Archive for November, 2006

Do you ever read an article about some research that stays with you for days, maybe weeks? That happened to me this month as two articles, seemingly unrelated, stayed with me throughout the Thanksgiving holiday. Jacob Nielson and the Digital Divide The first, by Jacob Nielson, discusses the current state of the digital divide. An interesting exposition of the state of the divide, which is not one of “have’s and have-not’s.” The cost of computers is coming down significantly. The cheapest new computer today is significantly less than the Apple Mac that I bought for college in 1988, and significantly more powerful. The goal of mass-producing a $100 laptop is…

Do you ever read an article about some research that stays with you for days, maybe weeks? That happened to me this month as two articles, seemingly unrelated, stayed with me throughout the Thanksgiving holiday. Jacob Nielson and the Digital Divide The first, by Jacob Nielson, discusses the current state of the digital divide. An interesting exposition of the state of the divide, which is not one of “have’s and have-not’s.” The cost of computers is coming down significantly. The cheapest new computer today is significantly less than the Apple Mac that I bought for college in 1988, and significantly more powerful. The goal of mass-producing a $100 laptop is…

A timeless post has been made at the Church of the Customer Blog. It is a post that will most likely receive little attention – inverse to the attention that it should receive. It isn’t popular to talk about the shortcomings of the US educational system, but it is an issue that is clearly preventing this country from developing the worlds next generations of thinkers and innovators.

Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?

“If you studied math, science, or engineering at a four-year college in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted…

Google sitemaps has been a boon to large websites, it has enabled site owners to submit an xml structured document of all of the pages in a website and receive reports about the indexing and compatibility of the site.

In a surprising development, Yahoo and MSN combined with Google and announced that the sitemap protocol would be accepted at Sitemaps.org, where one submission will go to all three of the major search engines.  This is surprising in that Yahoo has always maintained a paid page submission program.  Yahoo’s paid submission program Guaranteed that site owners could submit pages to the Yahoo index and have them spidered frequently.

This…

Via Kim Kraus’ increasingly unhealthy obsession with MS Dewey. (really Kim, I am starting to become concerned) Kim blogged yesterday about Microsoft’s new search engine MsDewey. My first thought was “interesting.” Ask finally dropped the butler, Jeeves, in order to change their image, and Microsoft has unveiled a sort of Jeeves 2.0. I will say that I found it to be patently irritating. Sure, Ms Dewey is attractive and gets your attention right away. Of course, I don’t go to search engines to be entertained. I go to find stuff called “information.” So, anything that gets in the way of that process irritates me. It’s obvious that this was…

Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. This was one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the past few years. While it briefly touches on Web sites and Internet marketing, I felt there were a lot of crossover ideas for both on and off-line retail. It was amazing as methods of signage, store and product layout, dressing room decor, the impact of males shopping with or without females, and other elements that surround our shopping experience. In one of the chapters, Underhill goes into detail about the aging Baby Boomer generation, and how retailers will be forced to change their marketing, packaging, sales techniques and methods…