After vote - Social search engine

Read review at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alt_search_engines_april07.php

Strange statues around the world

Otta Around the world

I think its a simple cool idea to get user generated content for travel website...

A silent world

Rambling thoughts on sonification (use of sound for data representation) as a mode of communication.

In an email correspondence with Gregory Kramer (“maestro behind sonification”- http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1214931.htm ), he remarked, “There is a strong visual bias in our culture, particularly in how technology is configured. We just don't think aurally, at least not yet. Also, I think the sonification solutions are not yet all that good.”

I think of my scooter and I chuckle! So many times by the sound it produces I can tell that the petrol poured lacked quality, the sound that the door makes, tells me who has come in, the sound of the bucket filling ..such examples from daily life reaffirm my faith in usage of sound for real time communication. Though it is ironical that at the same time we are struggling to reduce the noise, in vacuum cleaners, car engines, doors almost everything. Trying to make a sound proof world. We are trying to make our acceptance of sound even lesser, hence more and more sound will be perceived as noise, which makes the designer’s job even tougher. (....)

read the full text at: http://curvedrays.blogspot.com/2007/05/silent-world.html

Google Timeline and Map Views

See results on a timeline or map. With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Try this one....

http://www.google.com/views?q=mahatma+gandhi+view%3Amap&btnGm=Search

Notes on Design

Excellent blog on design, especially for students. Contributed to by several eminent designers and illustrators.

Stripe Generator

http://www.stripegenerator.com/

Running the Numbers

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: 2.5 million plastic bottles, the number used in the US every hour; 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Cake Timetable

I liked this bit of information design found in a cake shop called Sprinkles. They sell selected cakes on selected days.

Web 2.0 Design Trend!

The most popular and successful approaches tried for Web 2.0
Glassy look
Yanky names and logos
Gradients
Reflections, etc...


Try the free downloads....
This might help in quick prototypes and getting to try fast web 2.0 look and feel standards.


..read the last line of the blog

Location (within a single country) is Irrelevant for Usability Studies -Jakob Nielsen

As long as you're testing within a single country, there's no reason to expend resources traveling to multiple cities and conducting the same usability study again and again. You'll simply observe the same behaviors repeatedly, and learn nothing new.

This conclusion -- that the test location doesn't matter -- is different than the usual lesson from market research, where you find different results in different regions of the country.

Why does usability differ from market research when it comes to the number of required study locations? Because with usability, we test behavior, not opinion. Further, we test that behavior with a defined artifact (i.e., a specific user interface).

…In most cases, differences are due to diversity in the users' circumstances, not to geographical variation. It's therefore best to recruit a diverse set of users: some experienced users, some novices…

Turn Off the Computer Screen to Combat Global Warming

Turn off your monitor screen manually when you are not using your computer for 15 minutes or longer

» Turn off your computer at night and when you are not using it for several hours. The same also applies to copiers, scanners, printers and fax machines.

One computer left on 24 hours a day will cost you $115 - 160 in electricity costs a year and dump 1,500 pounds of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

A tree absorbs between 3-15 lbs of CO₂ each year. That means that 100-500 trees would be needed to offset the yearly emissions of one computer left on all the time.

» If you buy a new computer, consider a laptop. Laptops use only 1/4 the energy.

» If you buy a new computer monitor for the desktop, consider a flat screen instead of a CRT monitor. LCD monitors use only 1/3 the energy.

» Enable the Power Management feature for your monitor.