Gnodal Journal

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”

When I was a kid I read not only the dictionary, but encyclopedias too. My drill sargeant was not impressed to find my copy A. J. Ayers’s “Language, Truth and Logic” among the few personal belongings allowed me in my footlocker. So … let’s just say I don’t routinely expect to find myself in with the ruling paradigm or majority opinion.
That being so, it’s a treat, while drilling down through something concerning transparent inference and the nature of community documents, to come across something as outspoken as this: European Society for Developmental Psychology “Searching for research literature – Although the WWW is often written about as if it was a database of original sources (like a library), there is actually rather little in the way of complete “texts” to be found. There is a lot of information on the internet – but not a lot of ideas. Not a lot of expository text.” [emph. added] I would actually disagree with the opinion, but find it heartening that I’m correct concerning the illusion: whether the wealth of brochures we’re dealing with comes from corporate spin doctors or well intentioned free (as in speech) crusaders, brochures is what they remain. Hence the goad behind my “Miss Peebles” project.