The 2005 IA Summit is being held in Montreal. At the moment there's call for papers out, so if anyone is interested (and someone wants to pay for a trip to Canada...) take a look. Session proposals are due by 25 October, poster proposals by 5 December.
Also, for all those who favour Mac, Unix and anything-but-Windows: a Microsoft server crash almost causes plane crashes.
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Not much time so just a few links to interesting things found lately:
Via Column Two, an article on designing self-service applications for staff.
Someone has done an internet deprivation study. (Yes, that's right).
and...
Virgin Galactic - is this for real?
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Even a non-techie such as me can remember the heady days of c1998 when Linux was starting to hit its straps and Richard Stallman was the god of open-source. If you're around the main campus of Sydney Uni you can listen to Stallman give a talk on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks." It's in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 1 on Tuesday 5 October from 4pm to 6pm. It's brought to you by the good folks at the School of IT. If you want more information leave a comment and I will get back to you or contact Uwe Roehm in the School of IT.
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There is talk that Google may be on the road to developing a browser. They have even registered gbrowser.com...
Which reminds me, if anyone wants a gmail invite I have some to give away.
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A final post for today (hopefully): a round-up of some interesting things found recently
Less is more for University websites says Gerry McGovern. Well, yes, we could have told him that. In fact, we could have written this article, several years ago. Still it's good to see that ideas such as these are garnering a wider audience. Jakob Nielsen has conducted a usability review of the email newsletters of Bush & Kerry, currently fighting out for the position of most powerful man in the world. Both fail generally to make use of what could indeed be a good campaign tool. I think it will be a while before we see email, or the web for the that matter, used well by our local politicians. Cameron Adams has posted about designing for different screen resolutions and a way in which he believes the problem can be solved. It's both fixed and flexible width. Or neither. Read it yourself. A little while back Louis Rosenfeld posted his information architecture heuristics. For the rest of us, that means, a set of questions he uses to evaluate the IA of sites. As usual Rosenfeld has supplied some very useful tools to that can be adapted to the stuff we do at Sydney. On the subject of Louis, via his discussion of IA guidelines I found a link to the Best Practice website used by PBS (telly station in the US) to disseminate knowledge and guidelines to a distributed audience. It is a good example of the sort of thing we may be able to achieve on the Web Services site.
Ok, I can hear my son waking from his afternoon nap so it's ciao for now.
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This blog is an attempt to cut-down the amount of spam, links and general 'advice' I send to colleagues at the University of Sydney. From now on I shall post the things I find and think are useful here. I have set this up in TypePad, the sort of Blogger equivalent created by the good folks who brought you MovableType.
Today we will begin with a very silly but historically interesting photo of a home computer of 2004 as envisioned about 50 years ago.
Via Bloug and Column Two, a new community of practice: Content management professionals has been launched.
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