Archive for October, 2007

I wonder if the real prize of Zend Developer Zone’s “Contest for Busy Programmers (Win a Free Book!)“-contest is better Google search engine ranking for the site itself — due to an increased number of incoming links from (hopefully?) lots of bloggers…

In case anyone hasn’t heard by now, Radiohead’s newest album In Rainbows may be purchased online. The nice thing is that the buyer decides the price.

The web form in the online store allows you to type in any amount ranging from £0 to £99:99. And it is a great album.

Btw: quite interesting web form design in use there…

As a side note, I feel obliged to pointing out that Smashing Pumpkins’ MACHINA II / the friends and enemies of modern music was released online, for free, as early as way back in the year of 2000.

During his open space session on a possible Topic Maps driven Web 3.0 (or whatever one may want to call it) at TMRA 2007, Graham Moore rushed past a slide that mentioned ontology driven user interefaces.

To my knowledge, researchers have already touched upon this problem (see for example Furtado et. al., 2001) but I don’t really know whether anyone has been successful in generalizing or implementing such an approach.

Perhaps this is a problem more easily solved using Topic Maps than alternative technologies..? The concepts of a given UI can of course be represented in an ontology (using e.g. ontology annotation as supported by the OKS). Combining UI-ontologies, or fragments thereof, with Topic Maps’ scope could perhaps be a way of realizing “multiple UIs”?

Most web application use a specialized UI, targeted towards a primary user group. The layout of the UI is probably dictated by a single template, or by a collection of “static” template fragments. What if one used scope to support “switching” between various types of “templates”? Certain template fragments for certain topics under a certain scope?

An application could, for example, “learn” from the user’s behavior and present an alternative UI based on the user’s interests … in some way. Accordingly, one - especially public service providers - could, for instance, create alternative, more accessible interfaces optimized for disabled users (and thus avoid Section 508 lawsuits, if located in the US :D). This would bring “Skip to content” to a whole new level. One could of course also offer alternative views based on user type, interests, preferred form of visualization (e.g. text centric vs. image centric), etc.

Hmmm…

This year I was lucky enough to get to participate at the TMRA 2007 conference in Leipzig, Germany.

It was very interesting to hear some of the most prominent topic mappers giving talks on a range of interesting subjects, and promising to see that the community is getting there and that the missing standards work is not too far away.

I did also enjoy the tutorials on TMQL and CTM, and having done some work with XQuery in the past - at least enough to have experienced how powerful and easy to use it is, I really liked TMQL’s XQuery-like notation for simple expressions. For example, given a topic type identified by person, the expression: (more…)

I wonder how many of Windows Live Hotmail’s members knows how to delete the temporary Internet files in their browser’s cache.

“What’s ‘cache’, anyways?”, I’m sure thousands of users ask themselves.

Screen shot of Windows Live Hotmail not loading.

Haha! They brought this one on themselves.

(I still remember the e-mails we used to receive at Lingo)

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, a quick and good read btw, made me aware of an article entitled Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites: Observing Users Who Work.

The article gives good insight into why it is important to do things right on the front end (Norwegian literates should read Kuttisme.no’s checklist on good quality UIs).