Confusability

One Year On - Simply Google and Analytics

One year ago I published Simply Google, which was my attempt to expose  the hidden google information architecture. Since then I have been keeping the page up to date and have just added a co.uk version, so it seems like a good time to review the past year for Simply Google.

Simply Google was very popular on del.icio.us at the beginning and has just been added for the 3,000th time by nahtanoj04.

When I published the page last April I included the urchin code required for Google Analytics and here is the summary page from Analytics for the past 12 months:

The Visits and Page Views quadrant shows that I am currently getting 1,200 visits a day and my busiest period was when Charles Knight talked about SG in his Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list.

Over 50% of all visitors have been so the page before and this compares with a much lower rate of just 6% for this blog.

Geographically speaking, SG is most popular in the USA and UK, followed by Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal. Over 3% of visits come from one location in Edinburgh in the UK and it seems that someone in the National Library of Scotland has put a link to Simply Google on their intranet homepage. If anyone can let me know how the NLS is using Simply Google then I would be extremely grateful.

Here is a list of the top 24 referrers and you can see that the NLS intranet appears at number 5. 

I have found the stats produced by Google Analytics very useful but it would be good if I could make them easily available publically.

So, Simply Google has now been here for a year and if people continue to use it I will ensure that it is still here in another year.

An Agile Presentation in the form of a tribute to John Lennon

I have entered this Presentation into SlideShare's Worlds Best Presentation Competition.

An Agile Presentation in the form of a tribute to John Lennon.

Real Reality TV

Using Documentary-Style Video to Place Real People at the Center of the Design Process

In a user-centered design research setting, many hours of videotape are reduced to a few key minutes in the interest of saving colleagues' time, capturing short attention spans, and communicating that which is most compelling, insightful, and germane. Because of this brevity, video ethnographers are sometimes asked by colleagues, "How do we know what really happened when we only see footage after it has been edited?" It is a legitimate question. How does a fellow researcher know whether the video being presented accurately reflects reality? How does he or she know how to "read" the images? When does video need to be framed and contextualized for the viewer? Why can or can't it stand on its own? How does the specific use of video for ethnography and user-centered design research help determine how it should be viewed and by whom? Should different audiences be given different levels of contextualization and complexity? What is appropriate to present in an active, workshop setting, and what works in a relatively passive presentation?

Intel Technology Journal Feb 2007 by Susan Faulkner

On the role of the die

On the Role of the Die: A brief ludologic study of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and their rules

by Joris Dormans

Extract from Game Studies - the online journal of computer game research

Today, there is a huge variety of roleplaying games. Almost diametrically opposed to the fantasy hack-and-slash play of Dungeons & Dragons are the games published by White Wolf. At the other end of the spectrum are the games of White Wolf, which advocate a very different picture:

We no longer tell stories - we listen to them. We sit passively and wait to be picked up and carried to the world they describe, to the unique perception of reality they embrace. We have become slave to our TVs, permitting an oligarchy of artists to describe to us our lives, our culture and our reality. [...] However, there is another way. Storytelling on a personal level is becoming part of our culture once again. That is what this game is all about: not stories told to you, but stories you will tell yourself. Vampire is about bringing stories home and making the ancient myths and legends a more substantial part of your life (Vampire, 1992, p. 21-22, my typesetting).

White Wolf links roleplaying to children's games of make-believe. The company states that the lessons of these games are still valuable for adults: "this play-acting helped you to learn about life and what it meant to be a grown-up. It was an essential part of childhood, but just because you have grown up doesn't mean you have to stop." In White Wolf"s view the rules of the game are only there to "avoid arguments" and to "add a deeper sense of realism to the story" (Ibid, p.22). The game-rules and settings provided by White Wolf certainly are designed to facilitate the publisher's focus on grown-up themes and stories. Players of their games more often report roleplaying experiences with a strong significance or emotional impact than players who stick to games of fantasy and science fiction.

I Remember That

The year was 1994 and it was my Eureka! moment. The internet allowed publishers to display words and pictures just like we did on papers, but without waiting for a print run or a painfully slow delivery system. They weren't compromised by lack of space and they were threatening to offer broadcast material - on demand and at any time.

My conversionary zeal was not shared by my colleagues. Most glazed over every time I mentioned the buzzword "internet" and some thought it was a cranky fad.

The shrewdest comments came from the newspaper advertising executives who wondered where the revenue would come from. It's a question some are still asking.

Full Article from the BBC

Probably the most honest 404 Page in the world

The best thing about this year's April Fool from Google was their 404 error page.

I have also updated Simply Google with the new TiSP site.

The BBC have had these images running on their homepage today:

Here is some advice from the BBC on what makes a great April Fool.

A really good gag needs to be both ridiculous and believable, say those who have studied the craft. It's a hard trick to pull off and most pranksters end up with jokes that are ridiculous, but not at all believable, says Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California.

"The really good ones succeed at making us believe something that we recognise, in hindsight, we really shouldn't have believed because it's completely preposterous," he says.

"In a humorous way they teach us something about the limits of our own knowledge. They show us how unfamiliar many of the things around us - that we take for granted - are."

The question has employed some of the world's finest brains. The eminent wartime scientist Reginald Jones, who headed the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence at the Air Ministry during World War II, researched the perfect April Fool's gag. He came up with the equation: induction followed by incongruity.