Auctiondrop is a service which sells your items on ebay if you drop them off at their local location. They photograph it, list it and follow it up. Their charges are a little steep, but its for people who don’t have time. Also Andale is an interface provides auction buyers with pricing research tools.
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When we search the web for a few keywords, the information can be arranged in various ways, by relevance, by time, by categories, by author, by location, by content type (text, images, pdfs), etc. Google provides the results by relevance. Technorati cosmos provides blog results by time. If a search is made in google and the first few resulting url’s are put in technorati cosmos, it would give a search result by time. This method gives the most recent data on any topic.
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In blog talk the gutter is the narrow band on either sige of the page. Let me build a concise list of things we find in blog gutters. Blog roll, links, categories, calendar, photos, internal navigation, stories, weather info, webcam, previous posts, fav posts, books reading, fav music, technorati cosmos, tracking a keyword in google, rss output of blogs, about, mail link, daily pic, presence info, upcoming, amazon wishlist, new comments, submit news (tell me something), visualization of a global activity (shares, headlines, moonphase, earth with day)
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Organize photos, show photos to others, share photos with friends, use photos in an article. Do the current photo blog interfaces help us with these requirements? How should a photo browsing interface, not occuping a lot of space and fit into the blog gutter look like? Too bad, all the online photo sharing sites like yahoo are missing the bandwagon. Textamerica is getting lots of publicity, maybe because of Xeni at BoingBoing, who has her moblog there and Chris Prillo also helped them. Also listed in Time is the Hiptop moblog
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Geovector, a company with lots of patents is trying to introduce pointing as a method of interaction on handhelds. Demos showcased on their site include buying, travelling and watching a sport.
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Steve Jobs in his keynote at WWDC listed lots of new mac features. I was surprised by apple’s iSight. It is a small step, but a significant one into the camara arena. I’m waiting for apple to join iPod and a camera, before a cellphone gets a hard drive.
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Big sites get large number of overall hits, but they are less credible than a specialized one. I would trust an expert on my street more than the towns priest on a particular topic. A specialized site can profile and their visitors more effectively. Context specific ads are more viable in case of the smaller sites. Brand promotion and mass influence is viable in the big site case. More info on increasing credibility of a website here.
Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites: …
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“Licenses aren’t the heart of OSS, they’re just hygeine. What matters are three trends:
1. Software commoditization
2. User-customizable systems
3. Collaboration
Architect the system so that users’ natural activity yeilds the required results”
The Open Source Paradigm Shift …
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“Cars are designed to switch gears easily. Modern humans are not. When we learn a technique or a tool, it’s natural for us to fixate on its use. If you have a hammer, everything is a nail.” Design patterns help us to shift gears. Views also should be designed keeping this fact in mind for the user.
Solution: “All problems have multiple solutions. The larger the problem, the more open the solution space. To understand the different choices requires a creative approach. Someone must lead the way in expressing the different possible directions. What are three alternative navigation designs, and how would this improve the design, relative to known customer behavior? Can we reduce the number of categories we have by a third to simplify some user decisions? “
Comparison vs. creativity? “Some designers ruffle at the comparison process. They’d prefer to allow their personal choice of approach to surface as the direction for change. This is almost always a mistake. Often it’s impossible to understand the merit of a design, without comparing it against several potential alternatives. It’s hard to know if something is good or bad if it is standing alone. At the moment when the team has arrived at some good ideas, hopefully through evaluating the tradeoffs of alternatives, analysis becomes the greatest need. Perhaps there is time for a quick usability study, or heuristic evaluation, to help confirm that the proposed changes will truly have a positive impact on the customer. There are always more details in the world than can be considered by the designer’s mind, and it’s much cheaper to learn from mistakes in prototypes than in production code.”
The final sentence: “The greatest opportunities for the mindful designer are in exploring how to build complementary relationships from seemingly competing traits.” Is there any tool which supports the exploration and exaluation of the design? If not how should it be?
Designing on both sides of your brain: …
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Nice demo, but needs more control. The size of the text should fall less rapidly. Also a bevel demo here.
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