Ethics and Design Interview Live

By David Ponce It’s official: we’ve made it! We have appeared on Oprah!! I can’t quite believe it yet, but I saw it with my own eyes, so it’s not some sort of prank. On Friday, October 24th’s episode, Jeff Bezos appeared on Oprah to talk about the Kindle. She loooves the thing. And around minute 25 of the show, Jeff was asked to show what he reads. Guess who was at the top of the list? The only other tech-y blog was giant BoingBoing! So, I guess ... more

By David Ponce It’s official: we’ve made it! We have appeared on Oprah!! I can’t quite believe it yet, but I saw it with my own eyes, so it’s not some sort of prank. On Friday, October 24th’s episode, Jeff Bezos appeared on Oprah to talk about the Kindle. She loooves the thing. And around minute 25 of the show, Jeff was asked to show what he reads. Guess who was at the top of the list? The only other tech-y blog was giant BoingBoing! So, I guess ... more

Thanks Jeff - raised a chuckle. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95...ightmares.html by Jeff Liebermann (jeffl@) 07/09/94 (All these really happened to me since 1983.) 1. "My hard disk won’t boot." I suggest they take the floppy out of drive A:. Later when I arrive, they have successfully removed the floppy drive from the machine (with the floppy disk still inside). .... and 44 more. ... more

Collaboration is the latest rallying cry of software vendors hoping to embed new generations of enterprise class tools and user experiences into the fabric of the modern workplace. Microsoft , IBM , and other firms expect that control or leadership in the market for collaboration, whether by owning the architecture, systems, or other solution components, will be lucrative. A recent Radicati Group study (quality unconfirmed...) of the market size for enterprise collaboration offere... more

I was enjoying some of the engaging cartograms available from Worldmapper , when I realized tag clouds might have some strong parallels with cartograms. After a quick substitution exercise, I’ve come to believe tag clouds could be to lists of metadata what cartograms are to maps; attempted solutions to similar visualization problems driven by common and historically consistent information needs. Here’s the train of thought behind the analogy. Cartograms are the distort... more

For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that "...IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance"is worth a look. This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Information architects on communicating to IT managers , summarizes the original discussion in the IAI ... more

Direct connections between the war in Iraq and the realm of user experience are rare, so I was surprised when one popped up today in an article by the New York Times, titled 2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 25 . The article quotes an Iraqi, reacting to the destruction of a house containing a cache of munitions by American soldiers. "The Americans are lying," said Ali Jabbar, 28, one of several men digging through the rubble, where bicycle handlebars could be seen poking out. "If there wer... more