Tag: blog

Usability – interesting analysis of WordPress

I just had a look at the results of this interesting usability analysis of WordPress.

While I do not necessarily agree with all of it, it is a very good analysis, and most of it makes sense. The biggest thing I liked in it was the concept of “not getting noticed”. As much as I love slick new UI models, and lots of graphics and animation, in reality the best software in the world is software you do not even think about. As a user, I should be focusing on what I am trying to do, not how I am going to make the software do it. Especially for any activity which requires any level of focus, having to constantly context switch from thinking about your work to thinking about whether the software will let you do it is extremely invasive.

I had not really thought before about the design of WordPress (hey, I started using it because it is free!), but overall it seems pretty good. Goodness knows, if it had done things to annoy me, I would have whined about it on my blog somewhere!

Tough to find time to blog!

So, just when I thought I was going to have time to start blogging more regularly, life gets in the way again. My wife seriously broke her ankle a few weeks ago, and has been off her feet. I have been playing nurse as best I can since, so there has not been much time for fun stuff like blogging. Hopefully I will try to get back into some rhythm soon. I have a bunch of things I want to talk about – a report from the Conference Board of Canada about Canada’s issues with innovation, some playing I have been doing with Microsoft Silverlight, and a bunch of other stuff.

Soon, I promise.

A Quick Update

I have been unable to post the last couple of weeks as I have been tied up with a bunch of stuff for work (don’t you hate it when work gets in the way of blogging?). Anyway, I have a couple of posts which I have been working on which I hope to post this weekend – one is a followup to my previous post New Product Ideas – How hard can it be?, and will talk about some thoughts I have on actually generating and selecting new product ideas. The other is just some ramblings I have on Bubble 2.0 – questioning whether we (the tech world) and the whole “Web 2.0” community are blowing another bubble, complete with silly valuations, ridiculous buyouts, and not much real business sense. I have not finished writing it yet, so I do not know what my conclusion will be – you will find out when I do (or the other way around).

One of the saddest things I have seen in a long time…

I just finished reading Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations), having been led there from Taking the week off. Before I get to expressing an opinion about this, I just want to express my support for those who have been the victim of these attacks.

The kind of abusive, sociopathic behaviour demonstrated in the posts they are talking about really makes me sick. I have only been following the blog world for a little while, but I have been participating in and watching online interactions since the early 90s – including IRC, then ICQ, various more mainstream chat environments, and multiplayer games. Watching verbal abuse in chat rooms. Watching anti-social, racist, sexist, and just generally unacceptable behaviour is games like Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, and Halo, not to mention Saint’s Row (note that I am NOT criticizing these games per se – I am commenting on the behaviour of people in these games where they can hide behind thier characters).

It has always boggled my mind how many people abandon all civility and rational behaviour as soon as they think they believe they are protected by anonymity.

It has at times made me question human nature. Are these people representative of the world at large? Would they act this way in the “real” world if the thought they could get away with it?

I guess that last point is what scares me the most. It makes me wonder how much of “civilization” really is just a thin veneer – given the right (or wrong) circumstances, would much of the population resort to this kind of behaviour if there were no consequences, like we’ve seen in all those “post-apocolyptic” science fiction movies?

I would like to hope not – but this kind of stuff scares me.

Assessments of various blogging options.

This discussion of various Blogging Platforms looks interesting, and very timely for me. I am currently evaluating platforms to use (internally) for blogging within my company as a collaboration and idea exchange tool (external blogs may or may not come later). As a part of an overall innovation program, I think internal blogs will be very useful – even within a relatively small company it is really easy to be completely unaware of cool things others are working on.

I also love the Mind Map in that post – I use mind maps everywhere, and love to see others using them.