Gnodal Journal

Dang … a trans-oceanic “nightmare”

“Nasiriyah Turns Into ‘Nightmare’ for Marines” [washingtonpost.com] … *Dang*

SMEAC – In a hyper-connected situation, with excess information in an ocean of data, relating noise to noise with pattern. Plan and process, diagramatically thick, dense and fibrous, with operationally defined mission parameters and problem/solution pairs.

I have been entirely pre-occupied with correspondence and blogging at “Beyond Greed“. It’s all about democracy, which has precious little to do with benevolent tyranny and “might makes right”.

A nice overview of the lizard: Mozilla: Blogging’s Killer App, and a whole slough of “hidden prefs

Beauty

O’Reilly Network: Making Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files [Feb. 28, 2003]

I just got back from an hour or so at my regular coffee joint, where I read 4 or 5 IT magazines (how’s this for a set of numbers: according to an article on EMC/Symmetrix DMX (Direct Matrix Architecture) in InformationWeek 10FEB03, Information Resources Inc. (a market data analysis firm) “tracks 28 million items, stores around 150 attributes for each, processes 160 billion summarized transactions per week [yes, that really is “billion” with a “b”], and maintains a 40-terabyte data warehouse.” Ain’t those some numbers?!)

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<rant>I’m seriously ticked … yet another smart young programmer crying the blues to me about how his customers bog his sites down with animated crud and then use him and the other programmers as glorified typists. What’s with his management team? Well, the fact is they see a more stable growth path in following a patronizing tactic where they don’t burden their customers with things like understanding, knowledge, autonomy, flexibility, or any of those other touchey-feely abstractions. They’re big fish in a little pond, and they’re filling their environment with greenish crud. Does no one any good, but their numbers look fine, sooooo . . . . It’s pathetic.</rant>

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*driving another nail into the case*

“Writing for the Web” at useit.com reads in part: “Much is known about how to write help text, online documentation, and other technical writing, and a good deal of the advice from these fields does transfer to writing for the Web. The main difference is that Web readers are much less motivated than readers of online docs since they can’t know whether the site is relevant to their goals (in contrast, the docs are always relevant to using a product, even when the writing stinks).”
Yaa … in a world of hype and brochures, we browse, skim, surf … a situation where attention deficit is appropriate? So, then, when the material is properly scoped, …

Here’s some explication from Sun Microsystems‘ WebWriting Guidelines:
* 79% of users scan the page instead of reading word-for-word
* Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper

The intro reads “You can double the usability of your web site by following these guidelines: for two sample sites studied in Sun’s Science Office, we improved measured usability by 159% and 124% by rewriting the content according to the guidelines.” and points out that “Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent”