Archive for November, 2005
Yup, it’s true, MIT Media Lab just presented the world with the little and cheap laptop they have been developing to help fight the digital divide between rich and poor countries.
This little computer is surelly impressive, but not only for it’s price: it’s a full color, linux based and powered in a very special way: with a wind-up crank!! (I sure would appreciate having something like that on my mac!), it does have some limitations, expecially regarding data storage, but the model is more like a network computer than like a true laptop, it does come WIFI and USB ready!
The main idea behind this project if to enable kids from poor countries to be connected to the Digital World, and from there to learn and improve themselfs, this little computer is just the enabler of that bright future!
BBC has a more in depth article and video about this little computer presentation to the world.
November 18th, 2005
Some days ago, I gave a short presentation at an Usability Seminar here in Lisbon, I hadn’t much time as I would have liked to prepare the presentation, and as always I even run into last minute problems with the keynote to powerpoint conversion. Even so, the presentation was about something I personally call “Content Usability“, which basically evolves around some of the issues and guidelines that all of us should consider when publishing content on the web. The all presentation was based on a very simple thought: content = value! So what can we do. and should do to achieve the highest value for our contents?
The rules and guidelines I’ve presented, are more or less a personal compilation of heuristics and principals collected along my experience using different content managers, not only as producer (of contents) but also from my experience on the other side of the wall: as content manager system’s administrator and webmaster on different project and websites.
So if you’re interested on reading it or simply on this matters, do take some time to read it, and send me your feedback, the presentation is available in PDF as well as Quicktime Movies, portuguese (original version) or english (roughly translated).
November 17th, 2005
Google has already achieved a top position on the search engines and world information indexation, now they want to repeat the same, but this time, looking at the sctrutured information we publish everyday on the web:
Their imediate main target is probably the classified advertissing business, Craigslist, eBay, Loquo (now part of Kijiji) and others alike, have all good reasons to worry about, but that’s nothing when compared to Newspapers that had on this type of service a good share of their revenue and were already trying to fight those new players on the market.
But if you look at Google Base with a long term prespective, and thinking about the so called Semantic Web, the future of information will be structured! All the information we publish will be sooner or later publish in a common, largelly adopted structured format, allowing others to search and use this format to build on top of it, new applications and websites, proving a even greater value to the information, that otherwise would be almost “hidden” to everyday internet user. Google Base is just the first one of such applications, more will follow for sure..
On this subject I recommend paying some attention to two important projects that are helping to give some structure to today’s web: Microformats and Structure Blogging, differente approaches, same concept.
November 16th, 2005