SensoryMetrics

Ok, so a web browser is what you look at web sites with and Alexa is used to browse a list of web sites. It’s a great starting point to find out which sites are popular. Unfortunately, what I find one day just isn’t there a few weeks later. If you find something good, bookmark it, otherwise you might not find it again.

I wish Alexa would get rid of it’s archaic way of listing sites by category subjects alone. Instead, it’d be nice to see something that works along the lines of Apple’s garageband which has multiple tags that you can turn on and off. It’d make looking through the categories much easier. You’d no longer have to drill down inside each category so see the sub-categories within.

From MIT’s Haystack Group comes a clever javascript implementation called Exhibit that might do the trick. Unfortunately, Exhibit is limited to small data sets, but it should be enough to browse Alexa’s web site subject categories.

[tags]Alexa,Exhibit[/tags]

Popularity: 22%

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Long Tail, User Experience Alexa, Exhibit

Jetphoto is such a wonderful example of useful elegant software.
It’s a Mac OS X application which will let you manage your photo albums. It also lets you publish your albums to the web.

It has just about everything going for it except for its awkward map feature. Instead I resort to BlockRocker.com which is far from perfect, but it works a little better than Jetphoto for adding gps coordinates to photos.

Popularity: 14%

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User Experience

The Clock Tower was packed! Thanks so much to the camp organizers – these events are really starting to catch on.

As usual – great demos… Nelson’s world peace geo wiki was cool, Peter and Ian demoed their calendar app – which has great promise! Robert showed us a REALLY out of box demo for cataloging geological info… Thintropy demoed thin clients – which is a good thing… Bruce Tsuji – a former Nortel colleague demoed a cool app for audiofying visual material… and Alec with Steve demoed iotum’s TalkNow on BlackBerry! Even Leo Lax was smiling!

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience

So Tom Green has installed Skype and will be doing “Skype Pranks”. Hey – what could be funnier than VoIP??? What’s next – fun with iotum?

Popularity: 16%

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User Experience

In his inaugaural blog post, the Nortel CTO published a great graphic descibing his strategy for executing on the company’s vision. It’s a good model – one that clearly shows that real value is acheived by focussing on the intersections of technology, channels, and product.

[tags]John-Roese,Atom,Nortel[/tags]

Popularity: 34%

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User Experience Atom, John-Roese, Nortel

As I’ve said before, the best Visual Interaction Designers come from Industrial Design schools! The latest evidence of that is Arjun Mehta. He’s a 4th year Carleton student who has been with the CompanyXYZ lab since the spring. His innovation and dedication has been key in helping us create some exciting new products. Have a look at Arjun’s online portfolio…

Popularity: 19%

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User Experience

If you don’t know what Parkour is, read the wikipedia description below. The philosophy applies very well to software design – you should be building multiple paths for task completion. More redundancy is a GOOD thing! Everyone figures out their own shortcuts! If you’re one of those stodgy, old-fashioned “software-as-a-product” types – Get with it!

Parkour
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A traceur performs a saut de bras.
Parkour is a physical discipline of French origin in which the participant called a traceur who attempts to pass in obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible. The obstacles can be anything in the environment, so parkour is often practiced in urban areas because of many suitable public structures, such as buildings, rails, and walls.

Popularity: 17%

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User Experience

Yeah I like fetching alright! Fetch has been around for decades… for Mac folks wanting to FTP! So, like woof – they’re just releasing version 5.2????? yeesh. This is the earth shattering press release!

January 8, 2007

Fetch 5.2 introduces WebView, adds FTPS support and Droplet Shortcuts

San Francisco, CA — Fetch Softworks is pleased to announce the availability of Fetch 5.2, the latest release of the original Macintosh file transfer program. Fetch 5.2 introduces WebView, a convenient way to view files in a web browser and copy web addresses from Fetch.

Popularity: 15%

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User Experience

Wow! DemoCamp is going to burst at the seams – with 50 people signed up and 7 demos planned! From an entrepreneur perspective, it’s interesting that some of the attendees are representing Skypoint Capital, LaBarge Weinstein, VenturesWest, and Wesley Clover! Is this event turning into a mini venture fair?

• Nelson Ko, Citadel Rock Online Communities – A very short demo entitled “My trip for world peace – wikified.”
• Scott Annan – Mercury Grove – Collaboration tool for departments, groups, and teams within the enterprise [what's new this time?]
• Alec Saunders – Iotum – Talknow
• Peter Childs / Ian Graham – Distributed Calendars
• Misha Nossik / Boris Vilkoff – Thintropy – Slice Multimedia Remote Display
• Robert Norris – Straterra Inc

Popularity: 16%

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User Experience

Don’t worry XML geeks, this has nothing to do with software!

The trend that will sweep the world is tagless labels for clothing. This innovation was first introduced by Hanes. The term “Tagless” is even trademarked by Hanes’ parent company Sara Lee.

If you’ve been itchy and irritated by that t-shirt tag lately – there’s two reasons. Manufacturers have switched to acetate from silk to produce them (it’s cheaper), and increased government legislation for labeling has resulted in bigger tags. So I’m wondering why it’s taken SO LONG for the irritant of tags to be solved. The initial cost to Hanes is higher. But with computerized silk screening or embroidering, the cost will soon be less because there’s one less part to manufacture: the tag. Bye bye tag! Users Rule!

[tags]tagless,tag-less,Hanes[/tags]

Popularity: 19%

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Geek Wear, User Experience Hanes, tag-less, tagless