WebWord

“Every year or so I like to see how Microsoft is doing in its attempt to make a desktop operating system as usable as Linux. Microsoft Windows XP, Home Edition, with Service Pack 2, is a tremendous improvement over previous Windows versions when it comes to stability and appearance, but it still has many glitches that keep it from being competitive with GNU/Linux for everyday users, including a tedious installation procedure, lack of productivity software included with the operating system, hardware compatibility problems, and a price so much higher than any of the Linux distributions I’ve tested lately that I don’t feel this product is a good value for most home or small office users.”

This is an interesting perspective. Most people would say that Linux needs to catch up to the usability of Windows, not vice versa. Consider the source and author, I suppose.

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“I am going to write a thesis on the subject of usability, and basically I need different views on the matter. It seams to me that there is Jakob Nielsen, but no prominent opposition to his views.”

There is plenty of opposition. Trust me.

Read the thread…

“By cutting some corners, you can conduct tests on your own, without the hassle and expense and still pinpoint the major issues. To simplify the process, I am going to break it down into four areas…”

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About 2-3 people visit WebWord each day from Boxes and Arrows. The link is from Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training, which I wrote about 4 months ago. Niiice!

I have about 20 articles brewing in my mind, and I have 2-3 rough copies ready to publish. So little time and so many other priorities, however. I also would like to do a few podcasts. Of course, then there is the overall design of WebWord itself, including updating my CMS to Wordpress. ** Sigh **

Linux News — “This book will give you a realistic grasp of the workaday constraints experienced by these colleagues, the best practices that they should be observing, and the types of suggestions from you that might sound plausible to them.”

Read the entire book review…

I’m currently at the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC. So far, so good. Peter Morville gave a talk yesterday that I really liked. He brought together a lot of material and delivered a good story.

We’re meeting for breakfast this morning. I’m going to try to find out more about findability. He’s been talking about it for a few years and I think he’s way ahead of people on this one.

Number of clicks is one important metric, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The value of each click along the way is also important. To make this easier to understand, here’s what I wrote in an email: If you found $100 on every street corner but your feet hurt a little, I bet you’d still be happy to walk versus catching a ride.

“After producing a list of the top 100 folder names subscribed to on bloglines I found the usual suspects at the top “Blogs, news, tech, people, politics” etc. etc. But then at number 37, I found a folder called “Knitting” that had been used for 2,085 feeds.”

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These things are worth digesting…

“To this day, the majority of stockbrokers are compensated on the number of trades their customers make, not on the returns they generate for them or on the quality of the advice they provide.”

“In the end, analysts have minimal structural incentive to be accurate in their predictions; rather their built-in incentive is to be as favorable to their corporate clients as possible.”

“The problem lies in the fact that analysts have a much greater incentive to focus upon the positive of a company than to root out the risks and the negatives, and their employers value their ability to generate investment-banking income much more than they do proper analysis.”

“The issue here is that the analysts who covered Enron, despite the company’s long-standing policy of withholding key information, and despite knowledge of the fact that there was an unknown level of debt being hidden from them in off-balance sheet SPEs remained nearly uniformly positive on the company until it was clear the company would collapse.”

“The Enron collapse is neither the first nor the most expensive loss of shareholder capital that came while analysts maintained cheery ratings on a company. It’s only by virtue of the fact that the loss on Enron shares has approached 100% for shareholders that made it the most noteworthy.”

“It is our genuine hope that investors seek to buy companies that they truly understand and would be willing to own for a lifetime. If there is one lesson that individual investors must learn from Enron, that is: Buy What You Know.”

Read the entire transcript…

My thinking on stocks? Don’t invest unless you really, really understand the company. Advice from other people is largely useless, financial news is mostly biased, and analysts are not looking out for your interests. Furthermore, diversification is critical; distribute your investments.

“Intermittent, unexpected treats are more powerful than regularly scheduled expected treats.”

Nothing new here if you know anything about the basics of psychology. Nevertheless, a good refresher.

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“Context plays a more fundamental role for Asians than for westerners. Asians have a more difficult time thinking of an object as completely separate from its background.”

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“Leading search engines are now about on par in terms of accuracy and documents indexed, so they now will need to develop new cool, differentiable services on top of these results.”

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