vanderwal.net

The Last Big Piece

I grew up in the early 1970s with the Watergate scandal and hearings on television in the background to my world. Yesterday the one big missing piece was revealed, Felt was Deepthroat.

IA at Xerox Parc

Inside the PARC: the 'information architects'. This is part of the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives.

D-Day

To help remember D-Day Encyclopedia Britanica offers good multimedia tools for a light overview, but decent breadth.

The Web Grew Up

I was thinking the other day that two years ago, or so, was the last Christmas lag I noticed on the Web. It used to be that around Christmas time the Web would drag around the Christmas holiday as students finished their exams and surfed the Web. Office workers took advantage of their fast connections and a few free moments to order off the e-commerce sites.

This year I noticed this lag did not happen. Not this holiday season and not in September when students went back to school and were using their fast pipes to pull songs from Napster and catch-up on all their friend's sites.

Yes, maybe the Web has grown up. The only lags these days are from viruses and worms that grab hold of distant machines and only make it seem like we are all on dial-up as the malicious traffic drags the services down for the rest.

Foundations of Hypertext Navigation, Part 1

Another discussion on Peterme that has fallen into the discussion of spatial metaphors and the Web. The general feeling is that the spatial metaphor provides a poor descriptive language and metaphorical base to discuss the Web. Finding a replacement seems to be the focus, but there is an embedded base in the population of users that have adopted these analogies. I agree to a great degree that the spatial metaphor is not the best (agreeing with the negative of a positive superlative is the easy way out as there is very little room to be wrong so it is a false method of looking smart).

There is a chapter on "NAVIGATION THROUGH COMPLEX INFORMATION SPACES" from Hypertext in Context by Cliff McKnight, Andrew Dillon, John Richardson, which provides a solid understanding of some of the history of the navigational metaphor in hypertext services.

Meet the New Information Architects by Paula Thornton

Paula Thorton presents her thoughts on Meet the New Information Architects , which offers a nice history lesson of IA, interaction design, other elements.