Archive for April, 2006

IA and UI as building blocks of SEO

April 24, 2006

In SEO, Information Architecture and Interface Design, Shari Thurow writes:

The most important building block of SEO is the information architecture. If you want your HTML/XHTML, audio, video, and image files to generate qualified search engine traffic, the key ingredient to making these files appear relevant are the information architecture and the interface that communicates this architecture.

(Hat tip to Peter Morville.)

Splog software

April 21, 2006

I found one of my recent posts appropriated (plagiarized) at a clickfraud spam blog called Christian-radio, hosted or created by a tool called BlogSolution that appears to be designed to create splogs.
Welcome back my friends, to the tragedy of the commons that never ends.

Craig McLaughlin to Judge 2006 WebAwards

April 21, 2006

Congratulations to Craig for being selected as a judge for the 10th annual Web Marketing Association International WebAwards!
The WebAwards is the standards-defining competition that sets industry benchmarks based on the seven criteria of a successful Web site. It recognizes the individual and team achievements of Web professionals who create and maintain outstanding Web sites. The 2006 WebAward judges consist of a select group of Internet professionals who have direct experience designing and managing Web sites

IA Summit Wrapup at Boxes and Arrows

April 20, 2006

The venerable user experience webzine Boxes and Arrows has come out with its comprehensive wrapup of the 2006 IA Summit. A few of the writeups there are by me (coverage of a pre-conference session on prototyping with comics that I first wrote about here on this blog, coverage of two presentations, and coverage of a panel on tagging that I first wrote about over at You’re It!.
You can start reading the B+A coverage with the article called Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-conference sessions. Then continue on to Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Cleaned a lot plates in Memphis

April 18, 2006

Young Avenue Deli (in Memphis, TN)

Philip, Anjali, Gaven, Dan, Chris, Marsha, Joel, and I had dinner at the Young Avenue Deli tonight. Great food and nice divey atmosphere.

We also played a little Galaga (vintage video game) and pocket billiards, although the cue ball kept going down into the coin-op vault.

I briefly had the high score on Galaga

UX Magazine hot off the presses

April 17, 2006

UX Magazine – The User Experience Magazine writes about getting Dugg after their launch and having to locate a new webhost to deal with the influx of traffic. Not bad for a fledgling webzine.
Fundamentally, the magazine is a blog. The articles are short and the site is powered by TextPattern. But the homepage presents more of a magazine look and feel, with featured articles, departments, and a pretty layout offering multiple links to past entries. I’ve added it to my aggregator.

Yahoo! Next lets you preview what's to come

April 14, 2006

I stumbled across Yahoo! Next last night. Similar to Google Labs, this is a glimpse into what Yahoo! is working on. It’s a collection of some pretty nifty beta services. I particularly like the Open Shortcuts.

First page of search results, please

April 12, 2006

Todd just sent around this BBC News article discussing a US study that found thatsearch users stop at page three and that, in fact, “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results.” This jibes with my own personal experience. I rarely even go past the second page. I wonder if some people don’t even go below the fold.
Also: “41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.”

Social and Personal Search (at BayCHI)

April 11, 2006

Dan and I are heading down to PARC this evening for Beyond Search – Social & Personal Ways of Finding Information, a BayCHI event:

Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic search paradigm of relevance and flat lists of results, resulting in different user experience challenges. This panel brings Neil Hunt (Netflix), David Porter (Live365), Tom Conrad (Pandora), Kevin Rose (digg), and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) to explore trends in social search.

We’ll report back tomorrow!

The N-Judah blues

April 9, 2006

It’s been years since I’ve ridden the N-Judah muni streetcar on a regular basis but for a while there back in the late ’80s and early ’90s I practically lived on it.
I rode it to get downtown, to get to BART, to get to the east bay, to get to Dead shows. It was always late and it was always crowded.
My friend Nick tells me there was a song by some obscure SF band in the ’60s called the N-Judah blues.
I can believe. Now the line has its own blog: The N-Judah Chronicles.