i guess i'll give "Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off" the ol' heave into the annotated bookmark bin:

"The most significant finding from our recent usability testing of ten email newsletters is that users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you want to get in and get out as quickly as possible and not connect with the site.

Newsletters feel personal because they arrive in your inbox; you have an ongoing relationship with them. In contrast, websites are things you glance at when you need to get something done or find the answer to a specific question."

this article on User-Centered URL Design reminds me that i've been meaning to take that stupid "section" path element out of the machina, parallax and informatics urls. i really have no idea what i was thinking. and what's up with that underscore in the ex machina url? i'm sure i'm offending the usability gods with that one. cut me some slack. i was young. it was years ago.

oh, and why is the url for the photographs, http://snowdeal.org/photo? at least i didn't decide to add an extraneous /section.

so, i'm reading a recent post from rob poel about his recent positive experience at krispy kreme and i notice that he mentions that the new store is in western michigan. well, i live western michigan and i live just miles from a new krispy kreme store that i've been patiently waiting to open.

a quick note to rob confirms that we live in the same town - grand rapids, michigan. i've been reading rob's blog on-and-off for awhile and it's funny that i never put all the pieces together. looking back through his archives it seems fairly obvious. and there's also that blogchalking icon staring at me, which i only noticed after i wrote him an e.mail. hi. ho. it seems we have a few things in common, including a fascination with the krispy kreme experience. perhaps meeting for doughnuts is in order.

and yes, my wife still thinks the number of people i meet online is just plain wierd.

i'm not trying to be some kind of wiggedy-wack conspiracy theorist, but the whole flight 93 conspiracy theory has all the hallmarks of a great theory, including difficult to disprove circumstantial evindence, from easily discredited eyewitnesses:

"At least SIX witnesses, including Susan Mcelwain saw a small military type plane flying around shortly BEFORE UA93 crashed. The FBI denies its existence."

and now. we get the one thing that every conspiracy theory needs. a tape gap :

"THE FINAL three minutes of hijacked United Flight 93 are still a mystery more than a year after it crashed in western Pennsylvania - even to grieving relatives who sought comfort in listening to its cockpit tapes in April.

A Daily News investigation has found a roughly three-minute gap between the time the tape goes silent - according to government-prepared transcripts - and the time that top scientists have pinpointed for the crash."

Internet Radio the P2P Way:

"What could be even more controversial than Internet radio/audio broadcasting--which has made headlines this year over the issue of royalty payments--and P2P file sharing? Probably the merging together of these banes of the music industry. Two P2P clients, PeerCast and Streamer, are exactly that. Without the need to have your own dedicated server, these programs let you stream audio files to other users on a P2P network. Essentially, you can run your own Internet radio station whenever you start up your computer and get online."

olivier travers is the happy deflationist.

sweet lord. wondering what's up with the west wing season premiere? news.google is currently automatically clustering around 300 articles.

i'm a little perplexed as to exactly why, but i'm strangely fascinated by steve macLaughlin's formula one fact-filled extravaganza. i really had no idea.

hey! i had no idea that the "creating applications with mozilla" is now available online in its entirety:

"This book explains how applications are created with Mozilla and provides step-by-step information about how you can create your own programs using Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework. This book also includes examples of many different types of existing applications to demonstrate some of the possibilities of Mozilla development."

kudos to oreilly for making what is ultimately a very savvy business decision.

the phoenix pescadero release, a redesign of the mozilla browser, is now available.

confused about whether it's right for you? well, dave hyatt has graciously put together a painless quiz to help you decide if you're part of phoenix's target audience. or maybe you just want pretty pictures to help you decide? if you like features then maybe phoenix isn't your cup of tea. if however, your tastes run on the minimalist side then maybe give phoenix a look-see. [ thanks to asa for the visual aid ]

Serve Your iCal Calendars Using WebDAV:

"MacOS X supports WebDAV as a flavor of shared volume that you can mount through the Finder's Go -> Connect To menu command. And it's the way iCal outputs data to remote servers.

I went through the process of installing WebDAV on my server (Apache on Mac OS X 10.2). Here's how I did it."

i just caught aaron swartz on npr's weekend edition saturday talking with scott simon about warchalking. both aaron's and the warchalking site are a little slow right now, so i guess a bunch of other people are noticing too.

not much new in the interview. aaron almost made it through the whole interview before being asked his age [ he's 15 ], with the implication that warchalking might be analagous to kids stealing candy from unsuspecting shopowners. ouch.

google news might be beta, but it works. it looks like google is testing out a system update with a snazzy, new headline-picking algorithm and a very portal-ish interface. [ via webvoice ]

so, i'm minding my own business on the computer with the tv humming along in the background, when a very familiar voice starts coming out of the box. much to my surprise, it was a bio professor, betty kutter, from my alma mater the evergreen state college [ not "evergreen university" as cited on the segment ], talking about her work with bacteriophage on a 48 hours segment:

" "Nobody cared very much once penicillin came along in the western world. They thought they had the problem licked for all time. We have a lot of hubris a lot of time," says Betty Kutter, a microbiology professor from Evergreen University, who believes passionately that phage therapy works.

With Eliava, she hopes to convince others that using a naturally-occurring virus to fight an infection is a fine idea. "These are viruses that can absolutely not infect human cells, or animal cells, or plant cells," she says. "No chance of getting sick from the treatment. The only kind of cells they infect is bacteria." "

much to her chagrin, i learned the finer points of old school mouth pipetting while working with phage in betty's lab. hi. ho.

a big hearty congratulations to brent for getting netnewswire out the door. it's a no-fuss, no muss rss reader that elegantly does what is says and says what it does. i look forward to forking over the cake for the pro version.

it's good to see cam is back and posting. best wishes as he works on managing castleman's disease.

jonathan delacour says goodbye to useless calendars :

"But as I begin to redesign my MT templates, it occurs to me that I never use the monthly calendar to access previous posts--on my own site or any other site I visit. And, a quick check of my blogroll revealed that only a third of the sites displayed the standard weblog calendar on their main page."

i've always been a bit suspicious of the merits of the calendar myself, considering that i have never - not once - in my years and years of perusing weblogs, used the calendar to search or browse for archived posts. ever.

jonathan also alludes to his disdain for weekly archives. while i agree that monthly archives cut down on the returned search results, they also balloon the size of the returned result. for many of my pages, i'm forced to go with weekly archives because monthly archives could be over 100k a piece, which is mighty hefty for visitors that suck bandwidth from a straw.

yeah, i'm back from montreal. the ol' in-and-out. one of these times i'm going to stick around and actually take in the local sights and sounds. nice town.

er. o.k. Warchalking is theft, says Nokia:

"Warchalking, the technique of highlighting areas where wireless networks can be accessed freely, has been blasted as theft.

And the practitioners of warchalking are being slammed as bandwidth thieves in an advisory issued by mobile and wireless vendor Nokia."

i guess it makes a much sexier headline than, "warchalking of open nodes without the permission of node owners who are forced to abide by restrictive acceptable use policies is theft."

ohmygod. there's something seriously wrong with getting up at 4 a.m.

who booked this flight anyway?

i'm off to montreal for a few days, so things might get a little quiet while i'm away.

be nice and remember to leave me at least one beer in the fridge.

dj's thinking about the the rdf in rss :

"I get the feeling that for most mortals, including me, including RDF in their RSS feeds seemed like building a racing car to do the shopping, and never even taking it out on a track after the shopping was finished. Actually, perhaps some people didn't even see the racing car as a whole. So I did a little reading and thinking."

welcome back jenny!

l.m. orchard is doing some good ol' fashioned brainstorming with Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities :

"A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you're out Warwalking - better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.

But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you? Toss in a GPS unit somehow, maybe some other things like a thermometer device? A compass? Thinking about ways to automatically capture metadata about your present environment."

it would certainly be interesting to see a stew of parts/pieces like wifi, blogging, rss, presence [ in the instant messaging sense ] and maybe something like rdfmap could begin to lay the foundation for the oft theorized, seldom implemented vision of context aware computing :

"Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity). Since it was proposed about a decade ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this new technology. Context-aware applications (or the system infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely available to everyday users. In this survey of research on context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the types of context used and models of context information, at systems that support collecting and disseminating context, and at applications that adapt to the changing context. Through this survey, it is clear that context-aware research is an old but rich area for research."

it's not like there that far away from this type of vision on wifi enabled college campuses these days:

"Take Ben Kasdon, a Dartmouth exchange student with spiky, bleached-blond hair. Kasdon recently applied for a patent on a personal-security device that uses the network's base stations to pinpoint the location of campus emergencies. About the size of a cigarette lighter, the gadget attaches to a key chain and, when its panic button is squeezed, links up with nearby wireless access points to triangulate and transmit its position.

When I meet up with Kasdon, who's working on a double degree at Dartmouth and Skidmore, he's relaxing in the Collis student center, just in from traversing the campus with an open laptop to look for holes in the network's coverage. Asked to name the biggest difference between the two schools, he gives an answer that should stop phone company executives -- and anyone else who's betting on the cellular carriers' version of the future -- in their tracks: "Nobody here knows anyone's phone number.""

thanks to wesley, i now know that the mozilla calendar 0.8 release reads apple ical files.

and, since ical can publish to a webdav enabled server, i'm the luckiest guy in the world as michal at cornerhost has recently fired up webdav capabilities on the server.

i guess i need to stop procrastinating and get a copy of jaguar, so i can publish my calendar to cornerhost to be read by mozCal when i'm on a non-mac machine. hmmm. me wonders if mozCal can connect to a remote server.

and don't miss the fun stuff that morbus is doing with movabletype and ical.

jewels of wisdom. they are everywhere :

"If "normal" refers to the mentality of a year ago today, a great deal of ignorance would be necessary to return there. For the first time in its history, New York City has been forced away from a suspension of disbelief, as if the failsafe on Otis' elevator had never existed. This is obviously the most major turning point in the history of the city, but the new Manhattanism (in the words of Mr. Koolhaas), remains to be seen. What force will propel the city into its next stage of development?"

christ. i wish i could write like that.

it's strange to go back and ready what i wrote on this day last year . it doesn't really seem to capture how i think i remember feeling. trapped in a traffic jam, just miles from chicago's o'hare airport, pummeled by the sheer unbelievability of it all.

and those crazy, crazy nighmares that kris and i had a week before 9/11. at the risk of being branded a wackjob, i can still recall waking in a fit, wondering why i was standing in the cockpit of a plane, flying so close to tall buildings? why were we so close the buildings? thinking over and over. why are we so close? i really don't think we're supposed to be that close.

and why are they all cast with an eerie red glow?

layers and layers of profound inexplicability. impervious to explanation. that's how i remember 9/11.

so, let's just say you're driving 90 miles per hour down a highway that's clearly marked with a 70 mile per hour speed limit and your screemi...er humming along to radiohead's "the tourist", which - i'll remind you - contains the following ominous lyrics:

"It barks at no one else but me
Like it's seen a ghost
I guess it seen the sparks a-flowing
No one else would know

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot, slow down, slow down

Sometimes I get overcharged
That's when you see sparks
You ask me where the hell I'm going
At a thousand feet per second

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot slow down, slow down

Hey man slow down, slow down
Idiot slow down, slow down"

yes, let's imagine that this is, in fact, the circumstance you find yourself in, right before you get pulled over by a michigan state trooper. are you:

1. incredibly stupid, for ignoring the universe as she loudly shouts in your ear to slow your shit down?
2. incredibly lucky, for getting the nicest state trooper ever, because - for reasons left unexplained - he decided to write you a ticket for 5 miles over.

and, in what is surely one of the signs of the impending apocalypse, snoop has forsaken the chronic, gin and juice.

wow. Geek chic look is clean cut . and it's thoroughly depressing because it means i'm older than i'd like to believe. apparently an emo is getting popular again and influencing the youngins:

"To understand emo (sometimes called "emocore"), the music must come first. Emo is an arty outgrowth of hardcore punk. It's less macho and aggressive; the lyrics often address idealistic experiences and impressions -- frustration with hypocrisy (or bad luck in love), an appreciation for beauty (as well as the absurd). Emotion is OK. In fact, the emo ideal is authentic, deeply felt emotion.

While Rites of Spring is credited as the first emo band, Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi played a bigger role in defining the genre and being recognized in the media for their uncompromisingly anti-commercial attitudes."

so then, of course, it forced me to check out just how long it's been since i shuffled into the record [sic] store and bought something witth a decidedly emo-ish band name like, say, embrace.

yeah, that'd be around 17 years ago. oof.

oooh, look - it's a good ol' fashioned puff piece of "journalism" with conflict as the central theme:

"Netscape won't dislodge Internet Explorer from its hegemony over browser space. But its open-source sibling is aiming at even bigger game: Windows."

i like mozilla as much as the next guy, but c'mon. get real.

cory summarizes the hullaballoo surounding drive-by spamming:

"My guess is that as long as you can send spam from home without having to put on pants, there's no reason why you'd go through this stupid business of wardriving open wireless nodes to use as a spam launchpad.

It's amazing how many people really want to believe that open wireless is/will be a scourge on the Internet, an enabler for terrorists and child pornographers and spammers -- yet these same people utter nary a peep about the idea of libraries, Internet cafes, and kiosks in airports and conference centers that offer anonymous wireless access."

well, mike, i finally go around to changing the mimetype for the rss feeds. i guess i forgot to set it correctly when i switched servers awhile ago.

i set the mime-type to "application/rss+xml" - let me know if this works for you.

doc pointed to the frontline: faith and doubt show on 9/11 and spirituality, which coincidently i watched the other night.

it's been a long, long time since i've been help in rapt attention for an entire tv program. it's excellent, excellent stuff.

as always, i'm game for a "prairie bloggers" get-together. but where's jenny?

i noticed the other day that i had apparently exceeded the indexing limit for atomz. unless i pay to play, atomz will only index 500 pages of the vast wasteland.

although google is an obvious choice, it still can take a few days to weeks for things to show up in the archives. local site search capability is pretty much a commodity, so i'll probably install something like fluid dynamics or perlfect, unless somebody has a better idea.

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters:

"This tutorial explains the features and benefits of a Web format called RSS, and gives a brief technical overview of it. The reader is assumed to have some familiarity with XML and other Web technologies. It is not meant to be exhaustive;"

point :

"I keep picking on Groove, but only because there's something interesting in there, one of the few technologies that's interesting enough to care about. Yes, the Groove engineers are architecture astronauts. That's OK. They're building architecture. But they're positioning it like an application and I don't think Groove will be successful if they do that."

counterpoint :

"It's a different world now, and Groove's platform potential is far beyond that that could have been envisioned in the mid 80's. Afforded the opportunity to do so, it is surely our intent to create even more value through Groove - for our customers, for our ecosystem, and for our investors. I don't know if you view us as greedy, or clueless, or taking inept actions to choke off our own oxygen, but I can tell you for certain that we're trying our best to concurrently create a platform and an ecosystem around that platform, and to create direct application value for our customers, consistent with our ability to invest in the business and our knowledge and experience in this business. "

yeah, yeah. i'm still here. it's only been a few days for crying out loud. lots of stuff going on. not the least of which is that i have a new toy. more on that later.