wunderground]

[StarGazer]

[AstroViewer] (current night sky only) [Java]

[AstroImage]

[London monthly]

[Boston monthly]

[New Mexico monthly]

[Google Sky] (where's the labels?!?)

[YourSky] (generic link only?)

 
 
 
 
.

looking over the various available
animated doppler weathermaps
(easy to miss hidden features)

msn is the surprising winner
with a 6-hour loop
that requires only one click
beyond the url-bookmark
('doppler radar' under 'animated maps')

wundergound
has nice detail
but limited animation

weather.com
very limited animation

accuweather ditto

weather.gov uses java
again very limited

intellicast
is very feeble

 
 
 
 
.

the juxtaposition of
john gruber's concept of interface friction
with david li's copula formula

has refocused an old intuition
about the science of human factors:

that someday we should have a formula
for rating the 'friction' in an interface

• how many clicks
  for each important action
  
  
• how much mental strain
  to refocus the brain
  (like shifting contexts)
  
  
• how much unintuitive complexity
  to master
  
  
• how much opportunity
  to be publicly humiliated
  
  

web 2.0 has made considerable progress
on the first two of these

but achieving sufficient mastery
to avoid self-embarrassment
is a gigantic, growing problem

 
 
 
 .

reddit doesn't understand twitter!?!
(i'm surprised)

• it's the algonquin roundtable redux:
  a universal competition
  to say memorable things
  in 140 characters or less
  
  the more you're Favorite-d, the better you're doing
  
  if you're not finding
  a dozen tweets a day
  worth Favoriting...
  you're doing it wrong
  
  look at others' Favorites
  to find the wits you like best
  
  and doublecheck their own Favorites
  so you can subscribe (by rss)
  to those who'll broaden your scope
  
  
• bookmark twitter searches
  
  watch for interesting hashtags
  or mentions of interesting people
  
  (these are also rss-able)
  
  get comfortable with searching on @-names
  to check others' replies
  before replying yourself
  
  
• keep reloading hashtag-searches
  during interesting events
  (#oscars #sotu #superbowl #ted)
  or favorite teevee shows (#house)
  to sample an infinite range of reactions
  and occasional insights
  
  temporarily follow
  the best of these
  
  
• add friends and family
  (and celebs you wish were f&f)
  not expecting algonquin wit
  but grateful for random
  keeping-in-touch tweets
  
  
• ask/answer questions of the #lazyweb
  
  monitor memes
  
  announce time-critical tidbits
  
  

twitter is like usenet
where you subscribe to
people not topics

fastfastfast

spamfree by design

intolerant of prolixity

easily capturing stray thoughts
and trying them out
on a mostly-forgiving audience

 
 
 
.

there's something inherently 'broken'
about bookmarking webpages
to-be-read-later

having sucked out
the first sweet nectar of novelty
the husk is left
for future 'others'




firefox's 'toRead' extension
and chrome's builtin bookmarkstar
(to say nothing of del.icio.us's
almost-useless 'toread' tag)
only scratch the surface
of efficient bookmarking

how many flavors of
read-this-later
should our bookmarking system(s)
distinguish?

- how long will it take?
if we're really busy
we may set aside
lots of short items

long boring 'homework' posts
need muuuuch more time
(and perfect nondistraction)
and will likely eventually
be discarded unread

- can it be broken into
multiple visits
like exploring a website
or image gallery?
(can the progress of this
exploration
be tracked automatically?)

- does it need a decision
like rereading something marginal
before deciding whether to
pass it along or bin it

why don't all browsers share
a common core set of
smart
folders for bookmarks
mapping onto the universals of human life
via a startup questionnaire
about where and how you live

eg: each gizmo you own
mapping onto a smart folder
offering the best sites for support
localised for local service
any online communities for that gizmo
easily customised to your preferences
with a social feed (?)
that discovers new resources as they arise

a folder for each of your vehicles

for each of your pets
your hobbies
your clubs
your periodical subscriptions

for your music bookmarks
your photo/image bookmarks

It's a shame, because the content is above average, but here's what I hate about CounterPunch.org:

• 25 new articles today (usually more like 10)
  
• articles announced in skinny sidebar (35 screens long, today)
  
• no summary, no clue about length (usually absurdly longwinded)
  
• one-line author bio at end of article (if we're lucky)
  
• 1st screen is always ads, never content
  
• righthand sidebar 30+ screens long, all ads
  
• content squeezed into narrow central column, hard to focus
  

Who has time?

 
 
 
 
 
.

i'm increasingly dissatisfied
with blogspot/blogger
for my linkblog

they recently changed how they handle
posts dated in the future
so now
to keep my newlinks on top
i have to date my other posts in the past

also they're very slow to load in GgChrome

and their rss feed is useless for linkblogging
so i've tried to offer various alternatives:

mainly del.icio.us
which only allows one link per item
and always places the link first
and doesn't even support italics
(though it previews the occasional flickrpic)

but also Feed43 [rss]
(which needs special, constraining markup)

i'd like to embed some of the gorgeous images
i'm finding by the dozen at flickr
[rss-able but filtered and small]
or [large and less filtered but no feed]

combo feeds (delicious plus flickrfaves + twitter)
are now available at Tumblr [slow and partial]
GgReader [slowish]
and FeedBurner [slowish, rss-able]

but really i'd like a cross between del.icio.us and tumblr




btw
i've become very lax
about linking my other rwx blogposts
in the linkblog
because they feel 'unfinished'
so i expect people to occasionally visit
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/
and scroll past the links to see what's new

as well (more often) as
http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2009/10/god-of-old-testament-is-depiction-of.html

 
 
 
 
.

Between 31May and 27Dec 2008, the UK Guardian published an intriguing Chicago-based graphic novel, one page every Saturday. Their page layout sucked mightily, so I've shortcutted the good stuff below. The 1st set of links goes straight to the jpegs, but I'm not sure the URLs are stable. The 2nd set goes to the zoomed images, and don't work right in Google Chrome. The sucky interface is here.


author: [Wikipedia]


reworking of short story [cite]



Direct images:

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Zoomed html pages:

[1]
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[eg]

necessary web 1.0
was about content
and wikipedia has mostly solved
that problem

necessary web 2.0
will be about generalising
interface insights
so that all web2.0 apps share
all the predictable functionality

something google
could bootstrap into beta
within a year, i'd bet

starting from google pagecreator (GgPC)
for creating all manner of webpage
which offers authors
a private view of all their hosted pages
as a list or icon-grid
sorted by name or date

which ought to be available as well
as a public view
(effectively a changelog-blog)

and GgPC could/should also
automatically archive earlier versions
of each page, allowing authors
to reonstruct their state
on any given day

and if each created page
includes a short summary/description
and/or an illustrative pullquote
and/or a 'pull-image'
and/or a summary of recent changes

then that public blog-view
could also include
some or all of these

and the author herself
could customise a 'recommended' blog-view
of site updates
suppressing minor changes
promoting major ones
and even quoting short pages in full

which already cannibalises
most of the functionality
of blogger.com
(which should, itself
open to the public
the author's private, sortable
list-view of post titles)

but we can also add to each page
a set of topic designations or tags
which google could treat
as postings to GgGroups topic areas
(tag = topic = group)

and pages that refer/respond
to other pages
can include the URLs of those 'parent' pages
as topic/tag/groups, as well

so google can trace discussion threads
without the original authors even needing
to turn commenting on

and if this can be streamlined enough
google could let websurfers
rate every page they visit
(openly, or anonymously)
and aggregate these ratings as well

offering now a link-blog view
of all a surfer's ratings
(eg above a threshold level)

to support all this
the GgGroups interface needs to streamline
back to an ajax re-implementation
of the pre-WWW goldenage newsreader 'trn'

where you'd subscribe to
groups/topics/tags/urls/authors/communities

with killfile filters
to minimise annoying noise

and encouraging blogging-community experiments
like slashdot/digg/linkfilter/memepool

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

web
log

page
stream

link
share

no dates

no titles

no self-mirror

no self-censor

here are just all
the good things i've found

a million tiny lenses
amplifying

short and sweet

why i liked them

why you may not

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
.

as we observe the 10th anniversary of 'blogging'
and debate the precise definition of that term

i'll go on record as claiming not only that
rwwl was the 1st proper weblog
but that it's still the
only
proper weblog

an early product of the only proper
hypertext lab on the web

because properly designed experiments
(here, experiments with links)
need to minimise independent variables
(here, like columns and styles)
and pare down each design prototype
to its barest essentials

how best to

• craft linkable pages
  
• craft links to these pages [more]
  
• arrange links on a page
  
• embed links in prose
  
• accommodate prose to embedded links
  

it seems wholly bizarre to me
ten years on
that web trendsetters
have barely begun these experiments

obsessing instead on
standards
stylesheets
and hypothetical semantic 'structures'

some abcs:

• one chapter per page
  
• escape-links at the start of each page for lost visitors
  
• related links at the end of each page for happy campers
  
• similar links gouped, with major differences emphasized
  
• linktext that minimizes disruption while reading
  (eg isolated in 'text buttons' at the end of a sentence)
  
• linktext that tries to manage readers' expectations
  (eg text buttons that specify the filetype, the site, or special warnings)
  
• page metatdata in the headers (not embedded)
  
• pages that thoroughly massage all raw search results on some given topic
  
• timelines or best-first as better organising principles than alphabetical
  

 
 
 
 
 
.

while compiling my neologisms list
i occasionally came across ideas
that had completely faded from my thinking

one of which
'action hypertext'
i'm happy to resuscitate

the w3c paradigm for the semantic web
is approximately beehive-like
every webpage a hierarchy of containers
to be filled in by worker-drones
presumed to know in advance
exactly what they want to say
and how it fits into the rest of the web/site

but action hypertext is the opposite of this
each author an indeterminate jackson-pollock splatterer

each new webpage starting from scratch
with no clear idea where it's coming from
or where it's going
rather
freeform blocks of text
with freeform styles of separation between them

textblocks accumulating
more or less intentionally
in the course of never-finished web exploration

visits to un/familiar sites
search patterns un/successful
articles read skimmed skipped bookmarked
links saved shared discussed updated

so each of these web-actions
can be seen as an item in an ongoing stream
that should be archived
and re-traceable

and all the usual choices
for dealing with the results of these web-actions:

forget it, shred it
save it, share it, debate it
add it to your to-read list
subscribe to its feed
set a tickler-alarm for it
announce it to the world
link it from related pages of your own
etc etc etc

all these usual choices
should be offered in a standard
dispose-palette
that action-authors habitually consider
when dismissing any action-result

 
 
 
 
 
.

data on hard drives
reflects the lifestories
of those who put it there

and anticipates the lifestories
of those who may retrieve it

and the Web is
a network of hard drives
holding data
chunked as webpages

the browser an interface
for exploring it

so the surfer, seeking completion
of a story-goal
contemplates a webpage
extracting clues
about which clicks
should yield which goals

and when successful
may seek to bookmark the page
or to blog it for others

using the minimal number
of mouseclicks and keystrokes

i like the effect
of quoting poems in my blog

raising the tone

but i don't run across
enough hightoned quotables

so i thought i'd try
random joycequotes

eg yesterday:

"Pause. If we were all suddenly somebody else. Far away a donkey brayed." (randomJAJ)

but this collapsed two paragraph breaks:

"Pause. / If we were all suddenly somebody else. / Far away a donkey brayed." (randomJAJ)

and on rereading it this morning
i realised the slashes
(or something) were needed
and added them




now this simple edit
is semantically byzantine:

should the rss feed signal a change?
should the rss item be redated from
created-time to updated-time?

suppose i want to discuss the change
(as i'm doing now)
shouldn't i
ideally
be able to link
before and after views
eg waybacked at archive.com?

but the

story

this edit tells:

person writes text
person dislikes poetry of re-read text
person edits formatting

is a special case of:

person writes text
person dislikes X about re-read text
person edits X

which is one of the
most basic 'stories'
in general wordprocessing

and only becomes controversial
complex
because a publication-step
was added
between error and edit

semi-live publication
being characteristic
with blogs

if interface-design
ever gets a theory

its core must be
ergonomics
ie
calculating
and minimizing
the effort required
by each interface command




managing Web bookmarks
to minimize longterm effort
requires considerable
advance setup-effort

but will repay handsomely
every time you click




i see three major groupings
for bookmarks:

rss-ables
that largely take care of themselves

non-rss regulars
that i group by update-schedule
as toolbar icons

and irregulars
which i'm addressing now




pick a category like
movies music books games

and think of all your favorite
irregular sites
for that category

eg for movies
i use imdb
irregularly
when i want reference-background
on a particular movie or movie-person

rotten tomatoes
when i want an overview
of critics' opinions

script-o-rama
to look for online scripts

one of the spoilers site
when i want a full plot summary

cap
for its measure of offensiveness

robb's oops gallery
for vidcaps of its nude scenes

etc

and each
irregular time
i need one of these

i have to track down the url
maybe just from memory, retyping it
maybe in my bookmarks file
maybe via google
maybe via another site

but ergonomically
all of these methods are
vastly more expensive
than rss or toolbar icons

so suppose
to optimize
we (each) create a custom page
with a normal toolbar icon

that's our irregulars jump-page

that loads instantly
(by minimizing html-junk
and keeping a copy on our local hard drive)

that sorts these reference-sites
by category:
movies music books games
reference firefox html

with each category getting
one line's worth of links:

movies: imdb tomatoes scripts spoilers cap robb's [etc]
music: webjay yahoo lyrics [etc]
books: OlB pGut used complete dy [etc]
games: reviews jay goodexp [etc]
ref: dict thes rhymes wildcard [etc]
firefox: extensions updates [etc]
html: entities [etc]
etc:

so that your top n-hundred
irregular sites
require the same icon-click
followed by a simple second
scan and click?

isn't this ergonomically optimal?




and further
suppose we use Ning
to share and compare
these jump pages

tweaking them from time to time
and re-generating a simple-as-possible page
for download?

poll: would this work for you?

I've done something similar
I've done something better
I use a similar page created by others
My bookmark manager does fine
I'd use this if it were automated (eg at Ning)
I plan to do it, Ning or not
It's too much work
I don't understand it yet

let the relaxed tool-user
be represented as a green branch

so when the use of a tool
requires moderate effort
the branch turns yellow

and with high effort, red




we (mentally) trim a branch segment
with startingpoint where the tool-user
conceives a subgoal

and with endpoint
where that subgoal is achieved




the yellow-and-redder this segment appears
the lower we rate the
interface design
for this subgoal

(less common subgoals
are allowed to score redly

but the most common
need careful greening)




as the tool-user proceeds

the hi-tech tool
a pc
is streaming music
(say, via Pandora)

but the stone-age digital format (mp3)
frequently changes volume
(sometimes dramatically)

demanding quick response from the user

maybe a dedicated hardware analogue
dial on the cpu box
or on the monitor, or keyboard, or mouse

maybe a custom keyboard macro

or maybe a yellow-branch trip to the Windows tray
and an orange-branch mind-and-eye-squinch
to find the volume-icon
and an orange-red mouse-targetting of that tiny icon
followed by a retargetting on the popup control's slider
and a careful slide
a listening
a re-adjust
and finally a dismissal of the control
(o billg have mercy on us poor users)




since the pc's audio channel
is normally uncorrelated with the desktop's top app

that app needs to afford it
n square-pixels
of dedicated screen real-estate

preferably in a corner of the screen
where the mouse can be 'thrown' in a Fitt

and since volume is the most commonly required tweak
the mousewheel should become a volume control
whenever it hovers near that corner

(perhaps the lower right
is currently least-used?)

A couple of weeks back Cnet debuted a Flash ontology-browser (called "The Big Picture") that occupies a big chunk of the righthand sidebar with some/most/all articles.

I've been meaning to look closer at it, and this random link about how the brain represents habits seemed like a convenient moment... because the ontology-connections are especially bizarre.

It's easier if you jump directly to the fullpane view of the browser (identical url with "?tag=st.bp" at the end, where bp = big picture).

The story-author (or an editor) is supposed to tag each story with topical keywords (green bubbles) and mentioned-companies (red bubbles), but this story doesn't actually have either of these-- the three green and one red bubble you see here are linked via other 'similar' stories (grey bubbles), though you have to look closely to figure this out.

The author/editor has directly specified three 'similar' stories, which can be traced on the browser by following the grey lines from the central story-bubble:

• One goes NNW to "Are we getting smarter or dumber?" which has no secondary links, for no obvious reason. (If you click on it, you'll see it does have green bubbles for "Internet" and "Education".)
  
  
• One goes due south to "IBM sells Blue Gene for brain research" which has zillions of secondary links. (But if you click on it, you lose the backlink to the original article!? There's a 'Reset' button down there, for this emergency.)
  
  
• One goes SE to "Harvard brain images: Cat vs rat" which is linked only to the green R&D bubble (you may have to click on some whitespace to get this to scroll into view). If you click on this story you'll see it does have more hidden grey and green links, so apparently the due-south link has been arbitrarily favored for expansion (maybe because it has the most links?).

These three similar-story links are appropriate and useful, and as a basic rule of web-design all web-articles should probably offer such a short set at the end, because many readers will at that point be ready to explore. I think Cnet was already doing that in text form, maybe in a sidebar though (which is less effective).

Someone should have added "MIT" as a red-bubble link-- I expect this will become more routine. It needs at least one green bubble for "Neuroscience".

The supposed rationale for using graphics instead of just text is that similar items can be visually clustered, but this isn't what's happening here-- the most similar stories are getting buried in random linkage.

Whenever I see a floating-bubbles interface (and I'm ashamed to say I even programmed an early one, back in 1990), I think of a bad stage magician waving his hands to distract you while he picks your pocket.

Cnet's readers would be much better served if this info was offered in text-outline form, maybe with fast Ajax browsing.