Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Great book review for The Myth of the Paperless Office. An excerpt from the review:
According to Sellen and Harper, paper has a unique set of "affordances"—that is, qualities that permit specific kinds of uses. Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text. Digital documents, of course, have their own affordances. They can be easily searched, shared, stored, accessed remotely, and linked to other relevant material.
I'll probably order the book from Amazon. It reminds me of Tufte's argument about "stacked in space" versus "stacked in time." Stacked in space is neccessary for comparisons. Stacked in time is yer standard PC screen resolution limitation. Collaboration and paper. Comparing information. Knowledge management, and paper as a vehicle. Interesting.
Thanks to Mark Caufman for the link.
Very interesting article from InternetWeek: Notebook -- Inside A .Net Deployment, And More
Microsoft's .Net tools are just now heading out the door, but e-tailer ShopNBC.com is already putting the platform to the test, building its e-commerce platform on .Net while linking that new front end to a back-office built entirely on Oracle's more Java-oriented enterprise applications. Plus: A look inside the "new" browser wars, and the grassroots Web services strategy of Radio Userland. -- Richard Karpinski
Blaine e-mailed this reference directly to my Radio e-mail account. So HE actually updated my blog. I just went through and cleaned up some formatting.
Microsoft Warns of Java Security Hole in Windows. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) has released a bulletin advising of a second vulnerability in software that allows Windows users to run programs written in Java, a Microsoft program manager said on Tuesday. By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology]
RCS is looking pretty cool, and very viable. If nothing else, it's started a whole ton of people talking about things they weren't talking about before. And that's got to be a good thing.
Plus, I'm updating this site again, and finding real value in doing it.
Copyright 2002 © Robert K. Brown
