Jon Udell: The scannable blog

Jon's Radio : Jon Udell's Radio Blog

Updated: 8/6/2002; 12:30:27 AM.

Note: Jon's Radio has moved to InfoWorld

Monday, April 08, 2002

The scannable blog

Marc Barrot is working on making his blog more scannable. It's a subject near and dear to my heart. I'm always looking for better affordances --- which is not quite a made-up term, apparently.

First Marc beefed up my storyList macro, adding category display to his version. You can see it work; it's wired to the contents link of his blog.

Now Marc's working on a variation, a JavaScript widget he calls radioScan. It looks nice and clean under IE, but Marc's worried about JavaScript incompatibilities in other browsers. If anyone would like to help, he'd love to hear from you.

As I look at these things side by side, I wonder whether JavaScript compatibility is the major issue. In both versions, the category names are tucked into HREF TITLE attributes, which means they're only shown when you hover over an item title (and maybe only in IE).

Perhaps a table enumerating all stories, with titles, dates, and categories, is really what the storyList page wants to be. This kind of widget can be rendered statically in a number of ways, and you can give the illusion of sorting up and down on any column by caching these views. It can all be done with no JavaScript dependency.

This would work up to a few hundred items. After that, you'd need to start partitioning the display, but even this can be done in a dynamically-rendered/statically-served way.

Designing an all-in-one storylist display for maximum clarity would be a challenge. But if Edward Tufte has taught me anything at all, it's that a well-designed information display not only can be dense with data, it should be. Perception is a game of pattern recognition. We scan in order to absorb patterns. But we can't absorb patterns that we can't see directly.

That said, radioScan does something that I always think should be popular, but somehow never is. It uses a second window to display a navigational map. This is something JavaScript can do easily and compatibly. Yet there seems to be a strong preference for one-window interfaces. I wonder why?
10:22:21 PM

myNetWatchman: neighborhood watch for the Internet

Thinking about trust and social capital, in online communities, reminds me of the work of Lawrence Baldwin, the creator of myNetWatchman.com. As I mentioned in a column on broadband security, Lawrence takes issue with the attitude of personal firewalls toward the steady stream of malicious probes that they repel. That attitude can be summed up as: "Don't worry, this is just the background noise of the Internet, and we're shielding you from it."

Not so, argues Lawrence. In his vision statement he writes:

Every time your firewall or intrusion detection system logs an event, don't assume the source is the actual hacker. Think of it as a cry for help from a likely victim whose system has been compromised and is just being controlled by a hacker. It's easy to ignore attacks because they don't present an immediate threat — after all, we have a firewall. However, every compromised system is a real and immediate threat to the underlying Internet infrastructure since these systems could be used to attack others and/or to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), potentially incapacitating large portions of the Internet.

In light of these threats, I strongly believe that ALL attack events should be relentlessly pursued.

Lawrence's software reads your firewall event logs, and relays events to his central service, which collates them and automatically notifies the ISPs or organizations that are (usually unwittingly) responsible.

Here is one of Lawrence's success stories.

myNetWatchman is a brilliant use of a network of distributed agents, and perhaps an excellent business model in search of funding, if Lawrence is inclined to go that way. But fundamentally it hearkens back to something we all know in real life: we're safer when we watch out for one another. Good neighbors report trouble when they see it. If you saw somebody breaking into a neighbor's house, you'd report it. Well, we're all neighbors here in cyberspace. Lawrence's software makes it easy to report trouble.
3:22:15 PM