“In 1998, design engineers at TiVo, the Silicon Valley company that helped introduce the digital video recorder to the world, set out to produce a distinctive remote control. The result was a textbook blend of complexity and ease of use.”

“thecounter.comís stats live again. Not to be used as a final word, but as good an indication as youíll find of the global climate, their stats are aggregated from a widely distributed hit counter script, and presumably sample a broad cross-section of the population.”

“Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account. We compiled some especially memorable articles and threads in the timeline below. For example, read Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of what became the World Wide Web or Linus Torvalds’ post about his ‘pet project.’”

“Recently artists have become increasingly interested in maps… This study examines the use of maps in art, looks at why there has been an increase in artists interest in the use of maps, and what use they make of maps. This will be put into context by looking at a brief history of the development of maps and the ways maps are used today and the meanings they have accrued.”

“Here you’ll find a whole bunch of links to some of the vast resources out there. These are places I’ve have gone to and still visit for help and to learn. As new resources are constantly popping up, watch this space for changes. I’ve tried to order stuff as logically as possible.”

“Iím presently involved with the design of the corporate library sites at LucentóI work on information architecture, interaction design and developmentóand Iíve been thinking a lot about aspects of the growth and evolution of the site and how this growth affects navigation… I need some way of exploring alternatives, but I donít want to change the site too drastically without having some justification for doing so, so about a month ago I asked our systems administrator to come up with ways to track where links are being clicked on the page.”

“Put yourself in the place of the reader: Step away from your reporting and research, before you undertake the writing or editing (this is important), and ask: ‘If I were a reader, what about this story would I like to be shown, rather than told in text?’ Sometimes it will be a photo or illustration, but often it will be a simpler, text-only pullout, with at-a-glance information that may draw the reader into your subject the way the inverted pyramid might not.”

“Richard Carpenter is mapping every mile of America’s railroad system as of 1946. By hand. ‘It’s a story,’ he says, ‘that needs to be told.’ …What Dick Carpenter has engineered is A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946 , an encyclopedic work that is as audacious as it is artful. Carpenter aims to draw every mile of railroad track that existed in the United States in 1946. Volume one, published last summer, covers six mid-Atlantic states and more than 23,570 miles of active track. All of which raises a small question and a big one: Why 1946? And why at all?”

“I spend a lot of time helping clients conduct task analysis to form mental-model diagrams. When teams first start analyzing the interview transcripts theyíve collected, they often run into a confidence issue. ‘How will we know if we get the task groups right?’ This question usually arises because the team doesnít have the kind of details it needs to identify clear tasks.”

“Weblog visualisation uses spatial metaphors like that of the world map or the underground lines of a city. Something so apparently unlinked to localisation requires it in order to establish a reference(?)… Weblog visualisation deserves a certain amount of attention since it presents some specific features. An interesting aspect of this type of visualisation is that of the city bloggers (blog creators that live in a city), that are grouped in the visualisation according to the underground stations of their city.”

“…Beauty is skin deep, and so is our evolutionary response. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a layer of decision making we need… If you make something everyone loves, that’s a mark of mediocre design, not great design … I don’t want to control my DVD, I want to watch a movie…”

“Are we at the verge of the creation of a new global verbal-visual language? In 1998 political scientist and Stanford scholar Robert Horn released Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, a ‘must-read’ for anyone who communicates with words and images, and an important roadmap for any serious PowerPoint practitioner.”

“We†have been talking about how the media†is handling†a rumor†about John Kerry that emerged earlier this week. As part of our discussion, we’ve been asking one another questions about coverage and exploring ethical responses. Here’s a conversation†that might help you do the same.”

“This is a presentation I gave to the Usability Professionals Association on 16 September 2003. The full title was ‘Making sense of weblogs in the intranet: What they are, why people are using them, making them useful for knowledge management.’ I talked about weblogs inside my company, their use in knowledge management, and how my organization is hoping to make them usable for enterprise knowledge work if the number of blogs in the company increases significantly.” By Michael Angeles.

“The Artcyclopedia is an index of online museums and image archives: Find out where the works of over 7,500 different fine artists can be viewed online.”