Technology: December 2002 Archive Page

I've worked hard on this document; can you help me meet my deadline?

• Please tell me what you like about it -- I'll feel so affirmed and flattered.
• If you get stuck, or hesitate, I will tell you what to do, so we can get through this testing faster.
• If you start making any serious suggestions, my face will cloud over with a look of pain, since I don't want to hear anything but praise.

Dennis G. Jerz

--Usability Testing: Quick Tips for Designing TestsD.G. Jerz)

How not to conduct a usability test. The document contains eight tips I've collected after watching my technical writing students.

"The look 'n' feel of your website is important. However, it is less important than your text-based content. In most commercial websites, the role of the traditional graphic designer is relatively minor. The role of the information architect is central. The role of the editor and author is critical." Gerry McGovern

--How important is the look 'n' feel of your website?GerryMcGovern.com)

Note that McGovern is not claiming that design is unimportant -- he's just observing that fiddling endlessly with colored stripes and whitespace (as my students often do when they first begin making web pages) has only minimal impact on the value of a web site; far more important is the role of the information architect. Join the discussion over on WebWord.

"In May, when pro-Palestinian activists attacked a group of Hillel students at San Francisco State University, the national press took no notice; there was a small mention in the May 12 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, nothing more. But bloggers -- led by Richmond, Virginia, freelance writer Meryl Yourish -- piled on the story.... On May 14, blogger James Lileks mentioned it in a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Newhouse News Service. Five days later, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, all followed suit with their own articles." Noah Shachtman

[It's good to see an article that moves beyond "bloggers are warmongering bottom feeders who enjoy tweaking liberal journalists," but such articles are still rare in mainstream journalism. The blurb on Wired's main page, but not found in the article itself, contains the best insight: "It's been said that newspapers write the first draft of history, but now there are blogs. These days, online scribes often get the news before it's fit to print." --DGJ]

I really ought to create some kind of comment feature for this weblog, but Steve Himmer from OnePotMeal writes:
"In a similar story, over the weekend I heard an interview on NPR's BBC newshour with Danny Schechter of http://www.mediachannel.org/weblog/. It was about the role of blogs in pushing the Trent Lott story to the media forefront, and ultimately pushing Lott out. All of these stories, I hope, portend some interesting relationships between mainstream and blogstream media in the future. In an unrelated comment about serendipity, I realized recently that I've been bumping up against your writing for a while now without realizing that Dennis Jerz of Interactive Fiction circles is the same as Dennis Jerz of this literacy blog. And then, by another completely circuituous route, I came across your writing again while doing research on grammar and gender. There's probably something to say in all that about the power of blogs and the web to make unexpected connections and provide multiple routes to discovery and exploration, but I imagine I'd just be stating the obvious to say so."

--Blogs Make the NewsWired)

The Wired article quotes an academic who criticizes the weblog community for being self-absorbed, but the truth is that if you have an electronic audience, it's easier and more useful to comment on (and link to) other online texts. Steve's observation that he and I have bumped against each other in three different venues suggests that webloggers aren't that isolated after all. But new blogging tools mean that people who wouldn't otherwise have an online presence (as I do via my curricular website and my involvement in the interactive fiction community) can easily get an online presence through their weblogs.

"As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002." Jakob Nielsen

--Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002UseIT)

Quibble: Stating that "websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users" is misleading, since none of the "mistakes" is really new. Still, I did particularly like Nielsen's complaint about companies that place marketing propaganda in FAQ pages.

Discovering Jakob Nielsen's venerable UseIT.com was a fantastic experience for me back in 1997... his articles supplied vocabulary and a methodology that helped me articulate plenty that I had intuited about hypertext and web design (such as why George Landow's visionary Hypertext made sense in terms of elite literary scholarship but didn't seem to apply to anything that I did on the World Wide Web). At any rate, Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002 compresses all the rhetoric/writing related issues into a singe mistake: "Blocks of Text". (Okay, he also complains about fixed font sizes and horizontal scrolling, but those are hardly new issues.)

Maybe I'm just grumpy because professional websites seem to be better-written than they were before -- either more people have learned what makes good online text, or the post-bust economy means that fewer companies are hiring inexperienced web writers to puff out their pages. For whatever reason, I find Nielsen's columns to be less and and less useful. The comic-strip illustrations didn't add much to my undestanding of the issue, though a few made me smile.

"On September 23rd, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter, after travelling from earth to mars, missed its re-entry to the atmosphere by 143 kilometers, and burned to a crisp. Why? One engineering group used english units, the other used metric. 3 years of labor. Toast. They'd made a big mistake. They'd screwed up. Email to engineering: Clearly communicate essential facts. Otherwise, spaceships turn to smoke and ash. If you can't convert between meters and feet, don't leave the United States, or the planet!" Bill Taht --Uncle Bill's HelicopterTaht.net)

Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician's statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we feel might be sympathetic. But that won't be the expectation of the generation of kids growing up today. Even their most casual instant messages will be 'on the record'. Anil Dash

--Privacy Through Identity ControlAnil Dash)

During the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings of the early 1990s, when casual comments that either Thomas or Hill had made were dredged up and scrutinized under a microscope, I remember hearing stories that students in the law school at U.Va. were stealing each other's notes from bulletin boards and papers from the stacks of papers to be returned, on the odd chance that opinions voiced might one day become controversial, and potentially lead to the downfall of a rival. On an interesting side note regarding the Lott/Thurmond controversy, conservative attack dog Ann Coulter writes: "Back when they supported segregation, Lott and Thurmond were Democrats. This is something the media are intentionally hiding to make it look like the Republican Party is the party of segregation and race discrimination, which it never has been."

"But since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply, and complaints are becoming more common. Many people publish [weblogs] as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won't come back to burn them in the "real" world. Many overlook the fact that their rants can potentially reach millions of people when posted on the Internet. The same law that relates to publishing in the offline world, generally speaking, applies to material posted publicly on a Web log..." --Free Speech -- Virtually: Legal Constraints on Web Journals Surprise Many 'Bloggers' WashPost [registration; link will expire])

"In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal." Jesse James Garrett --The Psychology of NavigationDigital Web Mazagzine)

"Freshman Bobby Berg says he sought out UW-Stout this year because he knew he would be assigned a laptop computer. What he didn't know is that most of his freshman classes aren't structured around the computers as Berg initially thought. 'We don't use them hardly at all,' Berg said."

--UW-Stout students find laptops helpful, but some faults foundLeader Telegram)

UW Stout runs a cheesey advertisement on local TV showing streams of ones and zeros floating around the heads and into the school-provided computers of well-scrubbed happy college students. Truth in advertising? Yesterday my freshman comp students took their final exam in the computer room. (Full disclosure: Nearby UW-Stout has a larger technical writing program than UWEC; few students come to UWEC in order to be technical writers; rather, students who are here for other reasons find their way into the technical writing program at a late stage, and then rush rather frantically through it. When Stout started its laptop campaign, the number of tech writing majors and minors at UWEC dropped, suggesting that students who might otherwise have studied tech writing here ended up at Stout instead. More recently, our numbers are picking up, though.) (If the above link is dead, let me know -- I've saved a copy.)

"The future is now. My pocket video camera stores hundreds of images on a single plastic stick of gum. My mobile phone means I'm reachable virtually anywhere I go. I have hundreds of digital TV channels beamed to me from space. I can communicate with millions of people in one go through this weblog - (I wish). Many diseases and illnesses can be cured today. I can look at the face of my unborn child. My car talks to me and prevents me from getting lost. My money is mostly electronic 1's and 0's. Mostly 0's. My pocket computer can playback entire movies. I can walk around my house and garden surfing the net without wires to hold me back. My kettle filters its water before boiling it. I've spoken to you many times but we've never met. I'm living in the future I used to dream about when I was a kid." Gary Turner --I'm Living in the FutureGary Turner's Weblog)

You may have heard that an early version of computer translation software took the input "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," and changed it to "The whisky is strong, but the meat is foul." Or maybe it was "Out of sight, out of mind" translated to "Invisible idiot." Or maybe the mistranlsated phrase should have been "Don't believe everything you read." --"The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MTMT News International)

"Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims." Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker, Jr., Marc N. Elliott --Conducting Research Surveys by E-Mail and the WebRAND)

This book is available as a free PDF download.

"The unlikely chain of circumstances that would make Braille possible began during the Crusades with King Louis the Ninth of France. Already a religious man, Louis met a crushing defeat in the Crusades, barely escaping death. He returned to Paris certain that God was trying to teach him humility. This belief intensified his interest in charity and, among other good works, he founded the first institution for the blind in the world, the 'Quinze-Vingts' hospice (in English, 'fifteen score'). The name refers to the first inhabitants, 300 knights blinded during the Crusades."

--How Braille BeganBrailler.com)

I'm honored to be listed among Brailer's recent "Great Text Links." Apparently my Online Resource Room "is a fresh, friendly jolt of energy for writing anything in the electronic age: Learn how to write effective e-mail, web sites, and technical documents with short, easy to grasp summary lessons."

A series of pictures describing how usability professionals would handle the "blinking 12:00" VCR problem. Quite amusing. --Usability Review of a VCRUsabilityMustDie.com)

"We recognize the capacity of digital instruments to simulate so many of our elements and forms of living, and thinking, and imagining. But just because the book has been our simulation machine of choice for centuries, we need to study and understand it now more than ever -- not as a place of retreat, but as a profound source, and resource -- at a moment when we are trying to design and control digital simulation tools." Jerome McGann --Literary Scholarship in the Digital FutureChronicle)

At U.Va., I remember that McGann had a laptop computer on his desk around 1988, which was pretty unusual for an English professor.

I admit it... once I started stumbling across my own name on the Internet, I began using Google to find out who has linked to me and how my visibility compares to that of other people whose names I come across. Now Userati automates all that pesky ego-surfing, and even quantifies the result.

Userati uses Google to see how many times person X is listed on the same page as person Y. Then, all these connections are added up. Understandably, Jakob Nielsen tops out the list. A few days ago, I was ranked second to last, with my rating being about 1% of Jakob Nielsen's and 10% of WebWord's John S. Rhodes. Since then, however, new people have been added to the bottom of the list, so my ranking doesn't look quite as shameful. In addition, Google has found the Usearati list... so while it was flattering to see my score jump from about 110 to about 250 in just a couple of days, I am being credited for my connections to people with whom I have nothing in common other than being listed on Userati. --DGJ --Userati ConnectionsUsabilityViews.com)

"Time was, when a writer said: 'Kierkegaard observed that...,' there was at least a fighting chance that he had actually read Kierkegaard. Nowadays it is much more likely he just used Google to flesh out some dimly-remembered quote he heard from a college lecturer or a TV talking head, or came on by chance while browsing. John Derbyshire --The Age of Google: It's Even a VerbNational Review)

Google doesn't return hits that are correct -- it just returns hits that most people who make web pages people think are correct.

"What sort of recreation has the ability to absorb people to the extent that marriages break up, jobs are lost, and they lose friends? How does playing a game on a computer make someone lose functionality in the REAL world, because they want to spend too much time in some imaginary reality? For crying out loud, I thought, it's just a game." Jewels finds out the answer. --But in the End, They're Still Nothing More than VideogamesJive Magazine)

The author is credited as "photographer" for the screen shots of gaming action. That may be stretching it, but I did find the visuals stunning.

"I'm not so nerdy as to suggest that you read Harry Potter as an idea manual for next-generation product development. But the books are filled with examples of products that we'll soon be able to build, and they do provide some idea of what it might mean to embody awareness in the physical world. " A rare essay that communicates something of interest to the general public, from Jakob Nielsen

--In the Future, We Will All be Harry PotterUseIT.com)

"In fact 60 percent of Americans who use e-mail at work receive 10 or fewer messages on an average day, the study released Sunday found. Only 6 percent receive more than 50. And among those power users, only 11 percent say they feel overwhelmed by all the e-mail."

--Study Refutes E-Mail MythWired)

It makes sense... those few people who really are overwhelmed by e-mail are more likely to complain about it online, where such memes spread very quickly. Nevertheless, if you shut off your telephone and answering machine, there's no record of the phone calls you ignore. If you don't check your e-mail for a while, it piles up, and hits you all at once when you go back to it. You can't even pick up all your e-mail and dump it in the trash can so that it makes a satisfying "whump", though I guess you could record the "whump" noise and set up your computer so that the "whump" sound plays when you empty your recycling bin, but that wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. Er... what was this post about again?

Error 404. You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of this address. Do you wish to launch a bypass attack?

Yes | No

--Forbidden: You Do Not Have Permission to View the Contents of this Address. English 110)

An engaging animated intro to an "alternate history" creative hypertext project, created by my freshman composition student Aaron Styx. I hope he expands this idea into a full narrative. See also "The Ed Report" by William Gillespie, Dylan Meissner, and Nick Montfort.

Why would anyone want to consult Allied Computing ("Due to our unique location in Kalispell Montana, Allied Computing is able to offer zero sales tax on all purchases. We also consider trade-ins and trade ups on most new and some used computer systems.") while researching religious aspects of birth control? And if Allied Computing has such a great search engine, why did it return a link to one of my medieval drama pages (which has nothing to do with birth control)? Maybe that page includes all the words "religious, aspects, birth, control," but so, now, does this page. That doesn't automatically make it worthy of high placement in a list of search engine results. (Link goes to Google's cache -- the live results don't include my website.) --DGJ --For Religious Aspects of Birth Control, Trust a Premier Apple Authorized Reseller and Service CenterAllied Computing)

"DigiPen Institute of Technology is the first school in the world dedicated to computer science instruction as it applies to real-time interactive simulation programming. DigiPen is also one of the oldest computer animation schools in the world. Successful graduates of our programs gain the skills required to pursue careers in the rapidly growing world of computer technologies in general, and computer graphics and simulations in particular. We offer an unbeatable combination of practical game-making experience with strong academics." --DigiPen Institute of TechnologyDigiPen)

"The theater has been transformed into a multi-player gaming center in which patrons can challenge one another on some 80 computer games. Unlike a video arcade, players will compete against each other on such popular game systems as Microsoft's XBox, Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. Where there used to be stadium-style theater seating, there are now comfortable executive leather chairs and computer monitors. When the gaming center opens in January, there also will be video screens of varying sizes hanging from the walls so gamers and spectators can view several different contests at once." Jennifer Davies

--Theaters Getting Game: Stadium-style room is transformed into a gaming centerSignOn San Diego)

The article doesn't clearly specify that this is about the transformation of a movie theater into a gaming arena -- so this article is really about the blending of movies and sports, rather than games and theatre. A few weeks ago I taught the 1990 play PICK UP AX, which features a "mood room" that uses a computer to interpret the physiological readings of the people in it. We also discussed selections from The Diamond Age, which features theatrical events in which paying customers interact with professional 'ractors (short for "interactors") in virtual reality.

"Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it -- the software that's interesting to make is software that hasn't been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?' The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built." From an interview with Richard Gabriel

[Another quote from the interview: " So, the idea behind the MFA in software is that if we want to get good at writing software, we have to practice it, we have to have a critical literature, and we have to have a critical context. It looks like we may be able to start a program like that in the next year or so at a major university that I'm not free to name. It's probably going to be called a Master of Software Arts." From the other side of the coin, as a literature Ph.D. who programs on the side, I sometimes face great difficulty talking about my programming activities with non-coding colleagues (which is, in my case, everybody else in my department). Of course, books like The Soul of a New Machine and Hackers already provide a useful vocabulary for examining the values and practices that are -- pardon the pun -- "encoded" in cybercommunities. I find that many of the CS majors I teach are eager to contribute to classroom discussions on such topics as values and ethics, but that in their CS courses they are so busy learning code that they have little time for such discussions. Maybe that's not typical? Our CS department has no graduate program, so the vast majority of students are focused like a laser beam on graduating and getting a job.--DGJ] --The Poetry of ProgrammingSun)

"[T]he best news sources have always felt like a rich, somewhat mysterious pageant. And in many ways, this is an exciting experiment. Lately I've been visiting Google News several times every day, to see how the media world looks through the emotionless eyes of an algorithm." William Powers --The Play's Not the ThingThe Atlantic)

"Consumers are often baffled at the price tag attached to what appears to be little more than a mass of paper, cardboard and ink. A whole host of factors, including the size of the book, the quality of paper, the quantity of books printed, whether it contains illustrations, what sort of deal the publisher can make with the printer and the cost of warehouse space, all affect the production costs of a book. But, roughly speaking, only about 20 percent of a publisher's budget for each book pays for paper, printing and binding, the trinity that determines the physical cost." Christopher Dreher --Why Do Books Cost So Much?Salon)

"The link is the basic element of hypertext, and researchers have long recognized that links provide semantic relationships for users. Yet little work has been done to understand the nature of these relationships, particularly in conjunction with the purposes of organizational/informational Web sites. This paper explores the semantic and rhetorical principles underlying link development and proposes a systematic, comprehensive classification of link types that would be of use to researchers and Web production teams." Clare Harrison

--Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why?FirstMonday)

Harrison's taxonomy of links: Authorizing, Commenting, Enhancing, Exemplifying, Mode-Changing, Referencing/Citing, Self-Selecting. I think that "Mode Changing" is too general a category to be useful, though it is a useful step towards acknowledging that hypertext is often an interface to some other real-world activity (such as booking a plane ticket or buying a gift).

"The project was developed by the BBC to create a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book, marking the 900th anniversary of the 1086 archive. But the snapshot of in the UK in the mid-1980s was stored on two virtually indestructible interactive video discs" which, just 15 years later, were so obsolete they were illegible to modern computers. Engineers have developed emulation software that make the files accessible once more. --Digital Domesday Book UnlockedBBC)

"Costing me money? I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet--and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing....And it's difficult to convince an educated audience that artists and record labels are about to go down the drain because they, the consumer, are downloading music. Particularly when they're paying $50-$125 apiece for concert tickets, and $15.99 for a new CD they know costs less than a couple of dollars to manufacture and distribute." Janis Ian --The Internet Debacle -- An Alternative View (JanisIan.com)

Ian is not a megastar recording artist, but she's had a long, satisfying career, and she says that the music industry isn't to be trusted when it says that file sharing is bad for recording artists.

"I was at the mall today and I was waiting forever in line to tell you what I want for Christmas," wrote Nichole, 8, from Tucson, Arizona. "So I really like that I can e-mail you right away without lining up. Well except for after my little brother." Steve Kettman --Dear Santa: You've Got E-MailWired)