bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Hands Across the Clouds

(click on image to see full size)

I have been exploring server-based apps online the last few months, trying to help an offline group with 100+ members develop a platform for sharing news and schedules. As with just about any volunteer entity, there is, to put it politely, a wide range of computer comfort among its members.

On one side there are the fast adapters who are quick to learn new things and find it fun to do so. In the middle, there are the semi-techs, or later bloomers, who may know the basics of a few favorite functions such as email and word processing, but not a whole lot more. On the other end of the spectrum are the semi-Luddites with high computer anxiety who mouse around reluctantly.

And the icing on this layer cake is that all of them use an assortment of software and CPUs, old and new.

In short, it's an IT management nightmare to get them all on the same page doing similar things online at a similar time. What seems like the simplest instructions aren't so simple at all for those who are flying blind and clicking by rote without much of a mental paradigm.

If they all stuck with their own applications and their old computing habits, supporting them all would become more than a full time job. That's tough for any entity run by volunteers for free.

1.3 Ego-Surfing and "Namerology"

/from our cyberlife dept./

Hearing about Numerology among the Chinese viz the Olympics got me to musing about "Namerology" as revealed by ourselves on the Internet.

In an era where it's so easy to go ego-surfing, it 's natural to start wondering if those who are "name twins" share anything more than the obvious correlates. This goes double if you think your own first and last is not entirely common.

My ego surfing has had a few surprising twists. First was the fact that my maiden-named self was much more common (and active online) than I would have guessed when I first looked in the 90s, and some of them were up to things (example below) that might make my mother blush. Then on the flip side in later life, I found that my later-named counterparts were also much more numerous than I would have guessedd, which I suppose I can count as a blessing for privacy.

Over the years, I adopted assorted handles and pen names for various aims, but now it's starting to seem like a good idea to add a twist to your sig if you want a high ratio of signal to noise around a specific identity. Unless you want the "real" you to live 10 pages deep in the list of Google hits, your primary name online needs to make a mark of some kind.

1.2 Yahoo Buried My Arrows

from the cranky girlgeek dept./ theme: useability

Some brains, like mine, are especially sensitive to the perception of extra effort around small things such as pointing and clicking. In a hyperspeedy world, we even hate wasting nanos of time. When we sit at our screens creating things, the difference in one extra click, or one extra glance, is not insignificant.

So here's my latest beef in the ease of use department: Yahoo Mail  recently changed the menus in the toolbar of the online composing editor to make one pivotal move more cumbersome. It used to be the html editor had a 1-push button for indents; now it has a drop-down menu in which indent is stacked above outdent. (Follow the story jump to see more screen shots.)

This may sound less than trivial, but it's not if your eye-to-hand auto-routines work like mine.

1.1. New and Cool List (a running feature of bbg)

from my New & Cool department / topic: widgets

• Newsmap (from Widgetbox)
  A widget that gives a visual display of current Google news headlines and their relative "weight"

Below is a screenshot of what you get when this widget is working. The actual widget is beneath (which may not be quite ready for primetime yet since the content may not refresh). If the include is active, click on the teeny tabs at the lower right to switch from US to European or from Tech to Business to see what's perking up in the world right now. As the authors say below, it's very interesting to compare their inherent biases:

 

From the folks at Widgetbox:
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it. (emphasis added by me)

If I had a Chumby on my kitchen counter, I'd keep this widget at the front of the que all day. (See separate, upcoming piece on what "Chumby" means.)

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