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Top 10 Blog Usability Mistakes

Amanda Etches Johnson did a post today where she mentioned the “Top 10 Blog Usability Mistakes”.  I'd seen this before and intended to do something in response but never got around to it.  But there's no time like the present.

1. No Author Biography
Well, contrary to some people who think this blog is purely an exercise in ego, part of the reason I didn't do an “About Me” page is I didn't think it was worth it.  But on second thought, it might be useful, especially for people who stumble upon this blog from Australia or Europe or India (probably looking to outsource my rambling!)  So I'll create an About Me page in the next few days.

2. No Author Photo
I do have a picture on every page but my face is half-obscured.  I don't have severe facial scars or burns that would prevent me from posting photos of myself.  Instead, I just really like the photo and  find it appropriate for a library blog with a book being the thing that blocks my face.  (If you can't make it out, it's “A Literary History of Alberta”) Although I don't exactly avoid putting pictures of myself up, having both a category for “photos” and a Flickr account that's reasonably easy to find, I do like that it adds a wee bit of mystery. 

3. Nondescript Posting Titles
For the most part, I think I do a fairly good job of coming up with catchy, engaging, descriptive post titles that make people want to read more about the stories. 

4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
I think I'm also fairly good about indicating where links go by the text description associated with them.  But I've never really understood this as a major issue either.  It's a bit inconvenient but  for non-descriptive links, you can briefly hover over with your mouse and get a pretty good idea where it goes in the status bar at the bottom of your browser.

5. Classic Hits Are Buried
I realised this was a potential problem before I ever read this article which is why I created “!Jason's Unofficial Guide to Library School” (the exclamation point to make sure it's at the top of my links section which is sorted alphabetically.  Hmm, “An Unofficial Guide to Library School” would accomplish the same thing.  I guess I do have a bit of ego!

6. The Calender is the Only Navigation
I have categories, keywords and a search box to aid with navigation although I do wish that that blog software was a bit more robust about how some of these options are implemented.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
A couple classmates have recently started blogs and my biggest piece of advice to both of them was to make sure to post on a regular basis, at least weekly at the minimum.   You don't have to post  on a daily basis like some keeners but a regular publishing schedule lets readers know that it's worth  coming back to your blog once they've visited the first time. 

8. Mixing Topics
This can refer to two things – mixing topics within individual posts and within the overall “theme” of the blog.  Regarding the first point, I try to stay on one or two topics per post or use my “Holiday Randomness” gimmick when I want to cover a few different things.  If I really want to write about multiple topics, I'll do multiple posts in one day rather than jam them all into a single post.  (I think my record is 6 or 7 posts in a single day. )  As for the second point, it was nice to come up with the idea of a blog about my experiences in library school because nobody was doing anything similar and it gave me a natural, built-in audience.  Now that I'm done school, I'm a bit more scattered now about what I want this blog to be “about” but hopefully I'll find a new niche eventually.  

9. Forgetting That You Write For Your Future Boss
In my presentation on non-traditional online genealogy resources, I cited a stat that 33% of employers Google potential employees while 10% use resources like social networking sites and blogs. 

This one's tough.  I tend to be very open and can also be very opinionated on this blog.  I am pretty sure that I won't be to the same level about my workplace when I get a job as the relationship is different between employer-employee instead of student-professor/institution (at least in my opinion.) 

I would hope that nothing I've posted here would affect my job prospects but you never know – I do use the occasional swear word, I have pictures and stories of me drinking alcohol, and there is some nudity that some people will likely find offensive as well. 

10.  Having a Domain Name Owned By A Weblog Service
Depending on what you want your blog to be, there are definite advantage of having your own domain rather than being “yetanotherblog.blogspot.com”.  I think this mainly applies if you want to use your blog for professional reasons – either to produce revenue or if you're writing about things where you want to attract a wider audience than friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances.

Posted 12 January 2007 § Blog § Internet § List § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Just Another -40 Saskatchewan Day

These intrepid youths, standing outside the SaskPower building, show what happens when you throw boiling water in the air when the temperature is -40 (as it is today…hmm, that gives me an idea!)


Here's the Alaskan version.

Posted 11 January 2007 § Main Page § Saskatchewan § Video ‡ Comments (6) °

"How did the province where medicare was born end up with a city this frightening?"

I've spent the last couple hours trying to write a post responding to the recent Maclean's article naming Regina's North-Central neighbourhood as the worst in Canada.  But I don't know how do to it.

So instead, here is a painting I bought from a former North Central resident who came around my old office to visit my boss for a few weeks in mid-2005. 

 


He died about two weeks after I bought this painting from him.  During one of his last visits, he told my boss and I that he was going to go to Moose Jaw to
enter rehab with a friend.  He said he had to leave the city since the treatment in Regina wasn't really rehab
at all when you were so close to all of your known demons – human and otherwise. 

Posted 11 January 2007 § Main Page § Photo § Saskatchewan ‡ Comments (8) °

PeekVid

My absolute favourite project at library school last year was a presentation I did  for a class called “Shaping of News & Information Through Technology”.  The seminar-style course was offered jointly with the journalism department so we had about 16 LIS students and 6 or 8 journalism students. 

Given the title of the course and because the majority of the content was about the development of communications technology – from the alphabet to the printing press to the telegraph to television – I decided to do my final presentation on the future of broadcasting projecting forward from the point at which the course material basically ended. 

Relying heavily on YouTube clips for my presentation, I did a brief overview of the history of broadcasting in general, a bit more in-depth look at the history of online broadcasting and then a very in-depth (well, as in-depth as you can get in 20 minutes) look at some of the things happening with online broadcasting today (cancelled TV shows being resurrected online, amateurs producing shows that were as good as anything on TV, online viewership numbers that are competing with traditional television's numbers), the issues (copyright, clearance, English-speaking bias, media monopolies online that are worse than traditional media monopolies) and some of the things that will happen or continue to happen in the near future (many-to-many communication, increased citizen journalism, traditional broadcasters finally coming on board, YouTube rivals, ubiquitous media to be followed by omnipresent media.) 

Normally, I'd upload the presentation for anybody who wanted to see it but since I tend to use a fairly minimalist style for my presentations and since I did this presentation in a very ad-libbed fashion without a script, I think it might lose some of its impact seen without those elements. 

The other reason I don't want to upload it is that I haven't stopped working on it even though the presentation is over and the marks are in.  Part of the joy of doing this presentation was that every day brought a new development: Michael “Kramer” Richards goes on a racist tirade in a comedy club – is that citizen journalism or ubiquitous media?  Danny Devito shows up drunk on “The View” and attracts a bigger audience for the clip than the morning talk show normally does during its regular broadcast?  Let's add that to the section on “Audience Size”.)

Every day still brings new developments.  A couple weeks after I presented, a story got released about the Hamilton Police Force releasing surveillance video on YouTube to help capture criminals.  So I add a slide about “Official Use” in the current trends section and also incorporated info I had about the US DEA posting anti-drug messages on YouTube (which aren't very well received at all!) 
Even the fact that the unedited video clip of Saddam's hanging was online within a day fits into my topic in a variety of ways – the citizen journalism aspect, how online broadcasts demolish the space-constraints of traditional media, censorship issues, audience size issues.  (We'll leave the conspiracy theory debate about whether its release was “accidentally intentional” for another day.) 

So anyhow, that's a long way of saying the latest addition to my ever-expanding presentation is a web site called PeekVid that I just discovered tonight. 

People are already using the same technique to upload copyrighted materials that Napster users did when it first came under legal challenge.  If I remember (er, what my friends told me) correctly, you could search for the slightly altered name of the band (“EttalicaM”, “EatlesB”) that was issuing legal challenges and still find their stuff.

But if you didn't know the code, you couldn't find the music.  The same thing is being done today as people are uploading movies, TV shows and other types of videos to YouTube but giving them coded names so authorities can't find them.  The problem is that the codes are now a lot more complicated and so your chances of stumbling on all seven parts of “Borat” are mighty slim and if authorities find them, they get pulled extremely quickly. 

What PeekVid does is act as a double-blind key to help connect people looking for copyrighted material with the “hidden” content that is on YouTube and other video services.  They do this by adding an extra layer of hiding their own so authorities can't easily discover the “Eyk” by obscuring the direct links to the codenamed content but allowing you to easily see it as you would expect to see it (“Borat”, “Beatles”) via their web site. 

I am not a lawyer but technically, I don't think they're doing anything wrong (or at least their position would be that) because they're not hosting any of the infringing materials, similar to how a community bulletin board can't be responsible for the communications that may be facilitated between third parties using it. 

So anyhow, I have a feeling I didn't explain that very well.  But I'm going to sit here and watch “Kenny v. Spenny” episodes until I either fall asleep or die of laughter while I also enjoy seeing the future of broadcasting come alive before me (or something like that anyhow.)

(Slightly off-topic but how wrong is it that Wikipedia absolutely can't find “Kenny v. Spenny” as a search term but hits directly if you search for the proper show title, “Kenny vs. Spenny”?  They need to improve that area of their site pronto!)

Posted 10 January 2007 § Internet § Main Page § PopCulture § Video ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged:

Shhh! Are libraries places for silence anymore?

AskMetafilter recently had the following question posed which led to some great discussion.

Did libraries (public and university) stop requiring people to be quiet in the last few years, or is it just me?

At home on a recent break, I tried studying in a number of public
libraries and found that most were noisier than the local Starbucks. It
wasn't just the young people and cellphone talkers you might expect;
the worst offenders were senior citizens and a few librarians
themselves (one of whom read off the names of all the presidents over
the phone in a normal-to-loud voice.) Whispering seemed completely out
of place, the relic of a bygone era. The same is true of my university
library. I know there are a lot of librarians here; has there been a
major policy shift in libraries over the last few years, or have they
just given up? (Or am I imagining it?)

Posted 10 January 2007 § Library § Main Page ‡ Comments (6) °

The Beatles As Innovators (and my Top Ten Favourite Beatles Songs)

This site is one I rediscovered looking back through my MetaFilter comments.  The author makes excellent use of brief MP3 clips to illustrate the various points.  (Make sure you click through to Part Two linked at the top of the page as well.)

And here's a list I compiled a long time ago as the basis for a mix tape.  I'd come across an article that ranked the Top 101 Beatles songs so I decided to rank my own favourites (with the article's rating in brackets.)

10. Please Please Me (24)
– their first #1 is also one of their most exhuberant
9. Inner Light (-)
– the best sitar song I've ever heard!
8. In My Life (6)
– heartbreaking.  And I love that piano solo.
7. A Day In The Life (1)
– the top choice in this magazine's (and most) polls, it's definitely great and the story behind its creation is even better (and Wikipedia also makes me realise it was probably Mojo magazine where I first saw the article ranking the Beatles songs)
6. All You Need Is Love (28)
– the ultimate musical message set to a universal nursery rhyme melody
5. If I Fell (43)
– I love the obvious maturing when Lennon cites his earlier work “…and I found that love was more/Than just holding hands”
4. And Your Bird Can Sing (40)
– a musical head rush, criminally underrated
3. Strawberry Fields Forever (2)
– mystic artistic memory, haunting
2. Don't Let Me Down (-)
– pure lust, love and naked neediness
1. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (19)
– great sitar intro, get acoustic guitar, great cryptic story, great first line, great!

(Edit: Found a link to the complete list.)

Posted 09 January 2007 § List § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged:

Good Luck Everybody!

Tomorrow's the first day of Winter semester for FIMS students and I have to admit, I'm pretty glad I'm not there.  You tend to get pretty wrapped up in things (for good and bad) while you're immersed in that environment.  Then when you graduate, it all drops away…almost immediately.  For example, I just realised tonight that I never updated the Spirit of Librarianship page with last semester's winner and a few other things I had wanted to add (a list of “rules” for the award that I developed with a couple other people plus the name of the up-until-now anonymous sponsor of the $50 CLA gift certificate that SOL winners can use to buy a student membership or other CLA swag.  And don't worry, I asked his permission before naming him publicly.)

Anyhow, hope everybody back there reading this has a good semester!

Posted 08 January 2007 § LibrarySchool § Main Page ‡ Comments (2) °

A Big Puck Up!

This is both the worst and one of the best plays you'll ever see in the NHL.  Former first overall draft pick,
Patrik Stefan of the NHL's Dallas Stars, gets an open shot at an empty
net with fourteen seconds left in the game…and misses. The Edmonton
Oilers regain control of the puck, make a long pass down the length of
the ice and score to tie the game with two seconds left!Too bad it's the Oilers with the comeback but at least they still managed to lose in overtime.


Posted 07 January 2007 § Main Page § Sports § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Friday Fun Link – How Much Is This Blog Worth? (Jan. 5, 2007)

Found this via another site.  It uses the number of sites linking to your blog to calculate a value for that blog.  (I guess my IPO will be a bit longer in the making. LibrarianActivist on the other hand… )

Head Tale


        My blog is worth $7,339.02.
How much is your blog worth?


LibrarianActivist.org


        My blog is worth $11,290.80.
How much is your blog worth?

Posted 05 January 2007 § Blog § FridayFunLink § Internet § Main Page § Meme ‡ Comments (0) °

Randomness (Happy New Year!)

Early in this blog's history, I came up with a little gimmick where I cover a bunch of miscellaneous things I've come across or want to talk about in conjunction with a holiday (search for “randomness” to see previous entries).  I don't think I've done a “random” entry like this in awhile but the New Year provides a good excuse to clear up a few things I've had hanging around for the past few days.

CutePDF Writer
This is a very useful little utility that allows you to easily create PDF documents as easily as selecting the “Print” option in any of your applications.

Saskatchewan: TV Hotbed
CBC is getting a lot of publicity out of their controversial new series “Little Mosque on the Prairies” which, like Corner Gas, is set in a fictional Saskatchewan town. (In a semi-related point, I just watched Keith Ellison, the United State's first elected Muslim Congressman, being sworn in.  There was controversy among the haters about him choosing to use the Quran instead of a Bible for his oath so he arranged to use a Quran that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson to make a point that people who have an issue with him using the Quran are morons.  (I don't think those were his exact words.)  I'd strongly suggest reading the article I linked to – all kinds of goodness including the fact that one of the main haters is a Congressman in what was once Thomas Jefferson's riding and also that the Library of Congress played a big role in making this happen.  “The chief of the Library of Congress' rare book and special collections
division, Mark Dimunation, will walk the Quran across the street to the
Capitol and bring it back after the ceremony.”

Minnow Trap – Worst of the Year
Recent MLIS graduate and soon-to-be-published novelist Corey Redekop, posted a list of his Best and Worst literature of the year out of the nearly 100 novels he read in 2006.  You should take his recommendations seriously – Corey was also a long-time book reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press.  I'm a bit embarrassed that “Minnow Trap”, a book I gave him as a thank-you gift after he did a Lunch Bucket presentation in the summer, comes in as one of the worst.  I have to admit – I didn't put a lot of thought into the gift – I just picked one out of the pile of free books I got at BookExpo (hey, the Lunch Bucket had a budget of zero – what was I supposed to do?).  I apologized to Corey on multiple occasions but he claimed to be quite happy to have discovered the book and he's had a lot of fun writing about it on his blog since then.

It Doesn't Get Any More “Saskatchewan” Than This
I love how the Wheatland Library Region identifies the locations of their branches – instead of using street addresses for most of them, you have things like “in the old school”, “Main Street”, “Across from RCMP office” and the absolute best for the town of Plenty, “back of village”!  This seems quaint but is a real issue in rural Saskatchewan.  Our 911 service was moved to centralized dispatch a couple years ago so if you call up and say that your neighbours house is on fire, the dispatcher will want to know the street address and you'll (probably) only know “well, it's across from the Legion building” or whatever then the dispatcher will be unable to call for help and the house will burn down.  (I'm not exaggerating – this happened in Fillmore soon after the change to the 911 policy.)

Sriracha Hot Sauce
I love this hot sauce.  They had it out as one of the condiments at the Grad Club so I got in the habit of using it instead of ketchup with my fries.  Mmmmm! 

Our Roots/Nos Racines
This web site has digitized every local history book in Canada.  Unbelievable resource.  Plus check out the handsome young devil on this page (oops, not sure how to direct link to the page – follow that link then manually select page 425.)

SLIS Capping Exercise
I may have linked to this before but I rediscovered it and am totally impressed.  The library school at the U of A requires every student to do a capping exercise which is a web publication of their most outstanding work in the program.  I wish FIMS would add this requirement – what an excellent resource for other students, both at the school and beyond, providing student-centered essays and projects that are otherwise all but impossible to find. 

My Parents' “Christmas” Tree
What else can you say about this…


Posted 05 January 2007 § LibrarySchool § Main Page § Photo § Politics § PopCulture § Randomness ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: