One thing that bothers me about the whole global warming debate is the way the Internet gives voice to the fanatics. The extreme fringes in this debate, or any other, get just as much say as the unbiased, balanced sources. The result being you don’t know who to trust, unless you’re willing to do a lot of legwork to sort it out.
Just do a search for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (an amazing movie, by the way, for a glorified slide show), a movie that tries to debunk global warming skeptics, and you get all kinds of fringe arguments. Refutations of refutations of refutations and you don’t know who’s refuting what anymore. Every source is suspect, even the user-controlled Wikipedia where you’re never sure whether a right- or left-winger last edited the article you’re reading.
It’s all the more reason why anybody trying to argue for a cause or idea needs to be transparent. They need to give clear point/counterpoint. And they need to give their opposition the best possible footing–no straw man arguments. (My philosophizing friend taught me that one, and I often kick myself for it because I want to go for the easy kill, but it’s just a strawman argument. All I accomplish is making myself feel better–I don’t convince anyone.)
A new study shows that playing action video games can actually improve your vision. Specifically the action games like first-person shooters help you better pick out objects (i.e., targeting the baddies in a dark room). Slow-moving games like Tetris don’t cut it.
But gaming will only help specific situations, like optical nerve or brain dysfunctions–or old age–but not typical problems with the physical size and shape of the eye (so I’m probably screwed).
Of course then they throw this bit in at the end:
On the downside, research suggests that too much time on a bright screen can cause eyestrain and may disrupt the body’s biological clock, particularly if played just before bedtime, and that some games may be psychologically damaging.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately trying to redesign my blog, both the front end look and the back end guts. One of the projects that has yet to see the light of day is redoing my reviews blog. This blog was initially conceived of as a place to store my reviews and not have them clogging up this blog.
But reviewing stuff was too much work. I rarely did it.
I’ve been trying to find a way to make my review blog fun and useful again. One of my ideas was to take [yet another] page from kottke.org and add the functionality to rate each item being reviewed. So now a review could simply be the title and my rating. Fun and easy, assuming you can do cool stuff like sort by rating.
I redesigned my Archives page so it lists the months by year instead of a ridiculously long list using the MTArchivesDateHeader plugin (layout inspired by kottke.org). I might tweak it a bit more. I’d love to list the years in reverse chronological order (latest first) and the months in chronological order (Jan. to Dec.), but I haven’t figured that out yet. I bet I could with MTSQL, but it makes my poor brain hurt. Contrary to all this blog tweaking, I’m not a techie.
I’m also trying to add some pagination to the homepage using the Paged Archives plugin (I’ve been a bit plugin crazy lately). But it doesn’t work yet (sorry). One of my pet peeves with blogs is when you get to the bottom of the homepage and there aren’t any options to keep reading. It’s such a pain to have to scroll back up, find the archives, then scroll through all the entries you just saw to find your place again. Hassle. WordPress nicely offers pagination by default so you can just go to the next page. That’s what I hope to offer if I can get it to work.
Update: After some help from Alden Bates, the creator of the Paged Archives plugin, the pagination is back in business. Thanks Alden!
My favorite usability hero, Jakob Nielsen, has some new results from eye-tracking technology that can help you improve your web site. OK, the results aren’t that earth-shattering (except for the bit near the end about men checking out George Brett’s crotch–and if that’s not worth a WTF?!, I don’t know what is), but they are worth repeating:
Use subheads & bulleted lists.
Make the writing shorter and more concise.
Include more white space.
Write useful headlines (not cute or witty, unless they can also be useful).
Making those changes can help users get through the content in half the time and remember 34% more.
The article also has tips for online graphics, namely make the pictures useful. If the picture doesn’t add anything, it’d be better to have white space. It’s also better to use real people instead of stock imagery, and if your target audience is men it’s apparently good to include “areas of private anatomy.” Again, WTF?! (link via kottke.org)
I realized I switched from Vimeo to YouTube for no reason. OK, YouTube is now backed by Google and has the advantage of a massive audience. That’s tempting. But Vimeo has really nice design. Which do you like better?
Let’s compare. Lexi Combs Her Hair, Vimeo vs. YouTube:
(Keep in mind that the aspect ratios are different. I forced them both to be the same height–187 pixels–but Vimeo has a width of 250 vs. YouTube’s 227.)
Part of communicating effectively about yourself is responding to criticism. Of course you need to do it in appropriate ways. Another pet peeve of mine (And I do tend to have a lot of them, don’t I? Sorry, blogging is just a nice way to get them out of my system. It means my wife doesn’t have to listen to me complain as much.) is when organizations respond to criticism effectively, but don’t use all the tools at their disposal.
JetBlue was the example I gave yesterday with their massive delays and response that didn’t quite filter through all their channels.
Another good example is (Product) Red. Last week a critical Ad Age article tore into (Product) Red the same time as a critical protest site was launched. Not a good week. And Red certainly responded. Bobby Shriver responded on the Red web site. He’s also been talking to the media.
But what’s the word on the official (Product) Red blog? Not much.
We’re in the midst of the user-generated revolution. Content generated by users is skyrocketing in popularity. Which means anyone who can generate that content has much to gain. There’s always the random blog entry or video clip from folks like me who have full time jobs. But then there are the people with the most to contribute and the most to potentially gain from this focus on user-generated content.
I’m talking, of course, about teens. Who else has the free time to create loads of user-generated content and the patience to wait for their payday? It could be articles, blog entries, photos, videos, podcasts, even links. The Wall Street Journal just explored some of the users behind user-submitted link sites, like Digg, and found that one of the top submitters to Reddit is 12 years old. Netscape even pays a 17-year-old $1,000 a month to find links.
I just installed a new comment plugin which should eliminate spam and do away with the need for authentication with TypeKey (famous last words). It asks you to type in a word when you submit your comment to confirm that you’re a person and not some spamming robot bastard. We recently installed it on Church Marketing Sucks with amazing results, so I thought I’d give it a try here.
Let me know if you notice any errors or funkiness. My biggest pet peeve so far is that when you tab through the entry fields it skips the challenge question field. I’ll see if I can find a way to fix that.
You may notice other funkiness around the blog. I’ve been trying for weeks to get my category archives to rebuild without an error. I finally did it (by switching to dynamic category archives), but now I’m having dynamic publishing issues. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Since I am working on cobbled together templates, I’m tempted to just blow everything up and start over with new templates where everything is up to snuff. We’ll see.
I get a kick out of this story about the rise of the word ‘meh,’ thanks to the Internet. The best part is when the writer asks where the word came from and my immediate thought was the Simpsons. Is there anything they don’t know?
So much of our modern culture has been borrowed from the Simpsons with an exclamatory yoink. Just visit the list of Simpsons’ neologisms from Wikipedia (of course the list doesn’t include ‘meh’–doh!). (link via Josh Lewis!)
A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.