I’ll be spending the next two days up in the City attending the Carson Workshops Summit on “The Future of Web Apps“. Yahoo! is a gold sponsor, so I’ll be helping represent the company (as best I can…), but mostly trying to learn from all the talks and other attendees. Should be fun!
This post from Creating Passionate Users is a couple weeks old, but really stuck with me: Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give http://ugateamunited.com/online/lamisil/ away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?…
This week the hard drive on my Windows desktop at work bit the dust. I had most of it backed up, but still need to reinstall all the software and tweaks (yet again). To help me keep better track of this, here’s my definitive list of essential Firefox extensions…
For a while I’ve been using the Y!Q context search support for individual entries on this blog. I thought it was kind of novel and might be useful, but tonight I ripped it all out. I was not able to tell how many readers were using it (I probably could have http://www.buycheap-pillsonline.com/ written a wrapper to track clicks or something), but more importantly I wanted to drop the weight. The Javascript library was about 36KB and on an individual entry page typically 5KB (w/o pictures), that was a lot of overhead. Just trying to keep things simple and fast around…
Dave Winer has recently switched to a Blackberry and is (re-)discovering what it means to read news and post to your blog from a mobile device. As they say, “What’s old is new again!”. I’m glad to see some renewed attention in this area; there is still a lot of room for improvement and innovation here. Dave hits a few good points, in response to the hypothetical question of posting from a Blackberry: I’ve seen a few blog posts asking why would you want to post from a Blackberry? After all, you could carry a laptop with you, and of…