Archive for the ‘web’ Category

I’ve had a busy time of late, in particular thanks to a couple of days in Switzerland and Austria, followed by the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in the Docklands. FOWA’s a little large for my tastes, but it’s undeniably well organised. Three sessions stood out (the uniformly excellent Gavin Bell, Benjamin Huh’s history [...]

More and more, I find myself less interested in what web designers have to say. That’s not to say that there aren’t some very clever people out there – hell, I’m lucky enough to work with some of them. However, I’m worried that as a community we are blinded by our self-importance. Proudly we don [...]

Just found out that the video of my talk at Reboot in Copenhagen has been posted to the conference site: Slides themselves are on Slideshare, albeit with some minor font inconsistencies. It’s also worth checking out Andy’s session on the user experience curve, and I particularly enjoyed Eric Reiss talking about e-service. Be great to [...]

It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time. Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever [...]

One of the difficulties of working in the internet industry is we sometimes feel like we’re fighting a losing battle against regulation. Despite the new horizons the digital age offers: state databases of our information are growing, yet our access to public information is being eroded, copyright is becoming more restrictive, making a criminal out [...]

The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that [...]

The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session: Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. [...]

Some mashups are unlikelier than others. However, none as unlikely as the collision of Flickr and id’s classic shoot-em up Wolfenstein in Wolfenflickr 3D. The Web truly is a mysterious place.