links for 2010-07-18

• Stanford Online Accessibility Program – Stanford University
  The Stanford Online Accessibility Program has been established to provide guidance to the Stanford Community as they use various online means to share information to their respective constituents. The program has the mandate to assist web designers and online content creators in producing material that is accessible to the greatest audience possible. The program achieves this through the promotion of Universal Accessibility and web standards compliance.
  (tags: accessibility stanford web research design)

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links for 2010-07-17

• Moleskine presentation at Future Concept Lab
  July 2010
  (tags: culture creativity drawing notebooks moleskine)
• Lost Formats – Experimental Jetset
  Lost Formats Preservation Society

  The society was founded in 2000 with the design of Emigre issue no. 57. It's sole purpose is to save formats from obscurity.

  This overview of Lost Formats is not presented in any particular order and not in any way complete. Anyone can nominate their own beloved format by sending a picture and specifications to formats@jetset.nlThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

  (tags: archive design preservation inspiration)

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links for 2010-07-16

• Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers
  “Flexible access to people and resources can be enormously powerful in a world driven by changes that, more often than not, lead us in unanticipated directions…we need to become more adept at ‘capability leverage’ – finding and accessing complementary capabilities, wherever they reside in the world, to deliver more value.”

  – From “The Power of Pull” by J Hagel, J S Brown, L Davidson

  Businesses, in particular in the Western world, are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work.

  (tags: intranet social socialmedia ECM)
• Official Google Blog: Deeper understanding with Metaweb
  (tags: semanticweb meaning metaweb google)
• 6 simple steps for a good intranet plan " Mark Morrell
  (tags: intranet planning)
• 3M Visual Attention Service – 3M US – Home
  You've got seconds to engage a viewer. Be sure they count.

  As a designer, your challenge is to maximize visual impact within a visually cluttered world. That's why we built 3M Visual Attention Service (VAS). 3M VAS uses science-based modeling to help you increase the likelihood people will notice key design elements during the first 3–5 seconds of exposure.

  (tags: tools heatmap design online usability visualization analysis hci)
• D4A Winner Profile: Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data – Government Bits
  Matt McKenna's WhoPaidThem.com was one of he two entries that tied for winner of Sunlight Labs' Design for America contest in the Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data category.

  WhoPaidThem aims to challenge our individual and collective preconceptions about political funding through a series of interactive graphics. To hear more about the winning entry, check out Matt's short video below.

  (tags: data visualization)
• Closing the Tech Gap | The White House
  Government IT projects all too often cost millions of dollars more than they should, take years longer than necessary to deploy, and deliver technologies that are obsolete by the time they are completed. Colossal failures have contributed to a significant technology gap between the public and private sector which results in dollars wasted and a government that is less responsive to the American people. To close the technology gap, cut waste, and modernize government, the Obama Administration is taking concrete steps to deliver better results for the American people.

  In June 2009, we launched the IT Dashboard, which empowers the American people to monitor $80 billion of IT investments across the Federal government and shines light into government operations, and today we’re launching IT Dashboard 2.0 which represents the next major leap forward in transparency, performance and accessibility of the Federal IT portfolio.

  (tags: dashboard government2.0 technology WeCouldDoThis)
• SF Gate — Food & Wine — Recipes, Restaurant Reviews, Bay Area Dining Guide, Wine & Spirits
  The results of the 2010 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition are in! Sixty-three professional wine judges from throughout the United States evaluated 4,913 wines from over 1,500 wineries across the country. The judging of the wines took place in Sonoma County on January 5-8
  (tags: wine list awards reviews)

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links for 2010-07-15

• Better Explained | learn right, not rote
  # Site tweaks: Faster Javascript load time (examples), HTTP caching, gzip compression
  # Ruby on Rails: Starting Ruby on Rails, Understanding MVC
  # Tools: version control, distributed VCS
  # Web Development: Debugging with Firefox, Javascript Reference, load XML/JSON data, gmail XSRF attack, GUIDs, making bookmarklets
  (tags: rails rubyonrails tutorial programming development howto)

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links for 2010-07-14

• Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs | 456 Berea Street
  One thing that is rather common, especially on websites whose content is not in English, is URLs that contain unencoded characters such as space, å, ä, or ö. While this works most of the time it can cause problems.

  Looking at RFC 3986 – Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, characters that are allowed to be used unencoded in URLs are either reserved or unreserved. The unreserved characters are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. The reserved characters are used as delimiters and are :, /, ?, #, [, ], @, !, $, &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, ;, and =.

  (tags: url resource tip browser design delimiter ascii characters)

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links for 2010-07-13

• World Usability Day | Making Life Easy!
  s about making our world work better.
  It's about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

  World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

  (tags: usability design accessibility event ux ui)
• Public Library of Science
  PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All our activities are guided by our core principles.

  Read more about our mission, our achievements, and our hopes for the future in PLoS' first Progress Report.

  (tags: science research library reference free)
• NYC court tosses FCC's fleeting expletives policy
  A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out a government policy that can lead to broadcasters being fined for allowing even a single curse word on live television, concluding that the rule was unconstitutionally vague and had a chilling effect on broadcasters.

  The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan struck down the 2004 Federal Communications Commission policy, which said that profanity referring to sex or excrement is always indecent.

  (tags: webcast broadcast censor chilling_effect)
• Professional Development for Accessible Technology: PDF Tutorials
  Adobe presented two webinars for the CSU on creating accessible PDF documents this year. The webinars were recorded and divided into short tutorials. In addition, we have also provided you with a link to the full presentation, the Adobe PowerPoint presentation and supporting documents.
  (tags: accessibility CSU training)
• WebAIM: PowerPoint Accessibility
  Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most popular tools for creating slide show presentations. It is a popular way to organize thoughts for a meeting or lesson, to attractively present key points in a live presentation, and even to create handouts. Even though PowerPoint files are normally used in live presentations, they are extremely common on the web. For example, teachers may use them to organize lesson plans, or online conference proceedings might link to the files used during keynotes and workshops.

  Unfortunately, PowerPoint files are not as accessible as HTML. Although there are ways to improve the accessibility of PowerPoint files, the only way to ensure that a PowerPoint presentation is truly accessible is to create an HTML alternative instead of or in addition to the PowerPoint file. This is due mainly to the needs of people who use screen readers.

  (tags: accessibility powerpoint tools webdesign presentation)
• Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
  (tags: leadership education philosophy business readlater inspiration)

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links for 2010-07-12

• SnapHaven Introduces Free Photo Scanning Service With Active Membership
  If you’ve got boxes of old prints and family photos you’d like to salvage from those awful sticky photo album pages, SnapHaven will scan them for free. For a limited time, the photo storage and backup service is offering free unlimited scans for customers with an active membership — though you’ll have to pay to ship your own prints.

  SnapHaven is still the only dedicated photo backup and storage site. They also offer services for making prints, photo books, and other photo gift accessories.

  (tags: photos archive)
• We educate changemakers | Knowmads / Amsterdam
  We are a creative, entrepreneurial school, but Knowmads is also much more than a school. It is a platform for entrepreneurs who want to make a difference in this world.

  Knowmads (students and staff) are nomadic workers who can work anywhere, with everybody. We are brave, responsible, creative, imaginative and entrepreneurial. We work in a one year setting, combined with a socio-economic enterprise. We build blocks for a more colourful and better world.

  (tags: education learning business change entrepreneurship open creativity)
• Internal communications – the employer landscape – ItsDevelopmental
  The Watson Wyatt Worldwide report on Capitalizing on Effective Communication [pdf] is essential reading for internal communications professionals. Here are the key findings:

  1. Effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance and a driver of employee engagement. Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.

  (tags: communications)
• Guide to Low-cost Usability Tools
  As someone who works with start-ups and SMBs, finding low-cost, high-impact tools is an absolute necessity. Fortunately, the usability world has been blessed by dozens of new tools over the last couple of years. While many excellent blog posts have been written about these tools, I decided that it was time to take a deeper dive. Most importantly, I wanted to test these tools on User Effect and try to provide real data and screenshots.

  In the end, I decided that a blog post just wasn't going to cut it this time around, and so my second e-book was born. I'm happy to announce that I'm making that e-book available for free as of today. It's a guide to 20 online usability tools, all of which have free or low-cost versions.

  (tags: usability tools webdesign userexperience ebook analytics design)

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links for 2010-07-11

• Has Knowledge Management Been Bad For Us? « Systems Savvy
  In the world of Knowledge Management, we frequently talk about at least two different types of knowledge we deal with. The first is explicit, or codified, knowledge (stuff that’s captured and, hopefully, readily accessible in some useful form); the second is tacit, or tribal, in-the-head, “between the ears” knowledge. For most of my nearly 15 years of knowledge management practice in the aerospace business I have noted we spend an incredible amount of time, energy, and money working on the former.

  At the same time we have continually asserted the vast majority of useful knowledge was the latter. Here, for instance, is a graphic showing the ratio of explicit to tacit as 19 to 1.

  (tags: knowledgemanagement creativity enterprise2.0 web2.0)
• Attributes of Social Customers « Random Thoughts of a Boston-Based CTO: John Moore's Weblog
  The Social Customer has been discussed in great detail across countless blogs and web sites. In my opinion, no one has done a better job of providing a more complete definition than that provided by Jacob Morgan’s Chess Media Group, with Attensity, at the end of June, 2010. With Jacob’s permission I am including his Slideshare below, along with a link to a free white paper that was created as part of this effort.

  Before watching this Slideshare I want to note:

  * This work is outstanding.
  * This work is focused primarily on the private sector. However, the definition of the Social Customer, as part of The Social Ecosystem, must work across sectors, geographies, languages. We get to that common definition after you view the Slideshare.

  (tags: customer gov20)

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links for 2010-07-10

• m o t o | c u i s i n e : 2010
  Planet Green is excited to introduce a brand new show that will change the way you look at food and its relationship with the environment. Meet molecular gastronomists Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche: world renowned chefs, successful restauranteurs, patent-owning mad scientists and celebrated futurists. These two technology-obsessed chefs are looking for solutions to some of the world's most pressing environmental issues from a completely unexpected place-the kitchen. Is it possible to save fuel by taking the delivery driver out of the equation? Download pizza off the internet? Reduce landfill mass by making edible packing peanuts? Planet Green's new original series Future Food will redefine the nature of food. In each episode, Cantu, Roche and the rest of the team at Chicago's world-famous Moto restaurant are presented with a unique food challenge, and they tap into their gastronomical genius for solutions-with shocking, eye-crossing, and always delicious results.
  (tags: chicago food restaurants restaurant science design)
• 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks
  With Facebook’s ever-changing layout, and the fact that other social sites are encroaching on its real-time update strangle-hold, it’s easy to forget that there are some pretty nifty tricks you can pull using your humble Facebook status.

  We’ve pulled together 10 great how-to tips that will help you get the most out of your status update, from official features to apps, Easter eggs, jokes and more.

  (tags: facebook tips tricks mashable status fun socialmedia)

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links for 2010-07-09

• Interaction 11 | February 9-12, 2011 Boulder, CO
  This year we are asking for community submissions for lightning (20 minute) sessions and pre-conference workshops around a variety of themes, ranging from design practice (including guidelines, methods and processes) to design theory and new applications of design solutions. IxDA is proud to represent a diverse and multidisciplinary community; we encourage submissions from the fringes of interaction design and beyond. Check out content from previous IxDA conferences to get a flavor of the types of material presented.

  All proposals are due August 1, 2010. We are waiting to hear from you… what have you got to say for yourself?

  (tags: conference presentation todo ux)
• The Government has unlocked the open data safe – now we must open it – Telegraph Blogs
  (tags: open government opendata)
• Do Your Knowledge Workers Have a "Bitsmith"? – John Sviokla – Harvard …
  n our work so far, we've discovered the primary difference in how they do work is that they have the power to shape their work environment — which means that they can customize, upgrade, and even create new information technology to propel their productivity.

  If one looks throughout history, workers' productivity has always been proportional to the quality of the tools they use. In physical work, a man with a backhoe is much more productive than one with a shovel. Yet many firms — in their desire to save money by creating "standard" information environments — actually hamper the potential productivity of their knowledge workers. It's the knowledge work equivalent of outlawing backhoes.

  (tags: knowledgemanagement productivity hbr office)
• Massachusetts Data Breach Exposes 139,000 Records – Security – IT Channel News by CRN
  victim when an employee accidentally released confidential information of 139,000 state-registered investment advisers to a business publication.

  The breach occurred when personal information of tens of thousands of investment professionals contained on a CD-ROM was sent to IA Week, an investment industry publication, in response to a request for public information. IA Week had issued an information request of the office's Securities Division for a list of registered investment companies, but was instead sent a list of investment professionals.

  A new employee was culpable for the breach by failing to delete the investment advisers' Social Security numbers and other private information, which is normally withheld for such requests.

  (tags: Privacy public_records procedures)

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