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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Green is getting bigger all the time. Even supermarkets are getting in on the act – finally. In Australia, Woolworths and Coles are going to make the effort in the new stores they’re building to consume 20% to 30% less energy. Sounds good.
Here in New Zealand people have taking up the challenge of remembering to bring their own bags to the supermarkets. Not only do these bags hold a lot more, they save you that sinking feeling of carrying several plastic bags that you know are going to give up the ghost before you’ve got from the car to the front door!
And talking of bags, there’s a company in Melbourne (my home town – have I mentioned this before?) called Haul that’s making old billboards (presumably the paper rather than the wooden stands) into fashion bags, number plates into purses and wallets (I’m wondering how heavy one of those would be in your pocket) and backpacks out of the inner tubes of tyres. Get your rubber-smelling backpack here!
I’ve just checked the site – as I should have done first – and find that they’re using vinyl advertising billboards. Never thought of vinyl ones.
Seems they also make laptop carriers, bean bags, artists’ aprons, dog collars, document satchels, and, in what must be the best buy of all for anyone who wants to fight for the environment, punch bags!
I had a lot of fun just now making a business card online. (Inadvertently went as far as the checkout and nearly cost myself US$69.00, but managed to back out of there!)
Logoyes.com is an easy-to-use site that lets you play around with fonts, logos, layout to your heart’s content. There’s a great deal of choice of logo design in a silhouette-style approach, and the range of fonts is pretty wide too – between cool and trad.
I was able to get the colour I wanted on the ‘card’ (the one I didn’t go to the checkout with) and considering how little time I spent overall, I think the job came out pretty well. You can see the end result in this screen shot.
What I liked about the site was that it was pretty much self-explanatory – or maybe it’s just that I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use Adobe InDesign lately (in detail) and my brain might be more up with the play than usual!
I don’t surf the Net much, just for the sake of it, but I do like to put in a couple of seemingly unrelated words and see what comes up. As a result of doing this I found a book called Human Factors and Web Development, edited by Julie Ratner. It appears under the Google book search, that system where great chunks of the book are extracted, but with odd pages missing throughout. You get tantalised enough to want to read the whole thing, but the missing pages mean you have to go and search the real book out itself.
In this book, one of the authors says: “A key development in Information Foraging Theory is the notion of the information scent. Briefly defined, information scent is the user’s perception of the cost and value of accessing a piece of information.”
I’ve never heard of Information Foraging Theory, but anyway, what it means is that our approach to looking for something to buy, discover, learn etc, all depends on our context (a word I don’t particularly like to use, since it often has overly academic overtones). Whether someone is male, female, has certain hobbies, beliefs, is interested in the news, isn’t interested in it, has money/doesn’t, and so on.
All these factors affect how a person goes about doing their foraging. And above all these is that ‘context’ of time: how much time is this going to take me? If we’re looking for a gift for a special someone, or a new pair of golf shoes for ourselves (something that requires particular attention to detail), then we’re going to have to invest time in the foraging. Having only five minutes to do either of these pieces of ‘foraging’ will mean that however attractive the price, the shortness of time will switch us off from doing the search.
It’s the same on the Net: there may be very attractive prices out there for airline flights, hotel reservations, trips hither and yon, but unless we’ve got time to investigate them, we won’t bother. Real foraging requires time above all else.
If our broadband speed is slow, if the computer has been playing up (as mine has done several times lately by suddenly deciding it can’t load a webpage, no matter how much huffing and puffing it does) then the foraging becomes a chore and not a pleasure. Poorly designed websites will switch us off too, as will ones that take forever to load (even with a decent broadband speed).
The author carries on to say: ‘users attach specific value to each piece of information they access on the Web. As they surf, they are continuously making these value judgements in order to efficiently navigate themselves to the most profitable patch of information.’
So next time you’re surfing, or doing a quick search, remember Information Foraging Theory, and take note of how much the surfing is costing you!
The golf shoes I wasn't looking for!
Finally the carpet in our house is down, and we’ve begun putting things back in their rightful places again. Although it feels as though we have an awful lot more stuff around the house than we used to have, which is scary. Perhaps things have been breeding while we weren’t looking.
Though there was a lot of lifting to do, and a fair amount of pushing stuff through doors that seemed made for smaller furniture, at least we didn’t have to carry things upstairs as we did a few weeks ago when my daughter moved back in with us. We could have done with a stair lift to cart all those bits and bobs up there.
Actually I’ve just come across some photos on the Net of the stripped Mark II detector
[ Click here to read more ]
If only people didn’t go over the top.
A woman in Washington, DC, one Raewyn Campbell, took her laptop to Best Buy for repair. Best Buy somehow managed to lose it. Campbell claims that it was stolen, in fact, and that the company told lies as to why they couldn’t track it down in their store. A to and fro series of debates has ensued, and Ms Campbell has now sued Best Buy for US$54 million.
Yup, you read it right
[ Click here to read more ]
I’ve just been checking out the BT (British Telecom) home IT support site. The videos are fun, in an odd sort of way. Various actors (a British Indian, a rather over-the-top granny) ring up BT and get ‘Michael’ who has a distinctly London accent. Actually, when I rang BT, I certainly didn’t get any ‘Michaels’ – I got the British Indians, or West Indians, or Asians. Never mind. They did help.
Michael is very earnest. The only problem is that his lines are shown on the screen before he says them, and it rather takes away from his reading of them. It’s a bit like watching an English DVD with the English subtitles going. It always spoils a bit of the surprise of what’s being said.
Michael offers all sorts of solutions, and seems to be able to do anything. Jolly old Michael! He can do computer repair over the phone! Not true – one of his mates has to come out to do computer repair. Even BT hasn’t quite got the cyber world that sorted
[ Click here to read more ]
The other day we received an email at work from a New Zealand company advertising domains and various other such items – the typical sort of thing these companies sell together. Their prices looked interesting, and for some time I’ve been debating getting a proper domain name for my blogger.com blog.
So I wrote to them. I’m not sure exactly how long it is since I wrote – it’s at least a week and probably getting on for a fortnight. So far the response has been Zilch.
One company that isn’t going to make much money
[ Click here to read more ]
It’s a curious thing that it seems much harder for scientists to believe in something new, even when they see it with their own eyes, than for the untrained person in the street. Scientists’ training often gets in the road of their intuition and their ability to grasp the unexpected.
Worse, many scientists will stick with the status quo even when the facts don’t fit their theories. The current theory of Evolution is one such example – but let’s not go there.
In an interesting story I came across on the Net, a man called Thane Heins, from Almonte near Ottawa, appears to have discovered a form of perpetual motion
[ Click here to read more ]
When I was in England we babysat my niece’s house for nearly a month. They were with us a short part of the time, but most of the month they were in Corfu, or Rhodes, or somewhere where they were getting roasted alive.
I couldn’t use my laptop at their house, as the signal wasn’t strong enough for my mobile connect to pick up. Their broadband isp was BT, so I was able to use their computer to access the Internet and do all my blogging (when my wife would allow) until one day the computer stopped short, never to go again. Well, virtually.
I lie a little when I say it wouldn’t go at all. I could still use the computer, but not the Internet. By this time our hosts were on some sunny shore, so they weren’t much help and I had to get hold of BT themselves to see what could be done, as it was obviously the broadband connection that had gone phut
[ Click here to read more ]
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201 Posts dating from January 2007
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