Incidentally, this is how most of my posts get typed. Type a sentence, erase some, rinse, repeat.

Likely why so few I start get out the door. :)

Finding myself interested in news about the shutting down of Alaska’s Pipeline due to massive corrosion, I clicked through to Forbes.com to read more about it.

Within a few seconds, Steve Forbes himself was espousing, in what I can only assume was real-time video transfer, the value of something. I don’t know what he was espousing since I turned off the speakers on my laptop faster than a metaphor trying to hide behind a simile.

Is there a Steve Forbes blocker? Firefox was able to block the pop-up, but not so much with the Steve-up.

There’s a lesson to the web advertisers of the world: A word is worth a coin; silence is worth two.

This thing freaks me out on so many levels. The head and eyes follow the mouse movement. It talks. It says the sentence I type in (“This is a horrible thing”). It takes me to a page that yells at me without warning some more that queries me as to my knowledge of many businesses using this “service” to make millions of dollars.

Sound delievered via a web page without my initiating the sound will make me hate you. Fine if this is a cool way to interact with customers, but since a customer types your URL as a way of starting a conversation, let them also start the conversation if you use this type of interation on your site.

Does this type of thing really work?

Go generate your own ignoramous strip and poke fun at crackpots for some Bad Case of the Mondays relief.

What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Why am I doing this? Because I want to. Hooray! The design will be back up tomorrow-ish. Too bad it couldn’t coinside with CSS Reboot day. No styles for 36-ish hours, then bam! a fresh design.

My site probably looks better now without styles. But, if you are inetrested, here’s what it will likely look like by May 1.

A post last week on Google Blogoscoped, by Philipp Lenssen, entitled Usability Sins 2.0 caught my eye. But what really interested me was the ensuing comments. People vent on the problems they see. Others commiserate. Some don’t have the same troubles as others.

Which is why getting a large sampling of data is important. Some people will have a problem with your search results, others won’t. I think one of the hardest things about being a designer is truly trying to capture what will be a usability problem. Fixing problems is usually pretty easy. Getting consensus is the problem.

Also nice to see in the comments on Phillipp’s site is David Sifry chiming in to speak on some of the feedback about Technorati, “…if there’s anything that I or Technroati can do to help fix things up, we definitely want to know about it!” So just in case Mr. Sifry is listening…

Technorati has come a long way since I and others used to spend time roling our eyes, laughing, and commenting on how piss poor their service was.

I now use it every day. I use many of the features. But one feature I still long for is that Technorati be able to filter mentions of me, or Business Logs, or 9rules into at least two different contexts.

1. Show me who is linking via a blogroll-style list.
2. Show me who is linking via having something specific to say on their site.

Okay, just two is enough.

I like to know who has my many me’s in their blogroll, but I am usually more interested to see if someone has something specific to say about me or the different watchlists I follow. Is this a high priority piece of functionality that should be incorporated yesterday. No way! But I figure I would request it.

User feedback is an important thing to track, and as users of Web 2.0 products, perhaps we should be more User 2.0 and blog about the problems we have or the features we desire. How else are these companies going to get better for us? My request above may be the only one of it’s kind, or it may be the 1000th request. And maybe for Technorati, 1000 requests are when they decide to do something about it.

* Note on the title of this post. While “Web 2.0″ as a moniker isn’t going away any time soon, do you really see anyone ever saying, “That site is SO Web 2.4!” Neither do I.

A great idea. All you have to do is give them the URL of the audio file and they take care of the rest.

Personal audio collection: If you keep coming across cool audio files on the web, but don’t like the hassle of copying them to your portable MP3 player, just paste the URL into your Podbasket and we’ll take care of the rest. Subscribe to your personal podcast feed with iTunes or your favorite podcatcher, and the audio files you choose will be automatically copied whenever you update your MP3 player.

Quick & easy podcasting: All you have to do is copy the audio files to a web server and give us their URLs — and then you’re podcasting, baby! We’ll give you a custom RSS feed URL that you can give to your listeners, so they can subscribe to your hot new show.

Sharing data files with friends or colleagues: A podcast doesn’t just have to be about audio — you can use it to notify your contacts of new PDFs, Word documents, or almost any other kind of file.

You can feel safe putting all your pods in one basket. ;) And did I mention it is a free service? Free is good.

James seems to be set on taking over niche aspects of podcasting. He also built Fruitcast, an easy way to serve up advertising on your podcasts.

Good luck, James!

A few weeks later, I find out that Barger has recovered his domain – and Robot Wisdom pops back up online. I hunt him down for a pint at a local pub and he tells me he’s moving on, this time to Memphis. He says he avoids the need for a job by living on less than a dollar a day. “I was carrying a cardboard sign when we met that day,” he tells me. “I wasn’t sure if I should show it to you. I figured if things didn’t work out with Andrew I could pick up some change.” On his panhandler sign, Barger had written:

Coined the term ‘weblog,’ never made a dime.

Source

What is BookCrossing?

bookcrossing n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

BookCrossing is a social network of sorts for book lovers and book-sharing lovers. And lovers of books and book sharers, too.

Read a good book? Share it by registering it with BookCrossing first, entering your comments on the book, then leave the book just sitting somewhere it is likely to be picked up (and not thought of as something to be thrown away). The next person to read it will follow suit, yada³.

Just a little fun experiment to take part in. Heck you might even make a new friend, since you already know their answer to the question, “Read any good books lately?”