Saturday, April 06, 2002

Spend a few hours this afternoon playing with drag and drop in IE. There seems to be two main approaches. At JavaScriptKit they use onmousedown and onemouseup to grab elements with class=draggable and then dynamically change their x/y position. This creates a better visual effect than the official Microsoft approach, which uses a variety of new eventhandlers. But the Microsoft way allows for more powerful scripting, as you get to call functions not just when you grab/drag/drop, but also as enter or leave a 'drop-zone'. I can't decide yet which I prefer. I should probably look at ways to combine both. [Tony Bowden's Radio Weblog] 10:24:21 AM    comment []

Garth Kidd discovered the feature that makes the instant outline so much more than just an instant outline. There's a mind bomb tucked neatly in there. If you link to another outline it expands in place. It's as a web page links to another page, but you kept your context. All my work with outliners, since 1978, has been about getting to this place. It's a big idea. I call it the world outline, and it's as ambitious an idea as the world wide web. [Scripting News] 10:23:15 AM    comment []

Tapping into and Rewarding Communities "Emergent Music: Uncover the undiscovered in new music is now officially launched. In my own words I'd describe EM as: A site with collaborative new music recommendations that the community in turn rates and then our fancy math (based on Bayesian statistics) figures out not only the best recommendations but also the best people at creating and improving them (who we then reward). Something to think about relative to how to get incentives right in KM systems. Also looks like fun in its own right." [Jim McGee: TEC924] Jim pushes back on my original pointer to Matt's Emergent Music site, and I agree that the tricky part for KM buy-in is the rewards/incentives. I wanted to post more about this because Eric also added his perspective: "OK, I guess personally what I'm really after is someting more like MovieLens, not Amazon's "people who bought this, also bought this..." feature.  Yeah, sure they may have bought it, but did they enjoy it.  That's what I'm after.... But can I have the recommendations served up to me....?  Say via RSS?" [useless miscellany] I sure hope so! Eric must have a very rich media life because he's willing to invest the time to note his preferences for music, books, web sites, and movies. Filtering those lists via collaborative technology or RSS feeds is a killer app for information overload. The problem with these types of sites is that the information stays on their site - it doesn't travel with me. I visit fewer and fewer sites these days as I channel my news, information, and commentary through the news aggregator in Radio. If I could have a separate page to automatically pull in new music recommendations, movie reviews that match my tastes, etc., I'd be consuming far more products than I do now. Supposedly, the company that bought Kazaa released a new version this week that includes a new recommendations service based on the tracks the user actually listens to in the program. The best thing the music industry could do right here and now is partner with Kazaa, provide legal downloads at a reasonable cost, push new artists to me via the recommendations, and laugh all the way to the bank. It's the best way for them to turn average people who find no alternatives for online music back into paying customers. And it would work, too, if they would just grow up and treat us with a little respect. [The Shifted Librarian] 10:20:31 AM    comment []

The Story Behind Usability.gov "It’s a story that underscores the critical role that Usability.gov plays in the electronic communication of complex cancer information to very diverse audiences. One minute, a researcher seeking grant information is pulling up an NCI website for details on what grants are available and where to apply. The next minute, an ordinary citizen is frantically searching NCI websites for any informationæany cluesæabout a type of cancer for which the doctor is testing them. Every day, NCI disseminates life and death information. Usability.gov ensures that users and their web behaviors are kept in mind when designing sites.... Given these questions, we began testing the site, an experience that furthered the need to develop a formal way to collect and share our knowledge for future reference. We conducted user tests with doctors, medical librarians, cancer patients, researchers, and others who we expected would be regular visitors. What we learned from testing was as surprising as what we learned from our questionnaire and interviews: some icons were not clearly clickable, many links were confusing, our terminology did not match our users’, and core information appeared to be buried or lost within the site. These were not mere glitches, but conceptual and foundational challenges that needed to be addressed." [Boxes and Arrows, via Tomalak's Realm] In their Lessons Learned section, they also include what their testing revealed about Instant Messaging, both the usability of the interface and the placement of the logo on web pages. Libraries providing this type of online service should definitely read this over. [The Shifted Librarian] 9:03:28 AM    comment []

BooksIsFree. In response to the news that Oprah will be scaling back her book club, Steven over at Library Stuff has this to say: "Impact on libraries? I think that Oprah turned many ex-readers onto and non-readers back to the printed word. Even though she is not doing her thing anymore, many of her followers will continue to read. They will have to count on librarians more for reader advisory purposes and we should work on provding Oprah-type reading lists for our patrons. Thanks Oprah for what you have done for libraries and readers alike." He's spot on to advocate that we pick up the slack here. Heck, we're already doing Reader's Advisory work, and this is our chance to enhance and market it. The One City, One Book program is one way to continue book discussions at a regional level, but it doesn't help get quality advice and recommendations to individuals based on their own preferences. Libraians provide quality search, indexing, and cataloging services you just can't get anywhere else. The key word there is quality. The same holds true for Reader's Advisory. The only other people on the planet who can even come close to us are booksellers, and they don't have the same training and support network that we do (although they're close on that second point). So what can we do to keep ourselves in this loop, even expand it? Well, many librarians already do in-house, face-to-face interactions pretty well, although certainly we need some good PR to boost awareness of it. But we could probably do a better job of providing automatic notifications of new titles (via email), online chatting with readers via IM ("call" us and ask for a good book), better collaborative filtering software as applied by librarians specifically for this purpose ("Emergent Words?"), and better dissemination of our reviews and advice. For the dissemination angle, as a proof of concept I'd like to see a public library with a healthy RA service use a copy of Radio to start archiving their staff reviews of new titles. Genres could be set up as categories, and anyone on staff could add to the archive by just typing in the box in the browser. It should be pretty easy to add a macro to identify the author and a second one for the reviewer, you've already got the date (modifications could be added manually if need be), if you install the right software it's all searchable, and everything is archived automatically. Why would I do this with Radio? Because for $40, a library could get this service up and running in a few minutes. The categories would make for easy browsing by date, and the right search engine software could provide for pre-configured searches of works by a specific author. But the best part is that the service as a whole and each genre separately would have their own RSS feed that patrons could subscribe to with a news aggregator. It wouldn't be the most granular level of RA, but it would take the bibliographies we're already doing and make them available online in a more dynamic and portable way. You could even include links directly into your catalog for immediate status and availability (did somebody say "web service?"). If you set up a category for each reviewer, then patrons could learn which people they trust and subscribe just to those people's feeds. I know there are other ways to do all of this, but the simplicity of WYSIWYG editing in the browser, plus the easy creation and maintenance of categories, plus the killer app addition of turning your review service into RSS feeds suddenly becomes a very powerful combination. Now you've got quality (librarians aren't just the "ultimate search engine," we're also the ultimate collaborative filtering technology for books) plus quantity (by pooling resources multiple libraries could collaborate on something like this) plus automatic dissemination through channels the reader hand picks. Granted, we're a few years away from news aggregators going mainstream, but the elevator is on the ground floor right now and the arrow is pointing up. I don't know enough about the languages behind news aggregators to say how, but I know you could use Radio as the backend for this even if you just wanted to display the categories on your web site for now. As Dave says, it's bootstrapping for now, but imagine a book review version of News Is Free with thousands of channels and reviewers, all maintained by the experts - librarians. Don't get me started on how the reviews should be able to link to ebook and audio ebook versions listed in our catalog that a patron could check out right then and there.... [The Shifted Librarian] 8:25:04 AM    comment []

Exchange formats and common pools for free data. For a while, I've been considering the possibilities of creating a standard and some software to create distributed databases (in the sense of "collections of information", not relational databases). davidw's article about a free translation repository had a lot in common with my ideas, so I decided to put some thoughts down. Note that these are rather unfinished ideas, I'm putting them down here in hope of some feedback that might help refine them. [Advogato] 8:24:05 AM    comment []

Malayan Proverb. "Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 8:23:11 AM    comment []

16139 » April 6 4:46 AM. Behold Oddpost! Like they say, it really is "indubitably the most astounding web-based email application on earth." I was skeptical, but their drag-and-drop interface is so clean and functional that comparing it to Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail is like comparing a Frank Lloyd Wright house to a birdcage made of Tinkertoys. All DHTML, so it requires IE 5+ on Windows. Netscape, Opera, Mac, and Linux users are out of luck. (Welcome to the effects of market share.) [MetaFilter] 8:18:28 AM    comment []