Todd tells us that Microsoft released the public beta of Internet Explorer 7 today, and he sent us this link to the Beta 2 developer checklist, including these items (among others):
In Home Page Goals Derek Powazek explains why he designs the deepest pages of a site first before working his way back to the home page:
Before I get into those goals, here
The BlogHer organizers have relaunched their website as an aggregated group weblog (these seem to be all the rage these days: BlogHer [beta] | Where the women bloggers are.
It looks like a cool site, well worth reading and the stream of blog posts definitely adds more value than simply promoting the conference, which is also in and of itself a cool thing (at least the first one, last year, was, and I expect this year’s follow up to be just as good) but isn’t quite as “sticky” as website content once you’ve signed up to attend.
I imagine there’s a small risk of alienating newer women bloggers and reinforcing the idea that there’s a clique or inner circle that is featured, but an open policy for inclusion should help mitigate that risk.
This is it. The Firefox Extension I’ve been looking for. As a site developer I spend a great deal of time switching between IE and Firefox to test browser support. This extension completely removes that need and brings it all home. I haven’t tested it extensively however one of my other gripes has been the slow response time for Yahoo! Mail in Firefox. Loading Yahoo! Mail in an IE Tab using Firefox is the solution. MMmm… the best of both worlds!
IE Tab – Firefox Extension
Interesting trend over on Kos of late. Senators and reps have been posting on Kos for at least a year or two. The first one I happen to remember was from Senator Boxer, and folks just loved her for it. But the frequency of these big-name-posts has definitely been on the rise, especially over the last month. A few recent examples:
During the NSA hearings, <a href ="http://congressman-john-conyers.dailykos.com"Rep. Conyers urged folks to tune in to CSPAN. Over the last week, with the Alito filibuster effort under way, Kerry and Kennedy have both repeatedly posted on Kos, urging action. (The first Kerry post was especially interesting — he generally took a shellacking on Kos during the election. And now he shows up, says he reads the blogs and doesn’t mind the abuse, and just as quick, hundreds of comments form a love parade. Makes you wonder what if anything might have happened had he posted there a year ago October).
It’s a fascinating power shift — senators and reps (or at least, staffers of senators and reps) taking their message directly to their base. Does anyone happen to know if the same phenomenon has been seen on the right? Does Santorum post on freerepublic.com for example?
This was once my favorite game:
bbwrite(‘http://www.bunchball.com’, ’em545521138507080234′, ‘4caae0afb97598c470a0b8162077e3059238451085888919ca15f1a5243fbb6850a42f41a8c3689b0055bf355692ce143cba980c5c84a1ae68f6f7def38709a5’, ”, ‘T’, ‘400’, ‘300’, ‘Movable Type’, ‘xian’, ‘000000’, false);
(via TED)
This stuff’s all over my head, but it seems to be talking about tricks to get the performance of Ajax applications in the browser without trading off the standard browser experience your users (and Jakob Nielson) have come to expect (Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality):
To provide the traditional Web usability features, the Ajax application therefore needs to handle URIs client side in much the same way as the server does in traditional Web applications. The Ajax application needs to:
- Generate a URI and send it to the browser when a client-side state change occurs
- Recreate state when a new URI is requested by the browser
I’ve always felt (and I said this all over the book) that it was wrong to think that the Internet inherently isolates people or makes them behave antisocially.
A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:
> The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.
>
> Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.
>
> The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.
>
> “There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”
>
> Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.
Is knowing what to ignore.
The How Not To Deal With Blogs: A Case Study entry by Carlo Longino at MobHappy provides a perfect object lesson in how to get on the bad side of bloggers when dealing with them straight would have been much smarter.
not another blog! 