Dented Reality Notes

Not that I wanted to use a ridiculously-exagerated title like "PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption", or "Flash: 99% Bad", but I think it's getting to the point that someone's got to say something about the fact: Jakob Nielsen is running out of things to write about in his bi-weekly column, Alertbox.

Jakob used to be a fountain of information on usability techniques, concepts, tools and processes, but now he seems to have degenerated into selling his own products and moaning about (usually) related technologies and industries.

I hope that he reigns things in and starts writing some decent content again, he really did have some useful gems back in the early days. Maybe it's time to scale it back to once a month?

Was talking with Peter, the organizer of the AIfIA Translations Project and it looks like they are into beta mode. It's a great project which aims to identify key texts in the IA field and translate them to as many languages as possible.

So far, there's some;

• Spanish
• Dutch
• Portugese
• Italian
• French
• Japanese, and
• Danish

which I think is pretty impressive. You can even get a large portion of the actual website in your preferred language once you go to the translations page (selection on the left).

After posting to peterme.com about how I'd like to see more tools available for the IA community, I got an email from Lisa Chan from Stanford saying that she was also looking into creating a Search Log Analyser, and that if I was going to be working on one, why don't we work together! This is really cool, I love how the Internet allows things like this to happen. I am here in Perth, WA, knowing all of 2 other IAs personally, and yet I will now be collaborating with another IA from one of the largest Universities in the US to build a tool to help all IAs.

You rock Internet.

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would "spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured" to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would "save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year"... come on dude, seriously. You so can't make that assumption.

New tool being created to analyse the logs of a search interface and pull out informatoin about the most searched for terms, things returning lots of (or no) results, plus information regarding best bets.

That's annoying -- last week I got a call from DOLA, asking if I would be able to come in early next week (this week) to talk to them about doing some IA work for them.

I had to turn them down, because I am now working at AdultShop.com, which is taking up nearly all of my time, and I simply wouldn't have had time to dedicate to the job. I asked them what they were doing anyway, and apparently they wanted me to work on the information architecture of their entire suite of websites and online applications - bugger!