The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Great article, and the design short comings are pretty easy to overcome. Via RSS4Lib
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
This is an oft discussed topic on teknoids, so it is interesting to see that are larger issues here than whether or not a CivPro lecture is interesting enough to keep students from bidding on eBay during class.
Laptops in classrooms not working out as hoped
Some professors have responded to the prevalence of networked computers in class by changing their teaching styles. The University of Houston’s Prof. Adams, for instance, now peppers his lectures with enough questions to reduce students’ Web surfing. When he is discussing a particularly complex subject, he says, he tells students to close their laptops.
XSPF Web Music Player (Flash) – Plays MP3 on your website
XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format. The software is written in Actionscript 2.
Slashdot | Open Source AJAX Webmail
“It seems AJAX webmail is all the craze. Right on the heels of both Microsoft and Yahoo launching beta versions of their new AJAX webmail clients, an Open Source startup RoundCube has released an alpha of a GPLed AJAX webmail client. While there are still many features missing (like search!), the demo they have is completely cross-browser compliant and overall very impressive.”
The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog posted these stories of interest yesterday and today:
Microsoft, Yahoo Reach Instant Messaging Deal – Yahoo! News
A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies nearly as many users combined as AOL has in total.
Vertical Search Engines Rising Again?
Healthline specializes in helping people get access to sophisticated medical information. It uses cutting-edge semantic search techniques to let someone with limited medical knowledge mine sophisticated medical data from a Web site. By way of example, the company says searching for “Blackberry thumb” yields useful results.
I would go for this. I would also go for the opportunity to buy a DVD of the movie I just saw in the theater on my way out the door. I’d probably own a lot more DVDs if I could do that.
Slashdot | Pay-Per-View to Provide DVD After Viewing?
Comcast is entertaining an idea that would allow digital cable customers to purchase a pay-per-view movie for roughly $17 that would also include a hard copy in the mail a few days later. From the article: “The only snafu in the entire idea is the fact that only 40% of Comcast cable subscribers have the required digital box at this point in time. But still, that is 40% of 21 million customers which is not too bad. DirecTV and Dish, are you listening?”
Verisign’s payment gateway will become part of PayPal.
eBay, VeriSign Strike Online Payment Deal
Online auctioneer eBay Inc. announced Monday that it plans to buy VeriSign Inc.’s payment gateway business for $370 million, as it looks to further secure transactions by eBay users.