When people don’t fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it’s too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful…
Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics. Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them.…
This Yahoo! Search service finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license. While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions. —Yahoo! Creative Commons Search (Yahoo!) Slashdot is aflutter with…
An international study of about 100,000 15-year-olds in 32 different developed and developing countries suggests that the drive to equip an increasing number of schoolchildren in the UK with computers may be misplaced. In a report to be given at the conference of the Royal Economic Society in Nottingham this week, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger…
About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. […] Current file downloaders are…
Readers are using aggregation services like Google News to save time and find news they’re interested in from one location. But the digital melting pot of news has raised questions about the need for standards that go beyond technology. —Stefanie Olsen —Tough week prompts closer look at how Google gathers its news (SFGate.com) Similar:The Ascent…
Update, December 2024: Sadly, the “what’s my namber” service has not been operating for some time. I’ve changed the first link to the Wayback Machine’s cached page. What’s a namber? A namber is a word that acts as a mnemonic for a number. For example, 65 is drum, and 181 is push. A namber address…
—Personalized Google News (Google) A great little addition to Google’s incredibly useful news aggregator. I deleted the “sports” section, and added sections containing keywords that I always find myself googling. The search I created for “weblog” isn’t very useful, but I’ll play with the interface later. There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to…
The demand is such that the niche has grown from text-based games coded by hobbyists to between 30 and 50 professional audio-game developers who sell 3,000 games a year, experts estimate. Most of these games run on ordinary PCs and are often joystick- or keyboard-controlled. The player dons a pair of headphones, and elements of…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace claimed that literature is “sweet” and “useful.” Since then, literature has been traditionally understood, at least in Western cultures, as having the dual purpose of entertaining and educating its audience. Literary texts are constructed in effect as objects of beauty, sources of pleasure and as…
Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual “Is it lunchtime yet?” inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well. But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not…
Search engines are some of the most commonly accessed Web sites online. Millions of people turn to search engines daily to find information about news, health concerns, products, government services, their new neighbors, natural disasters and a myriad of other topics. At the same time, recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking,…
If you’re designing a website aimed at teenagers, you’d better not make the text too small. That’s not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they’re at their computers. That advice and much more about how websites for teens should be different from those for adults…
When I recently asked a group of librarians how they thought Google organized its search results, the first suggestion was that Google counts the number of clicks on the links, and adjusts its rankings accordingly. Most of the people in the room seemed satisfied with that answer, but one person volunteered the clarification that Google…
So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation…
Google greatly advances its web search by raising the word limit to 32 words. Previously, only up to 10 words were allowed. —Google Raises Word Limit to 32 (Google Blogoscoped) The casual user probably won’t notice a difference. It was really hardly any trouble to cut out some of the words in a string that Google…
Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if…
The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride’s party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and –in a supreme affront to the “vitality” of the art– will don a bright red…
The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. —Alan…