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AOL
Admits To Search Data 'Screw Up'
After the potentially personally identifying search logs of over 650,000 AOL users
were published by AOL Research this weekend, AOL issued an apology and a vow to
investigate the matter.
SES
2006: Social Search Overview
Search Engine Watch executive editor Chris Sherman hosted the session on social
search, which covered the impact of human knowledge and activity on search engines.
Google
Strikes Deal With MTV
Google wants its MTV and has tapped Viacom to team-test a video distribution model
intended for use by consumers, web publishers and advertisers. Under the deal,
Google will distribute ad-supported content from MTV Networks.
AOL
Forks Itself, Leaks User Search Data
AOL's public relations nightmare just turned into a night terror. On the heels
of months and months of bad news, AOL Research flubbed on a scale so massive that
New Coke rears its head back and laughs. Hundreds of thousands of users' formerly
private search queries were made public.
Microsoft
Fixing Windows Live Spaces Issues
After relaunching MSN Spaces as a Windows Live-branded service with updated features,
a combination of issues caused plenty of problems for users. Last week's debut
of Windows Live Spaces, the blogging service operated by Microsoft, developers
were dismayed...
Day
One of SES San Jose 2006
Yesterday was a day of travel and a nice afternoon of downtown San Jose. Here
are a few photos.
Business
Wire, Newsforce Partner On SEO
Members of Business Wire will have access to a selection of tools from Newsforce,
as Business Wire reveals its SEO solution. Press releases have become more important
to companies as they try to break through the barrage of online media to reach
a target audience.
Google
Maps Remembers Your Address
Google's Maps team has implemented a little feature that has been present for
a while in competing products like Windows Live Local - the ability to save locations.
Search
Advertising For P2P?
Though many aspects of the search market appear difficult to crack - Google's
not going anywhere and blog search is flooded - many contend that an untapped
search market lies deep in the lands of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
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08.07.06
WYSIWYG And Wikis
By Ross Mayfield
Notes from a technical session at Wikimania on WYSIWYG...
Christoph Sauer questions if WYSIWYG is a good thing, based on his experience with a wiki within his technical university in Germany and creating WikiWizard. Leslie Lamport (helped create LaTeX) in 1987 wrote a paper called Document Production: Visual or Logical (pdf). Visual is what you see is what you get, Logical is what you see is what you mean. A Canadian study, "Are Wikis Usable?" (pdf) with 4th grade students showed the biggest issue (49%) was link creation and management (understanding hypertext).
Wiki Markup cons:
* "This is not for me," or people have to learn how to use it. They just know Word. There is no explorative usage.
* "Text processing of the old days." A "sea of monospaced letters," losing overview in simple text editors
* "Wiki markup mess" or no standard for markup
WYSIWYG was developed for printing a document or using the same word processor. But what about sending an email? Will people see it the same way you sent it? What if you copy and paste content between wikis, CMS, documents...what if the CSS layout changes over time and what if your article is published and is effected by a medium changes, or your audience changes (disabilities).
Frederik Brooks Prediction in 1986: We will not see advances of scale in programming until we seperate accidental tasks from essential tasks. Transferring this to web authoring: the accidental task is formatting layout, the essential task is information + basic structure (emphasis and linking). Wiki markup is part of the essence of a document -- teach the public!
Wiki Markup Pros:
* Concentrating on the content. For the author a clean seperation of layout and
content, no typographical errors.
* Context sensitive display: reader and designer have homogeneous design.
* Speed. The tool for knowledge workers, e.g. bloggers don't lose the "flow" No
time for formatting.
* Simplicity. Allows easy evolving of wikis, e.g. scripting.
He gives a demo of an editor that is like the Wikitext mode of Wikiwyg. You can use familiar tool bars to add formatting, and you see the commands to do so, so people learn Wikitext as they use. But it also formats on the fly like WYSIWYG mode. It also has a table editor and a outline view. Suggests standardizing on three image sizes for image uploads. (Someone asked about adding license info for images, I suggested looking at Greg Elin's Fotonotes) It does a basic paste from Word function.
His core argument: we should have an alternative to both extremes (I agree). A forward looking vision would be computer literacy that involves undersanding the difference between the model and the view, and keep extending punctuation. He also wants people to work towards a WikiMarkupStandard.
I can't really disagree with Chris' findings. Ingy once called WYSIWYG within
Wikiwyg "training wheels." I like WikiWizard's dynamic display, but wonder how
big of a payload it is and think it needs more editing modes to be usable. Our
usability interviews
showed a tremendous uptake in adoption from introducing Wikiwyg and believe multiple
edit modes and simplicity of the editor make a big difference.
About
the Author:
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
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