links for 2010-06-15

"My job is to hold the umbrella so the shit from above doesn't hit you. Your job is to keep me from having to use it." … "To get trust, you have to give trust. To get people who will go all-out for you, you have to make sure that when they fuck up, and they will, that the total amount of blamestorming is "yeah, that was pretty fuckin' epic dude. Now, let's figure out how to not be epic like that again." If you want people to be honest with you, you have to be honest with them. Even when they don't like it. Even when it's bad news. Especially when it's bad news."

"It's very easy to fix the easy problems first. So it is easy to get seduced into fixing only the simple issues you find. As a result, the most serious usability problems tend to persist over a long time. "

"Any interactive object that isn't perceived as being interactive, isn't."

"So, over the weekend I finished up the first pass at the woedb, a searchable and linkable index of every single Where On Earth (WOE) ID published. Each WOE lists basic information like name and place type, as well as child locations and adjacencies and all the various aliases for that place. You know… linked data. As of this writing, there are about 5.5 million entries." I heart Aaron Straup Cope so much.

"Social objects are the artifacts that bring people together around shared interests or topics. They are the content assets around which communities form and grow. For a community-driven site like YouTube, the social object is the video. For a community-driven site like Flickr, it is the photo… Because the social object is what brings people to a community-driven application, its screen design matters a lot. The object needs to presented appropriately and framed with lightweight actions that allow people to share, curate, and discuss."

"Designing with information shadows means using devices, such as RFIDs, that may have specific, limited functionality and capabilities. However, as with the FedEx example, designing with information shadows often requires global service design. Information shadow user experience design must simultaneously consider (1) what happens when every object is automatically tracked and (2) how to associate those objects with all available digital information about them."

"…a new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence. Lovers of the look, feel, and quality of old fashioned manual typewriters can now use them as keyboards for any USB-capable computer, such as a PC, Mac, or even iPad!"

"Both of these activities enable, as they do for me, blogging all dog-eared pages (hat-tip to Mike), which feels like a new thing. Public commonplace books. "

"JavaScript Blacklist is a simple extension for Safari 5 which blacklists scripts from a configurable list of domains." Defaults include those goddamned double underline hover things. Installed!

"…it all depends on the situation, the characters, and how obnoxious the listener feels like being that day."