Today I stumbled across an email a colleague of mine sent out last July. He referred to a YouTube video that highlighted MS Vista’s speech recognition. All I can say is that while it performs admirably at times, quite a few times I found the video both painful and funny to watch (see below). It really confirms that the usability and user experience professions are here to stay.

Microsoft Vista Speech Recognition Tested – Perl Scripting

[Runtime: 10:33 | Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed on your computer to watch this video. To download it, please visit: http://www.adobe.com/]

– Hat Tip: Ari Weissman

Tags: [Vista, Windows Vista, voice recognition, user experience, usability, Microsoft, Partial Recall]

If you missed the IA Summit in Vegas this year, fear not! DCIA will be holding a redux on Saturday, May 12 at 9am. We have commitments from several speakers to recap their talks.

Details:

Where: BCC Services Center
When: Saturday, May 12, 9am – 1pm
What: Mini-sessions, panel discussions, five-minute madness, networking, and bagels — lots and lots of bagels.
How much: $5 to cover the cost of food and venue

Speaker	Detail	Presentation File
Celeste Lyn Paul on card-sorting	description	PDF (519 KB)
Hallie Wilfert on her grandmother as IA	description	PPT (10.8 MB)
Stacy Surla on Second Life	description	PPT (6 MB)
Thom Haller on clear and useful content	description	PPT (8.5 MB)
Dan Brown on IA documentation	description	PPT (3.5 MB)
Austin Govella on IA’s impact on business	description	PPT (1.3 MB)
Lorelei Brown on lessons from failures	description	SlideShare (online)

We’ll be breaking into small groups to talk about several of the themes that emerged during the Summit, including: documentation for rich internet applications, management issues, and design processes.

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED: If you attended the Summit and would like to talk about your experience or lead a small group discussion, please drop me [Dan Brown] a line at brownorama@gmail.com.

Tags: [IASummit, IASummit2007, IASummit07, DC-IA, information architecture, interaction design, usability, experience design, Partial Recall]

Today I decided to check out his site and found an interesting find. I’m surprised I hadn’t stumbled across it sooner, but I believe it can inspire a company such as my own since we leverage whiteboard technologies with our learning curriculum. Check it out.

[Runtime: 04:43 | Please make sure you have the latest version of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer to watch this video. To download it, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com ]

Tags: [k12, MIT, whiteboard, smartboard, educational technology, education, Partial Recall]

Today Google launched their own calendar offering. I created a Google Calendar for myself and my initial review is relatively positive, but not enough to make me a convert.

Pros

The definitive positives include the ability to manage multiple calendars, sharing calendars and delegating permissions to access these calendars. Also, there are a variety of ways to get notified of events – emails, SMS, etc.

Cons

The biggest negative, for me, is that there is no sync capability. Google allows you to import your calendar from another program, but there is no way to sync a localized version of your calendar, either on a client program, a handheld, or otherwise. In addition, it does not publish in the iCal format to allow for subscriptions. Why should I only be able to view the calendar on the site? Shouldn’t I also be able to subscribe to the calendar and view it using a portable device? Perhaps the thought is that all portable devices in the future will have a persistent connection to the Internet, but I for one cannot now justify spending a few extra bucks for my mobile phone provider to offer this option.

I understand that Google starts off with limited features and expands its offerings, but this sync criticism is one that I have with a majority of the web calendar offerings out there. My current solution is to use iCalx to host my calendar. Essentially, it is a site that offers webDAV technologies and uses PHP iCalendar. That way I can use a client like Apple’s iCal or Mozilla Calendar to publish and sync my calendar in the iCal format to the iCalx site. Then I can sync the client with my portable device (Palm).

Conclusion

I have no problem using a web program like Google instead of a client program, but it must at least offer a way to subscribe to the calendar for viewing on other platforms and devices. Google is on its way to solving the problem of sharing and collaborating using calendars, but until they can offer a subscription and a syncing feature, it will not replace my current solution.

Update

I spoke too soon. Google does offer the ability to view the calendar from other applications by offering both an xml feed and an iCal subscription! Yippie! Now they just need to let users create entries from these other applications so they can be synced to the Google calendar.

Tags: [Google, calendar, Google Calendar, iCal, iCalx]

Well, it looks like there’s a relatively stable way to get Microsoft and Apple to play together on a Mac. Have you been successful?

Tags: [Apple, Microsoft, onmac, intel, macbookpro, Joy of Tech, xp]

“There are federal mandates such as Section 508 that provide for equal access to web applications for handicapped individuals. Shouldn’t there be an equal access technology policy too?”

My point being that official G2C business systems should allow for multi-platform accessibility. Granted, I’ve spoken about the alternative of using Citrix, but this is not a particularly intuitive solution for many people. At least there are some offers of help.

Frankly, I do not think that it would be such a stretch to create a product that is available on multiple platforms. Sure, perhaps they cannot have something available “for every platform imaginable,” but this is not forging new ground. For instance, a tool like JEdit is Java-based and can therefore be run on multiple platforms. It is a text editor that handles a variety of plugins, including fairly robust XML editing. Now, although I do not know all the technology requirements for a tool to be able to transmit the data to grants.gov, it seems to me that something similar can be created that meets the requirements for offline application creation.

If Grants.gov is unwilling to “host” grantees’ data centrally, then it seems that this saved money could easily be used to resolve this issue. It’s just a shame that they did not think to include the multiple platform requirement when they initially contracted with PureEdge. I guess the saying goes “better late than never,” but it sounds as though there are some angry people – I’ve been monitoring this dissatisfaction for almost 2-3 years now.

Tags: [Grants.gov, grants, federal, government, G2C, usability, UX, PureEdge, Mac, Apple, NSF, Citrix, fair access]

Today’s Washington Post catches on the problems Mac users have identified for a while now – that Grants.gov does not support Mac users unless these users use a Citrix workaround.

Scientists should focus on science, not on how to submit applications for funding. It seems to me that the process should be intuitive and quick – not painstakingly difficult to figure out. The Grants.gov issue starts off with usability problems because it does not support a variety of computing platforms. Why does the grant community gush about NSF’s Fastlane system? Well, you don’t need to get bogged down in instructions to figure out how to use it and it is platform independent.

Perhaps Grants.gov should determine why scientists love this system. Previous posts about Grants.gov here and here.

Tags: [Grants.gov, grants, federal, government, G2C, usability, UX, PureEdge, Mac, Apple, NSF, Citrix, fair access]

It looks as though Best Buy is offering Apple Powerbooks with what looks like the Windows 98 OS! This post may get a lot of traffic, so let me stop the speculation now by saying that Best Buy is NOT offering Powerbooks with Windows. BB simply needs to work on their Photoshopping skills.

Product here and expanded image here.
Hat Tip to Durden2.0.

Tags: [Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Windows, Microsoft Windows, Best Buy, laptop, Powerbook, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Newsvine]

Tags: [CoverFlow, iTunes, Apple, software, visual, music]

Year One included the tagline “The Web Is a Platform” to which Battelle remarks,

“That felt spot on, because the idea of the web as a place you could build on the work of others was a pretty new idea.”

Year Two included the tagline “Revving the Web” to which Battelle remarks,

“…because it was all about the services and businesses and opportunities that arose from the Web – all of which taken together made the web more robust and more exciting.”

For November’s conference, Battelle suggests the tagline “Disruption” by indicating,

“…the year the Web – in all its forms – really flexes its muscle and begins to seriously turn the soil of the global economy in deep and permanent ways. Think of the disruptions in the media and entertainment industries – probably the deepest disruptions so far. But we’re only in the first inning or so of the disruptions in the mobile and communications space (how excited do YOU think AT&T is about Google offering free Wifi, for example? Or eBay buying Skype?). And the disruptions of search and clickstreams on commerce is only now beginning, and the same is true for the massive IT industry (Microsoft Live, anyone?). And the disruption on our cultural life – in government, for example (can you say warrantless wiretaps meets the Database of Intentions?) – is only beginning to dawn on all of us.”

I’m not sure I follow Battelle’s logic here. “Disruption” is just another name for change, and the technology industry, which affects other industries like media and communications, only survives through innovation. I do understand that some industries are grounded in consistency rather than innovation, but for every example of IT companies becoming more immersed in other industries (i.e., Google offering WiFi, eBay buys Skype, Yahoo streaming television content), there are examples of these industries embracing IT (i.e., Verizon offering integrated internet, television, telephony,etc. services) . I’ve even seen telephone companies now offer VoIP so that they are offering more than one service.

Certainly Web 2.0 may be disruptive to some companies from some industries, but what about the consumers? Are they disrupted by the new technologies and philosophies that have emerged as a result of the Web 2.0 dialogue? I do not think so. Web 2.0 cannot be just about how it affects industry and commerce but how it affects the end user, and part of what makes Web 2.0 the current buzz is because as the web becomes more social, so too it becomes more universal and needs to become more usable. Usability is much more critical when we focus not on the needs of a target audience, but on the universal web population.

Last September, Tim O’Reilly fleshed out his definition of what Web 2.0 really is. The focus covered both the economic implications and the social components that seem to define this concept. I’ve tried to respond to John by suggesting that the next conference include a tagline inspired by one of my following contributions:

• “Web 2.0 – Egocentrically Altruistic”
• “Web 2.0 – Egocentrically Altruistic Web for the World”
• “Web 2.0 – Findable, Usable, Portable and Universal”

Egocentrism and Altruism

You see, I am noticing that Web 2.0 encapsulates both egocentric needs and altruistic ones. Thomas Vander Wal discusses Web 2.0 and concludes his post by referring to a recurring theme he has been evangelizing:

“In this past year I frame the need for it as a change from the “I go get web” to the “Come to me web”

Thomas points to some of the egocentric components of Web 2.0. The internet is becoming more portable and personal – customizable portals, RSS feeds, rich interfaces and the like draw people because they can make their Internet experience their own. This is the lure from companies who are offering free services to customers – offer a rich personalized experience to draw people to sites driven by advertizing revenue.

But Web 2.0 is also defined by its altruistic qualities. The other side of the coin that is offering free personalized services for intended revenue is that the software and web developers tend to embrace the credo of making the world better – that means some are offering services for free out of an altruistic spirit (okay, so some hope to make it big and get bought out by Yahoo or some other IT conglomerate). We are currently seeing an explosion in collaborative and social web services. The altruism that partially defines the Web 2.0 generation is that the web collective seeks to help and connect with each other.

One of the outcroppings of Web 2.0 has been that of organizing information for easy retrieval – concepts including information architecture, findability, oncology, taxonomy, and folksonomy have become en vogue. Folksonomy, in particular, has intrigued me because it encapsulates both the egocentrism and altruism components that appear to define Web 2.o. Thomas Vander Wal explains that “in short a folksonomy is a set of uncontrolled tags provided by individuals for their own retrieval purposes of that object and these tags are shared publicly.” Therefore, although Thomas appears to focus on the egocentric components of folksonomy, I would argue that there is both an egocentric component (tagging for myself) as well as an altruistic one (I’ll share my tags for others and see). This is Web 2.0 in a nutshell. Yes, from an economic perspective, the outcropping of technologies and services is for revenue, but Web 2.0 is much more – it is a movement, a philosophy…

So, will O’Reilly and Battelle embrace my tagline for the Web 2.0 conference? I doubt it – it’s not flashy and it isn’t aimed at the bottom line: the almighty dollar. However, at the end of the day, I think true Web 2.0 is more than a technology, a company, a concept, or a service. Web 2.0 is simply providing an intuitive rich user experience that can be both egocentric and altruistic.

Tags: [Web 2.0, Web2.0, VanderWal, Thomas VanderWal, Vander Wal, Tim O'Reilly, John Battelle, longtail, folksonomy, taxonomy, findability, tagging, AJAX]