Posted on by lhl

While more than 70% of the people the NSF surveyed knew that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, only 16% could define the Internet and only 13% could accurately describe a molecule. At least those numbers are going up, the report’s authors noted diplomatically–five years ago, only 11% could define the Internet and only 9% could describe a molecule. Well-Informed Citizens Increasingly Rare in Information Age“>whoa.

Posted on by lhl

jorn makes some interesting proposal for content-centered web design. this would integrate well w/ semi-structured db entries (for adding metadata, content-tagging, and appending comments / elaborating on relations as time went on). also, the dead links problem is actually addressed by many available crawlers (with automatic link deactivation or demotion when linkrot sets in) – also, if it’s all db backed, you get all kinds of neat options like reordering data based on activity of the page (store last updates based on crawls), popularity (store clickthroughs), or if you want to get ambitious, integrating such things into your community and collaborative filtering systems. ooh, sounds like a project.

Posted on by lhl

interesting article on conflation of terms across creative and technical disciplines. i think the best way to avoid it is to not use an ambiguous words like architecture/design alone. visual design, user experience design, information architecture, system design, systems architecture all come in handy.

Posted on by lhl

heh, i remember back in 1995 when i was quite a bit of internet based research for a nanotechnology research paper, which was not very common. I remember having to track down the MLA standards on citing web sources, using the examples they had for SIRS and gopher servers. now it seems that internet research has all but taken over.