The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We’re tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it’s often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

Background: I’m a 22-year-old university student with aspirations of practicing rural medicine. I’m also a freelance web/print designer. It’s my sole source of income, and it’s what I do to put myself through school. I don’t have much of a social life because I balance a full-time university schedule with twenty to thirty hours a week of volunteer and paid design work.  I wouldn’t change a thing here. I’m happiest a-codin’ and designin’, and I count myself as pretty lucky to be able to make a living from my hobby while I’m working towards my doc dreams.

I’ve always been a nerdy and creative kid, so I got into computers and art at a fairly young age. I knew I liked designing and I spent a lot of time playing with Python to pick up on basic programming in middle school. In high school, I designed posters and crappy Geocities websites for nearly every extra-curricular club around. So when I was fifteen, I was really excited when my dad asked me if I’d be interested in doing some design work for a good business acquaintance of his, whom I’ll refer to from now on as CFH (for Client From Hell – what else?).  The job involved developing some simple layouts and promotional materials for an industry-specific print career guide. Armed with Publisher and Photoshop, I got to work.

The pay seemed pretty damn great for someone my age, and the idea of getting paid to do something I loved from home seemed pretty attractive compared to the notion of finding a summer retail job, an experience that had bored me out of my mind the previous year.

I did the job, CFH was happy with my work, and I continued working on small projects for him every now and then, past graduating high school and entering university.

In early 2009, I received a scholarship to study abroad for a semester. When CFH heard, he gave me his heartfelt congratulations, attended a goodbye party my parents had for me, and even gave me a generous monetary gift for my travel expenses. He’d become a very supportive family friend at this time, and was often the only non-South Asian face at family gatherings. I was really grateful for his support and thought the world of him. When I returned six months later, CFH let me know that the website I had designed for him had been voted into the global top ten of its field and that he would be branching out to cover a greater range of clientele. I knew that it was making him boatloads of money and I was happy to have been involved in a project that had achieved such status. He asked me if I’d be interested in taking a lead role in helping out with the company’s growth. I agreed enthusiastically, and got to work.

Fast forward to September, when I started as CFH’s primary web designer. The work was substantial, and took up much more of my time than previous projects had, but it was completed on time and he was thrilled with it. Prior to starting, I had let CFH know that I’d be changing our previously casual business relationship, and that I’d be invoicing him all Official-Like from now on since I was going to be using my work as my primary source of employment, and needed to keep good records for tax purposes. At this stage, CFH had started outsourcing all his back-end development work to India because it was cheaper than hiring Canadian-based developers, so I think my invoice took him by surprise as he had thought that web work would be ‘cheaper’ and ‘easier to do’ than print, for whatever reason.  Keep in mind that I was asking for what was essentially cents above minimum wage per hour of work not including the many hours I spent on development, consultation, edits, etc. because I was a little insecure in my legitimacy as a designer due to my lack of formal education in the subject. I now know this to be BS, as my current clients continue to hire me, citing the diversity of skills I offer and the highly creative and efficient nature of my print and web work. Nevertheless, I decided to give CFH a very steep discount because we hadn’t pre-negotiated the terms (even though he was aware of how much time each project was taking me). He took his sweet time with my invoice but finally, and begrudgingly, decided to pay up.

Things get a little ridiculous here.

CFH became increasingly imposing. His phone calls to me became increasingly longer and unrelated, bordering on uncomfortable.

He started demanding additional amounts of work to be done ‘immediately’, and when I’d ask about payment, he’d get irritable and tell me that it was ‘all about the money’ with me, and that he’d pay me as soon as I sent him an invoice via snail mail. Everytime I would mail out an invoice, he’d complain about some charge, and insist that I send him an updated invoice with this or that detail changed. This continued. I didn’t see a cent. I was even paying for stock photos and fonts out of pocket and not being reimbursed like I had earlier been promised. Keep in mind that I was in a particularly delicate position given that this person was my father’s good friend, and regretfully, my pride got in the way of actually saying anything to my father at the time. At the time, I didn’t think things would (could?) get worse.

They did, so in January, I put my foot down. I told CFH I’d no longer be working for him as he had become unbearably imposing, and had unreasonable expectations of me. Primarily, I was concerned because I hadn’t seen a cent from any of this work I’d done since September. He countered this by telling me that I was a rip-off and that he’d found a “professional design agency” that was better equipped to meet his needs. I wished him the best despite the fact that I was disappointed at having let go of my biggest client. I tried not to think about the many hours of work I wouldn’t be seeing a cent for anymore. At the same time, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to put up with his borderline psychotic behaviour, or compromise the quality of my work anymore to meet his increasingly ass-backwards demands (white text on beige?).

Two days later, I received a phone call from CFH. He apologized profusely right off the bat, said that he’d pay his complete owing sum, and that he needed me to come back. He told me that he was extremely unhappy with the quality of, and the speed at which his new designers were completing his work. He begged me to come back, saying that this time he’d be more considerate of my time and reasonable in his expectations of me. I hesitated, but agreed to come back on the terms that he had to agree to the estimate I gave him prior to starting each job. Since my prices were ‘too steep’ for him and he didn’t want to contend with the fact that I could only work in the evenings due to my class schedule, we worked out a system where I would design the main graphical elements and primary pages, and his “professional design agency” would use these elements to develop subsidiary pages for the back-end. He agreed, and I got to work. As a sidenote, I should mention that his “professional design agency” pulled out when they realized the extent of work that needed to be done and his unreasonably demanding nature, but I digress.

So I hadn’t realized that my new agreement with CFH would otherwise translate into a one-way ticket to hell, with him reigning as chief Satanic commander.

His behaviour become fairly unbelievable at this point: he’d call me at 11:30pm and asking to have something by 7am the next morning. He’d whine when I’d decline. He’d have me sit on the phone for hours while directing me to this stock photo or that website to “get inspired by” (i.e. steal). At the time, I was under a lot of stress because I was experiencing a flare-up in an existing neurological condition that was putting me in the emergency room almost every week. I mentioned at one point to CFR that I was scheduled for an MRI in a couple of months, and he suggested that I pay out-of-pocket to get it done privately to avoid the wait. A private MRI has to be done out-of-province, and runs upwards of $1500. I explained that this was not an option for me given that a recent astronomical increase in tuition costs, and my student aid being cut substantially due to the increasing conservatization of my post-secondary institution.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t ‘get’ it, telling me to bug my parents for the money or ‘something’. For the record, I’m completely financially independent, and have no intentions of harassing my parents for money I’m perfectly capable of making myself. My lifestyle ain’t so lavish that it requires a lot of  dough either: I’m a herbivore, don’t go out much, share an apartment with two other people, and ride a bicycle or take public transit everywhere. I use open-source software and recycle hardware whenever possible. Textbooks (which I generally buy secondhand) and tuition are my major expense, so while my living costs might be minimal, they’re still there. I wasn’t sure what part of this CFH couldn’t comprehend. Surely, he’d understand, having himself been a student forty years ago?

April was the final straw. I hadn’t seen a cent since September despite many false exclamations of  “the cheque is in the mail!” and what I now knew to be CFH’s lavish income from MY work.

He even had the nerve to call me to share his excitement about his new ‘keyless’ car, which he eagerly explained cost about as much as a house.

A myriad of other reasons followed, and you should tell me if I’m being a bit too sensitive here: Rape jokes? check. Racist remarks about his Indian developers DESPITE the fact that I’m South Asian too – but ‘not like one of them’, according to him? Check. Pictures of, and forwarded emails from women he was sleeping with? Check. Pervasive questions about my sexuality and personal life? Double-check.

I quit. I fucking quit. I sent a politely-worded e-mail explaining that I would not be working for him anymore. I don’t believe in leaving people in the dark about their behaviour, so I explained very clearly exactly how his behaviour had influenced my decision to leave. CFH responded by saying that he hadn’t “bothered to read my e-mail” but that “as a professional, [he] anticipated that [I] would provide [my] assistance in bringing the new resources up to speed..”. Regarding my invoice, his exact words were: “It shall, of course, be paid, in full, upon receipt” (all those commas, must be, compensating, for, something) seeing as how he was continuing to use my work. I had no problem with this, and made the remaining incomplete files available in their raw form on my server, alongside a detailed explanation of what the new designer/s would need to know. I’m not a vengeful person, so when the new designer got in touch with me, I was quick to direct him to where he needed to be. I just wanted to get paid and get CFH out of my life already.

Things seemed like they were ending on a slightly more positive note. A few days later  I got a call from my father. CFH had taken him out for drinks and then gotten him call me to “tell me” to come back to work for him. CFH had explained to him that I was upset about my pay (I didn’t realize zero dollars was pay?) but that he had ‘forgotten’ that I was now a grown-up with financial responsibilities, and not that same fifteen-year-old who was estatic about getting some spending money from his hobby.

He told my dad that I had left him hanging despite having given me a pretty decent deal; apparently my ‘mental health issues’ and ‘greed’ were getting in the way.

Clearly, this wasn’t just about the money for me anymore, and I realized that CFH’s new designer had probably bailed on him as well as a result of his.. loopiness.  Naturally, I declined. This upset my father initially, though he changed his mind later when I gave him a (heavily censored) account of what had actually happened.

Besides, hadn’t CFH mentioned that he’d be paying me for the work I’d already completed? The invoice was in the mail for the fourth time. Of course, I didn’t set my expectations too high because on May 11, I received  the following message:  “Let me be quite clear about things. Unless you immediately finish the projects you started for [Company Name], we shall not pay your invoice. Enough is enough!”

So now I know better than to expect any pay at all. Over 300 hours logged since September, and not a cent.

CFH continues to use my work and profit from it. I have no legal backing because (1) CFH happens to be a retired lawyer, and (2) I never drew up a physical contract because of the sporadic nature of the work and our long-standing business relationship. My own fault.  The best part? I have to defer my next semester at university to work more, because I couldn’t come up with my minimum tuition payment in time this year – seeing as how my job didn’t pay me, and I had to use my existing funds for things like rent, medication, and food. CFH is well aware of this. Sucks, but I’m not one to dwell in the past recognizing my own mistakes. I’m also far too grateful for things like a roof over my head to feel sorry for myself.

I learnt my lesson and since then, I have had no problem putting what I’ve learnt into practice with my current clients. Keep in mind that these are primarily charitable organizations and student groups with very limited funding – yet they have no problem respecting my time, signing contracts without complaint, agreeing to my terms and putting down a 50% deposit before I do any work.  These clients believe in my right to make a living wage from my work, and that’s exactly how all clients should treat their freelancer.

In closing, please don’t make the same mistakes I did with CFH. I don’t care if you’re making invites for your neighbor’s son’s friend’s girlfriend’s baby shower: always draw up a physical contract, regardless of whether the work is for-pay or not.

It’s a sad fact, but there is no guarantee of sanctity in a long-standing relationship regardless of how long you have had your client. There are people out there whose only motivation is to make as much money as possible while taking credit for your work and screwing you over in the process. A contract gives you some legal backing, and at the very least ensures that both parties understand the terms of service. Deposits are great too, because they ensure that both parties are invested in the project to some extent. Lessons are better learnt earlier rather than later.

And finally, to CFH? I trust Karma.

I’d love for fifteen or twenty minutes to go by without my Google Reader barfing out yet another piece of software patent or “HTML5 video codec war” news, but that’s how it is. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the video tag didn’t become standardized until HTML6 or 7.

One serious downside to the lack of consensus is the fact that your browser may very well not have built-in support for some video files embedded with the tag. Firefox, for example, is running with Ogg Theora and won’t be bolting on H.264 support. Apart from patent issues, there’s a $5 million price tag to be paid to MPEG-LA if Mozilla did want to support the codec, and they still wouldn’t be able to include that code in their open source.

But developers love to spin remixes of the Fox, and it only makes sense that someone would take matters into his or her own hands. Enter Maya Posch, who has launched the Wild Fox project on SourceForge. The plan: add H.264 support to Firefox’s stable branch using libavcodec or GStreamer.
Posch feels “that decisions have been made due to patents which do not apply in most parts of the world.” He continues, “The Wild Fox project aims to rectify this by releasing builds with these features included, builds which will of course only be available to those not in software patent-encumbered countries.”

That sounds useful, right? A nice, pre-packaged Firefox build with H.264 support? Sure it does, but there’s a potential pitfall.

While you would probably be able to download and install Wild Fox even in the U.S. and Korea (two of the patent-encumbered countries), Thomas Holwerda of OSNews warns that you’d be doing so at your own risk, saying “MPEG-LA has clearly stated that it will sue unlicensed users (and is clearly not afraid to do so).” Their director of Global Licensing, Allen Harkness, has said “where a royalty has not been paid, such a product remains unlicensed and any downstream users/distributors would have liability.”

Yes, that means MPEG-LA could come after you if you choose to browse with Wild Fox. However, it’s infinitely more likely that they’d target Posch and Wild Fox.

You’ve hired the wrong guy. After reading David Airey’s forget about design and Andrew Maier’s User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director I’ve come to the conclusion that the role “web designer” is a cheap ass effort to fudge a graphic designer into a role requiring two entirely separate fields of knowledge.

Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers. What’s needed to compliment a web team’s graphic designer is someone to account for the complexities of human-computer interaction (HCI). Surely a manager in any field can’t expect staff to adopt a completely opposite, complex knowledge base overnight.

Welcome the missing link: User experience designer.

User experience design is a blend of usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design.

A web-based user experience designer is charged with learning about users and creating interfaces that match website goals and user needs. They deliver interaction specs and simple mockups to the graphic designer as a framework for user-centered visual communication. Then, of course, the web developer makes the interaction work.

Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.”

If you’re going to make the leap into a more complex communication channel, account for its complexities or it’ll bite you in the ass when your competitors “get it.”

I have to say that of everything I’ve seen, I am truly impressed with the quality that has been achieved in online scenarios, including live event video.  Yes, live.  Many people saw the recent big broadcasts of events like NBC’s Winter Olympics and others, some of the first to feature a broad distribution of Smooth.  Having been in online video for the better part of 14 or 15 years, it was truly a day of reckoning to see some of it come to fruition.

There must be something behind this. Last July (2009), YouTube quietly added a feature to its video player that allowed one to watch presumably 3D-enhanced video uploaded by visitors by adding yt3d:enable=true to the tag.  Nvidia has been leading a charge to release video card and monitor combos that support 3D Vision – a software/hardware (glasses) solution that I have to say is pretty cool, albeit pricey (sorry, I’m not a big techbuygeek – I don’t run out and buy the newest stuff just because its there).  With all respect to the latter – there is some really kick ass stuff available on the platform.

But frankly, for me, I still don’t get the hype.  I may be really old school but the fact is that I just don’t get why I would want to watch everything in 3D.  I just don’t see the value or the sparkle. Apparently, I’m not the only one (ok, I never was – my entire department, the very ones who are developing the components, have always questioned it) – even Francis Ford Coppola calls it a “juvenile abomination” and ‘just a way to “make you pay more money”.’  And Roger Ebert says “Hollywood’s current crazy stampede to it is suicidal,” adding nothing to the movie-going experience.

Ha. Figures.

To be fair, the stuff we’re working on is largely for sports, and in a way I can actually see where some types (basketball, hockey, boxing) might actually benefit and get some enhancement from it.  But not everything.

And that’s where the problem is.  Like every other “big thing” (ahem, iPads, iPhones, Android, blah blah blah puke) there is a mad dash to be first simply for the sake of being first, and then a mad clamoring to jump on the bandwagon.  Why? The point being that putting stuff into 3D just for the sake of being 3D and without having content that fits it (or worse, forcing the content to be) is just plain stupid.  Let’s leave 3D (and all it’s contingent hardware and software reqs) to content that suits it.  Like horror flicks.

Content is king.  Still is.  Always will be.  But don’t f— it up by trying to enhance it with something totally unnecessary.  Chrome on a pencil doesn’t make it write any better, and doesn’t even necessarily make it any prettier.  It just makes it clunky and prone to fingerprints.  Same thing with 3D.  Keep it in check and keep it special instead of the norm and we’ll all benefit.

My friends think I’m crazy … overreacting. I’ve gone and done it, though.

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.

My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn’t feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don’t trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect it.

What’s the big deal? Like me, you might be thinking, “I have nothing to hide. Who cares if Facebook collects personal information and sells it?” That’s a fair statement; pretty much every large company we do business with today does that. The problem here is that Facebook tells us that we can trust it, but then it repeatedly changes the rules on us to suit its own needs. Facebook is within its legal rights to do this, but that doesn’t make it right.

I have a friend whose identity was stolen a few weeks ago via a Facebook exploit, and he’s in a living hell now. Facebook’s new Instant Personalization pilot is so controversial that it’s being debated on the floor of the US Senate, and the latest change — switching your interests to keyword links that you have to individually opt out of — is a completely transparent user-hostile move. A few months ago, Facebook changed the privacy defaults to be completely public (in other words, not at all private) and pitched it as an improvement to their privacy controls. In fact, those privacy controls are so convoluted (and it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t intentional) that even when you think you’ve got it locked down, there’s a good chance that your friends don’t, and they could be sharing information about you.

Google’s mission statement is to “organize the world’s information,” and their motto is, “Don’t be evil.” What’s Facebook’s mission? Where do they stand on being evil?

Actually, we know Facebook’s mission statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Of course, back in 2008, it was: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” It’s certainly not “to be the best place in the world to connect and share with friends and family,” even though that’s what Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, claimed it is in a recent New York Times article.

Though Mr. Schrage points people to view his Facebook profile and compare it with Mark Zuckerberg’s, at the time writing his profile comes up as a missing page. What happened, Elliot, share a little too much information, maybe? If you need to get a better understanding of your privacy policies, check out this info graphic in the New York Times that shows the more than 170 possible options you can set.

Given the changes Facebook has made over the past couple of years, what new surprises do the folks there have in store for us? Clearly Facebook feels the power of having such a dominant online community. As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So, yeah, I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while. First, I want to see if it’s possible to live without the big FB. Then I’ll decide whether it’s a good idea to live with it. I already know which way I’m leaning.

Of course, even if I do decide to completely delete my Facebook account, Facebook will keep my personal data and continue to mine it.

I don’t expect anyone to follow my lead. I do, however, urge you to think about whether you think Facebook is deserving of our trust. Is Facebook a good steward of our online (and increasingly offline) identities and information?

If Facebook was a person, it would be one who can’t keep a secret and talks about you behind your back.

Would you stay friends with a person like that?

Jason Clarke did it first, and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook.

For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they’re broadcasting their status to “friends of friends”.

Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings?

There’s a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that’s where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don’t like large, successful anything.

But today’s Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a super-friendly, smiley-happy face for newcomers and non-geeks. On the other hand, to prevent your personal information from getting all over the place, you need to be a super-educated and “paranoid” geek.

Since when did privacy become “for geeks only”?

And it’s also a matter of trust; Facebook has an interesting habit of opting users in to all sorts of new schemes. I suddenly found out I was included in their information sharing scheme with other sites. I just randomly discovered this. I’m just plain sick and tired of having to watch over Facebook’s shoulder every day, trying to figure out what they added or changed to make my information more broadly available.

The bottom line is that it’s just not worth it, at least for me. Goodbye, Facebook.

Read UNLV’s President recommends which programs should be cut via ktnv.com and the full 15 page dipshit report here.

[05/10/10 @ 2:30p PST] The plot (and plight) thickens as I have tried for two days now to access the Dept. of Informatics web page to no avail.  Has it already been deleted by OIT?  What the hell is that all about?

On a personal note, all decency aside, President Smatresk, the Faculty Senate and the JET and PRC can all go F themselves.  I spent a bit of time soul-searching last night, thinking I may try to channel my energy and desire to work on a PhD and work into a different program, but the more I thought about it, the more I got pissed at UNLV and Nevada as a whole for being so grossly short-sighted, so now I’d rather go spend my tuition dollars somewhere else where the administration (and government) actually thinks about what the importance of a program is rather than purely considering current dollars.  Nothing like a budget deficit to put yourselves into an even faster tailspin, and only increases my spite towards programs that I think should have been looked at more closely but weren’t even considered.

I am, along with the tenured and professional faculty of the Department, urging all students, and anyone who might agree and offer opinion, to write to the President, the university committees and the Board of Regents, urging them to reconsider keeping the department.

Update: selected letters written by students speaking out about the proposed cuts are here.

But I expect myself to be a leader of sorts, an instructor by example, and hence I am posting my letter here, openly, so that anyone who does not understand the dilemma might find it worthy of opinion.  For those who do not know what informatics is, you can read about it on the UNLV Informatics Web Site, but more importantly, here is a succinct explanation from Michael Dunn, the founding Dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, where Informatics as an academic college was incepted and created.  He says:

• Informatics studies the application of Information Technology to the arts, sciences and professions, and its uses in organizations and societies at large.
• Informatics is a response to the data/information/knowledge gaps caused by billions and billions of bits
• Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. The purpose of informatics consists in developing optimal methods and means of presentation (recording), collection, analytical-synthetic processing, storage, retrieval and dissemination of scientific information. Informatics deals with logical (semantic) information, but is not involved in qualitative estimation of this information. Such an estimate can be carried on by specialists alone, in the specific fields of science or practical activity.

Below is the letter that was posted on the UNLV website, posted here.

Sent via UNLV Official on March 22, 2010

Colleagues:

I have received a set of recommendations from Executive Vice President and Provost Bowers and Vice President for Research Smith to start the conversation on how we can reduce the academic budget by $4 million. This list (see below) was made after consultation with our deans and after reviewing various measures of productivity and cost. I thank them for their hard work on this thankless task. This was an extremely difficult set of recommendations to generate, and includes departmental elimination, sub-unit elimination and recommendations for differential tuition (which may ultimately reduce our cumulative need for cuts). The list includes more programs to be reviewed than we plan to cut at this time, thus allowing the Presidential Review Committee (PRC) the opportunity to offer their guidance on maintaining core institutional strengths.

This material has been transmitted to the PRC, chaired by Dr. Gregory Brown, formed jointly by the Faculty Senate and Administration. The PRC charge will be to review this list, along with cuts from the other VP areas, and to deliver a prioritized set of recommendations for program elimination and other savings or revenue enhancing measures by the third week of April. Their recommendations will be reviewed by the Deans and Cabinet, our student governance groups, and the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee before we make final program elimination recommendations to the Board of Regents.

In addition to these “vertical” cuts, we have extended the hiring freeze on all current searches, with the exception of grant funded hires, self funded programs and areas that are absolutely essential for business continuity. Savings in these areas and our VSIP program may help mitigate the need for further cuts later this year. We are all deeply saddened by the need to resort to such drastic measures. If there are any other viable options for UNLV we will pursue them, but I expect little relief, and fear that without significant legislative intervention we will be forced to cut again next year. As we make these cuts, we will honor noticing periods and tenure, allow students to graduate from eliminated programs in a timely fashion, and hope to minimize the disruptive impacts these cuts have on faculty, staff and students.

I understand how much turmoil and distraction our budget situation has created on campus. For programs not on this list I ask you to focus on our mission by providing a strong education to our students and by pursuing scholarly growth so that we emerge from this as a stronger and more focused institution.

Sincerely,

Neal Smatresk
President

---

March 22, 2010

President Neal J. Smatresk Office of the President University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada 89154

Dear President Smatresk:

It gives me no pleasure to either write or transmit this letter to you. Indeed, no one who loves and respects higher education could feel anything other than sadness in doing so. However, as you know more than anyone, over the past three years UNLV has had its state funding reduced by 30.9 per cent. No institution can continue to function normally when given such a dramatic reduction in resources. UNLV has made a large number of “horizontal” cuts university-wide but such cuts can no longer achieve the significant expenditure reductions required of us by the state. The University must now look to “vertical” cuts in departments and programs in order to achieve these results. As you have requested, I am transmitting to you recommendations for the Division of Academic Affairs in three areas: (1) unit and subunit eliminations, (2) additional administrative reductions, (3) departments and programs in which differential tuition has the potential to be successfully applied.

The Process
As you have mandated, each vice president, including the Executive Vice President and Provost, will be making recommendations for reductions and outright eliminations in their divisions. The target for Academic Affairs at this time is $4 million. In order to achieve shared governance between administration and faculty, the attached list represents a budget figure higher than the target. This allows the faculty committees to evaluate each proposal and to have a real voice in making these decisions, not simply a take it or leave it option.

Because any reductions in Academic Affairs will also affect research productivity, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies Ron Smith was asked to sit in on my individual meetings with the deans. At these meetings deans were asked to provide possible eliminations and reductions in their colleges and schools. None of them were happy to do so, of course. It should not be assumed that any of these recommendations were initiated or supported by the relevant dean. The list that I am transmitting to you will not be met pleasurably by any of them. This list will be given by you to the joint presidential-Faculty Senate committee, the Presidential Review Committee, who will review these recommendations and forward those that they believe necessary to meet our state fund reductions. A similar process will be followed by the Faculty Senate Priority and New Program Committee. The recommendations will all go to you for decision, some of which may also require further NSHE Board of Regents approval. To the extent that there is any silver lining in this, it is that you have pledged to protect tenure and any tenured faculty displaced by these decisions will be reassigned.

These recommendations have been guided by factors including, but not limited to, cost, graduation rates, number of majors, student credit hours and FTE produced, scholarship/research/creative activities, external funding, and importance to the University’s mission.

Units To Consider for Elimination

• Educational Leadership
• Informatics
• Management Information Systems
• Marriage and Family Therapy
• Recreation and Sport Management (including Professional Golf Management)
• Sports Education Leadership
• Teaching and Learning Center
• Women’s Studies

Subunits To Consider for Elimination

• Clinical Laboratory Sciences
• Construction Engineering Management
• English Language Center
• Entertainment Engineering
• Gerontology and Senior Theatre
• Landscape Architecture
• Urban Affairs Advising Center
• Urban Horticulture Program

Further Administrative Reductions To Be Considered

• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Affairs position
• Executive Vice President and Provost: Do not fill Vice Provost for Academic Resources position
• Executive Vice President and Provost/Academic Success Center: Eliminate 1 advisor and 1 classified position
• College of Education: Eliminate 1 associate dean position
• College of Education: Not seek NCATE accreditation
• College of Hotel Administration: Reduce to only two academic departments
• School of Nursing: Return to campuswide semester instead of trimester system
• College of Sciences: Reduce costs of Department of Geoscience
• College of Urban Affairs: Combine School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Department of Communication Studies

Differential Tuition and Registration Fees
There are some programs nationally that are either extremely popular or extremely expensive to operate in which the market will bear differential tuition/registration fees. This tuition/fee is an additional revenue source that can be used to bring down the costs of delivering such instruction to the institution. Not all programs and departments can successfully implement differential tuition/fees (i.e., those in Liberal Arts come to mind) and that is not a possibility for them. For those programs that can implement differential tuition/fee structures, the additional tuition/fee must be sufficient to offset the additional costs of instruction. The following colleges and schools are among those nationally that charge differential tuition/fees and, should NSHE and UNLV determine to pursue that tack, extensive research will be required to determine the appropriate price point for each of them. There may be others that are not on this list that can be further discussed by the faculty committees reviewing these proposals.

• School of Architecture
• College of Business
• College of Engineering
• College of Hotel Administration
• School of Nursing
• Department of Physical Therapy

Conclusion
None of us are unmindful of the effects that these proposals will have on our campus, our colleagues, our staff, and most of all, our students, if they are adopted. However, these proposals are merely proposals at this point and we should look forward to the continuing discussions that will occur in the faculty committees and with students prior to final decisions being made.

Regretfully,

Michael W. Bowers
Executive Vice President and Provost

I seem to recall a president who went to war after misrepresenting that someone was hiding WMDs and incited a big country to invade a smaller one halfway across the globe, needlessly killing several thousand soldiers and just generally being a retarded jerk.

Okay so maybe this isn’t a war but killing education based on misinformation and misrepresentation is bad enough.  LVRJ forgot to take into account that INF is the fastest growing degree at UNLV (over 200% the current school term), that it is the program that covers little things like cybersecurity (preventing hackerman Chang from getting into DoD computers) and HCI (making sure your iPhone has all those touchy-feely gizmos) and realize that LVRJ is suggesting that we should cut one of the few departments that teach for jobs that are still in demand. Nice. All because of not checking facts.

The University readily publishes current, accurate data.  The Provost’s 2009 Joint Evaluation Taskforce (JET) report on the Engineering program for example, reports “…this program is highly multidisciplinary and has a very high enrollment of women and other underrepresented groups. The program only has 2 tenure-track faculty.”  Furthermore, “[W]hile approved by the Board of Regents as an independent school, the program has no support staff and pays for an administrative assistant through course buyouts.”

Write to LVRJ and demand a retraction, correction and proof! People/colleagues, we are about to die a quick and painful death here and we need to fight. In 2010, informatics is a critical program both for the university as well as Las Vegas and the last thing we need is someone with erroneous information deciding our future!

Below is the comment I submitted to LVRJ (though who knows if it will actually get posted) – I ask and urge and plead for anyone who gives a crap that the paper seems to have it out for programs who make a difference to fight back…

LVRJ misreported that Informatics is the most expensive program – that was the case when it first started but is currently inline with other engineering programs.

It was also highly misrepresented and mischaracterized. The 2009 provost report actually recommends HIRING more staff because it is a fast growing field and covers a wide range of cognate areas, in addition to the extremely high ratio of sponsored research contracts and the awards it has received. The program is still small because it is brand new (started in 2005).

It was reported as “most expensive” because the report was based on 2006’s FTE (full-time enrollment) divided by the cost of faculty. Informatics has a low FTE because a high percentage of the students, especially at the graduate level, are non-traditional students who work full-time jobs like myself and cannot attend school full-time. There are only four tenured staff and the enrollment in the program increased 200% in the last year.

On top of the, the earlier LVRJ article that listed the top 20 most expensive programs had an interesting common thread – they were all engineering and computer based programs – and the ones whose fields still have jobs in demand!

To see more accurate reporting, go to the UNLV Provost Joint Evaluation Team (JET) web page and see the 2009 reports. Shame on LVRJ for the bad reporting.

And don’t get me started on why the state is cutting education funding in the first place. Sure the University can use streamlining, but are we setting up the state to lose what edge it has?

Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know:

The mission of the School of Informatics is to provide an academic path for students who are interested in pursuing a career that combines computing and information technology with another academic discipline. The curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, and recognizes that the human, information, and technology dimensions of problem solving are equal contributors in advanced informatics applications areas. The School of Informatics will produce graduates that become successful and internationally competitive educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders in the global information economy.

Read the rest of my op-ed here…

With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

Take everything you know about the internet. Now fucking forget it.

The internet is an infant. It’s a pile of crap. I’m tempted to call it defective. The W3C is worse than the UN. We need to make progress. We need to push forward. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and search out possibilities for expanding our horizons. We need to step out of the boxes we’ve sealed around us. There’s a world outside the crazy “best practices” created to overcome horrific shortcomings of CSS. We are not confined to the way things are.

When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don’t settle, don’t give up, don’t get stuck in a box built by other people’s misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.

So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

[more here on CNET]

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

So I set up a WP instance for her to play around with and it looks like she’s digging it. She’s worried that she’s going to lose some of the benefits of using the Google-based platform but I think that with the stats she has (trust me, she’s way beyond what MatSays will ever do) she doesn’t really need to worry.

The one downer note – the import function works great but it puts Blogger tags as WP categories so you might have to massage the DB by hand a bit. Wonder if they are aware of that little bug.

So the real juice behind our success in 9 years is our ability to think outside the box. Honestly I can’t stand that expression but the reason I am not hunting for another metaphor is because everyone understands it. So what am I getting at? Back to the post I was reading.

The gem from the post was “know what the box is.” It sounds simple enough and certainly something we almost take as a given. But do you really?

A week ago my team was contracted to do a job for a prominent division of a Fortune 100 company. The job was to construct an SMF-based Silverlight media player that would, in short, deliver live and/or on-demand Smooth or Windows Media content with a bunch of social tools, a very slimmed down interface with a universal style and the catch is that it needed to use initParams and/or an externalized XML to direct it (with order of operations precedence), blah blah blah on and on. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the portability meant that we needed to reduce the configurable parameters as much as possible, make sure that delivery could occur both inside and outside a firewalled intranet, and that it was CMS supported. Anyway, the designer did the nice, clean XAML, the developer got the app interface done, I finished off the CMS and reporting components. All in 2 days.

And along comes the first gig – only a week from today – and another group in my company asked – so what happens if we’re streaming Smooth over satellite and we drop the link? How do we fail over to, say, an origin-based WM encode? Hmmm, didn’t really think about that one. It’s not that we wouldn’t normally, but historically we’ve always used ASX files or our own mediaFeedXML format to handle failover, but in this case we didn’t even really think about it, because (I guess) we don’t work operations on a regular basis and hence don’t really make those considerations.

My point is that we approached the job thinking we had covered the details but in fact we were missing part of the equation – we didn’t really know the box, inasmuch as we thought we did. And it took a single email from another team to point it out. Problem has since been solved but it makes me wonder, now, if we neglected anything else.

In the blog post author’s (Tom Stewart) words:

How often have you been told to ‘think outside the box’? I don’t know about you but I find that very hard to do. It’s as helpful as saying, ‘now come up with a great idea’. So my approach involves ‘knowing the box’. Identify all the constraints and limits you can.

Same holds true for design. Inspiration and production comes from knowing the box – knowing the customer, knowing the intent, knowing the content, knowing the delivery. Before tackling that really great job or that really great idea that you get your head wrapped around what it is you’re really designing against. Knowing that, and being able to step outside of the proverbial space, will only serve to make the end result better.

[sooner or later, when I'm allowed to and if I remember, I'll post about that player]

Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

But I digress, here’s the report…

It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

“To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

Horrified, he deleted and explained:

I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

Battery never dies, dependable, can’t compute as fast but really great tactility.  And at least a couple hundos less than whatever Apple comes up with.

Update February 3 – thanks, Mark

and…

From a visual perspective, it fills that little void by replacing the static window blahs in my second monitor with a fullscreen slideshow, complete with bios, photos, and a whole lot of social gaming tricks that I have to say are very well thought out and very easy to use. It does all this while the music plays continuously and the photos keep sliding in

And it’s not Flash (no love lost there). And of course you can buy the music (the true Long Tail in action here). Awesome. On a side note, as CC and I were commenting, we had a good laugh about a miserably failed project we did in 2003 with the then-Death Row Records that had a similar premise but way before social media was the buzz, before Ajax and jQuery frameworks existed, but was nonetheless pretty hot conceptually (though definitely not as good looking).

Anyway, for all my IMD414 students – this is the kind of thing you should be striving for and exactly what we’ll be talking about this quarter. Nice timing.

If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

If elephants are the Jackson Pollocks of the Animal Kingdom, then orangutans may be the new Ansel Adams of the jungle… or the drunk, trigger-happy sorority girl.

Nonja, an orangutan at the Vienna Zoo, now has her own Facebook page dedicated to the photos she takes herself with a digital camera. Armed with a Samsung ST 1000, all the 33-year-old Nonja has to do is click and whatever her eye sees is automatically uploaded to her Facebook page. Even though she’s nearing senior zoo citizenship, her fan base continues to grow by the day; she’s already hit the 20,000 fan milestone, and the page only launched on Tuesday.

[courtesy of me]

Like this is something new?  I have at least 15 orangutans in one of my classes posting to FB on a regular basis already! 

J/K - have a nice holiday break all!

PS – For INF400 students – the course textbook is posted on the (forthcoming) class page already so in case you want to get it over the break (that means ask mom and dad for an academic present this year).

For my students and UNLV colleagues: if you had never heard of the DreamSpark program, you should jump on it.  A program launched in 2008 by MSFT (don’t groan) can get you free software.  Yes, free.  Yes, I’ve gotten some of it.  In a blatant (and conducive) attempt to move budding developers and IT staffers to the Redmond dark side, they’re offering Visual Studio (2005 & 2008), Windows Server 2008, Expression Studio and more for free.  So while the university’s alliance program is broken and paltry, you could have just headed straight to the source and gotten legit, keyed copies.

Now the new stuff: just released by MSFT – WebsiteSpark.  Like it’s older brother, the new program is aimed at small companies – no more than 10 employees – and offers:

• 3 Visual Studio licenses
• 1 Expression Studio 2 or 3 license
• 2 Expression Web licenses
• 3 users license for WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008
• 4 processor license for self-hosting WinServer 2008 and SQLServer 2008

That’s a buttload of very expensive stuff for nothing.  The caveat is that you must launch a new web app (that’s app boys and girls, not a paltry PHP site) and if you hit it big, you have to exit the program and pay a $100 fee.  That’s peanuts compared to the value.  Or you could go to a bunch of MSFT seminars and collect copies but that takes a lot of time and snoozing through 4 hours of demos.

[via Android and Me]

Everyone’s favorite Android hacker appears to have angered someone at Google. We just received word that Cyanogen has received a cease and desist letter from Google. Details are scarce, but it appears Google is not happy about Cyanogen distributing their closed source Android apps (Market, Talk, Gmail, YouTube, etc). CyanogenMod is easily the most popular custom Android rom with over 30,000 active users.

Relevant bits from the chat log we received:

Hopefully, the two parties will be able to work something out. I’ve been using CyanogenMod on both my Android phones for several months and they are awesome. If you want to show your support for Cyanogen, you can always visit his site and place a donation for all the countless hours he has put into improving the Android platform.

If you’ve ever read David Weinberger’s ”Everything is Miscellaneous” (ISBN10: 0805080430) as well as a host of other books and articles on Wikipedia, it’s almost as if Wikimedia is doing a 180 on its own founding principles.  Since the beginning, the founders strongly defended and imposed the concept that the community itself was the police and at no time should an editor be the final say…this to extent that a founder removed himself as an editor for changing an article without the consent of the community (consent being reached by culminating responses and critique any time an article change was made or requested).

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Not that I am necessarily opposed to having these types of sanctions, but at the same time, it gets to the core of defeating the point of the community based system.  The community, as I’ve often maintained, can rarely govern itself over a long period of time.  If it could, governments wouldn’t exist.  But by the same token, where does the power and authority end?  Should the Wikimedia board not consider that instead of a single editor, at the very least, possibly three or more editors should have to consent to the alteration first?

Advocates of the system point out that [it] provides an extra layer of insurance to prevent false posts and improve the overall accuracy.  But once again, at whose expense?  Is historical information not fact riddled by the opinion of the observer?  Who is to determine what is accurate?  While editors are, for sure, carefully chosen, aren’t VH1 game show contestants screened as well (ok, bad analogy but you get the idea – substitute radical terrorists in place of game show contestants and it’s a bit more frightening).  There is much at stake in this issue – freedom of speech, importance of historical record, observation and opinion – more than just the fact that Wikipedia could potentially end up more like Encyclopedia Brittanica (a system it sought to avoid) than the incarnation we’ve all grown to love over the last eight years.

How NBC, NFL Will Stream Sunday Night Football

Web surfers will be able to watch only a fraction of NFL games in live streaming video this season, but those few games that the league will run online will offer several interactive features, including the ability to watch any play in slow motion.

The NFL and NBC Universal said today that they’ll offer live streaming video of NBC’s 17-game Sunday Night Football schedule on NBCSports.com and NFL.com.

After using Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE)’s Flash player to deliver games online last year, NBC is switching to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)’s Silverlight platform for its football coverage.

NBC Sports senior vice president of digital media Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events, including the Olympics and Wimbledon.

Football fans will be able to toy around with several interactive features during the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, including four separate camera angles and a video player that offers full DVR functionality. Viewers that access the video streams in the middle of a game will even be able to rewind to plays that occurred before they opened their Web browsers.

One of the biggest additions to the streaming video feed this year is a “scrub bar” that will allow viewers to quickly navigate to the major plays of the game. NBC will integrate a data feed detailing each play into the scroll bar, so a viewer will be able to hover over an area on the scroll bar of the video window, and a marker will detail locations in the video where touchdowns and other major plays occur.

“We’re collecting the data feed that comes out of the stadium. We marry it to the video file. We can take a point in time, and create a visual marker for it on the player,” Miller explained.

NBC will rely on technical teams in several cities to deliver the interactive football games. In addition to teams that will be stationed in trucks near the stadiums at each Sunday night game, NBC staffers at its digital sports operation in Stamford, Conn., will cull video highlights from the game.

Perkins said NBC signed San Francisco-based Vertigo Software Inc. to write the code for a video player that hosts the Silverlight component. The network is also using the Uppercut video switching product from Los Angeles-based Reality Check Studios, and it signed iStreamPlanet Co. to encode video from all of the games.

While the games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com will allow those few viewers without access to a TV on Sunday nights to catch the games, Perkins says NBC expects that most of the traffic will come from football fans that are watching the games on TV.

“People use it as a complement to the broadcast. It enables them to have a control room at their coffee table,” Miller said, adding that he expects it to be popular with fantasy football fans and viewers that want to discuss plays with their friends.

NBC has a sales team dedicated to handling digital sales for the streaming NFL games and other online programming, and the network is also packaging online ads in broader deals with media buyers that buy spots during its TV broadcasts. Miller said NBC expects to generate online ad sales for football that will reach “seven figures.”

“It [online sales] is a fraction of what we’ll do on broadcast in terms of the revenue. We’ll do fairly well on this product,” he added.

Unfortunately for football fans, NBC will be the only NFL broadcaster to distribute games on the Web, as Fox Broadcasting Co. , CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), and ESPN won’t have the rights required to stream games under their contracts with the league.

The NFL extended its TV and online rights deal this week with NBC, giving the network rights to broadcast Sunday nights on TV and online through 2013. The league already has rights deals with ESPN, CBS, and Fox to broadcast games through 2013, but those contracts don’t include rights to broadcast games online.

The Comments:

davisfreeberg
“Perkins Miller said the network struck a broad deal with Microsoft to use Silverlight and its Smooth Streaming technology to deliver high-definition streaming video for its major sporting events”

Fortunately the gods have prevailed and though I’d been goodie-goodie (meaning resistant to) about rooting my G, I finally decided to after some prompting (and a well made video showing how easy it was to do).  And damn, it works, and yea, it was easy and quick.  Nice work!

Sources:

• Five Great Reasons to Root Your Android Phone on Lifehacker
• Get Root Access in Android with One Click on Lifehacker
• Android Rooting in 1-Click from RyeBrye

For those who don’t know, a micropayment solution describes a system whereby the product being bought is a significantly small amount (something like $2 or less, so basically iTunes music would be one), and is usually coupled by either a pre-pay or a carting/aggregation system. Some day-to-day examples that have succeeded outside of iTunes would be something like pre-paid transit passes in NYC which remove one fee for each use. In the UK, there’s sQuid which is a similar service but can be used for many types of transactions. In Japan, the phones are tied directly to bank accounts for vending machine purchases.

Having worked on a number of e-Commerce back-ends for varying clients, this has always been an issue that perplexed me. On the one hand, consumers all know that at some point, to access content or acquire goods, that a payment needs to be made. On the flip side, content is so easily accessed for free on the Web (whether legally or quasi-legally) that consumers have started to become used to getting it for free. So how do we impose payment systems that allow for micro-purchasing? The example scenario is for, say, news. Several news providers have already started charging for access to news (which in reality is no different than buying a newspaper) and several others are moving in that direction, but is the subscription model working? Or perhaps will we see a pay-per-content-item system emerge?

Either way, the system itself is the culprit. In my somewhat out-of-the-box opinion, there needs to be a new model altogether. Imposing traditional payment schemes simply hasn’t worked for the micro-payment world (though I could argue that RedBox might actually be a close-to-perfect model but its also partly the targeting). Pre-pay, post-pay-aggregation, bank cards, none seem to work really well, and most of the systems that have emerged with promising outlooks later died untimely deaths (as pointed out by one of the Answer respondents).

Anyway here was my response…

I think that we still haven’t tapped the right balance in micropayment solutions that is able to satisfy the needs of the providers and the consumers. There is too little transparency and too little fluidity in the process, and we have (as a development and developer-provider community) dwelled to much on protecting the value of our content and not offering alternatives to letting customers acquire it (mind you, I am a rabid advocate of DRM solutions, so don’t think that I am not in support of content protection, it’s just that we tend to either do it with an iron fist or not at all).

I think customers are more than willing, in the end, to pay for services but the system itself needs an overhaul, likely one we haven’t come up with yet. In the same way that Amazon capitalizes on long-tail marketing, we need to look way outside of how we do things now in order to create environments where the provider and consumer of media services can co-exist. To that end, while there are several successful vendors of such products I don’t think anyone is a leader right now because I think the market will shortly turn itself over.

I do know, from my own experiences, that changes in digital asset management is the starting point for the vendors, but from a standpoint of providing explicitly heuristic access to content, not just providing massive libraries and letting the users hunt for it. A Pandora type experience with a flowing payment process (mixed pay for right to use and pay for use on a very micro level) is something I envision as an evolution. Providers are going to have to work together instead of living in silos of licensed content and use intelligent agents to disperse desired media.

Clarification posted 9 hours later
[reference to responses made later] those are some really great points. I agree that the current state of micro-payments is in waning death mode but argue that a re-thinking of the approach and process (and yes, the interminable fee structures that traditional money systems place on the products) can revolutionize the system. iTunes is a successful venture for every reason stated in several responses, but after raising the price point past the $1 mark, it’s beginning to lose its lustre and it’s debatable if it’s a true micro-payment system anyway (it’s really just a shopping cart for smaller products like the 99¢ store). When I think of micro-payment, I there’s two traditional approaches but they are still both pre-pay or cart-and-pay systems; the evolution I see would be be much more superfluous than that.

Several years ago, a good friend and myself came up with the idea of sending barcode images to cellphones via MMS as a means of ticketing for events, most notably nightclubs with VIP access (and two years later we see Fandango using scanned bar-code “ticket at home” systems that are pretty much the same but not digitized), but the system itself was paid for using micro-transaction on account (in other words, the transaction itself was attributable to the benefiting business, which could then be passed on in hard form to the customer if the business desired).

Like this, what outlandish ideas can you come up with that can revolutionize how payment models work?

But this past week I installed the Google Voice app (and another one just to try out) from the Google team and wow, what a difference. Just the fact that I now have my VMs both audio (without having to call my TMob VM account) and transcripted to text is a true testament of how far things have come (imagine what a God-send the text transcript is sitting in a meeting with your tone off and not wanting to be an ass by dialing out while someone else was speaking). Both apps are easy to use, both have their benefits and drawbacks but as first release software, I suspect they will only get better. Now I see what all the kerfluffle was about when Apple banned Google Voice from the App Store.

[from Switched]

We’re not exactly huge Microsoft boosters around here. Most of us in the Switched offices are devoted Mac users, and there’s at least one professed Linux nerd in house. We regularly joke that it takes just as long in 2009 to open Microsoft Word as it did back in 1992. Operating system preferences aside, we can’t help but feel as though Microsoft is getting a raw deal. The Redmond-based company is regularly painted as the enemy of… well, just about everything. Yet, while the European Union is forcing Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows, no one seems to be keeping an eye on 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA. Here are a few ways we think Apple is evil, and getting away with it.

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

To understand the complexity behind designing the UX it’s important to understand the nature of the data and the critical effect of the workflow. First, video was being supplied from six sources, some to us using Saviant direct to our servers, some we pulled via FTP, and then of course the live streams (some HD and some SD). Then there were multiple parties…NBC (as the news reporter) needed editorial control over metadata, while iStream’s Managed Webcasting team needed to control the timeline over when items went to publication. My team, RnCS (Research & Creative Services) needed to insure that everything was tested before going live so we needed to throw the whole thing through a staging server before hitting a production server that then fed a cluster of edge servers on Akamai’s network.

So we structured it in several parts. First we put automated bots to determine when new assets had been dropped, specifically seeking out XML files that held the initial metadata, and dropped that into the CMS DB. Once there, the appropriate parties were notified by email (or in my case as PM, by SMS) – to update metadata, insert images, begin video transcoding, etc. Through the entire process, we designed screens to make it as easy as possible to follow the flow of assets, provide enough ability to each staff person so that overlaps in duties existed but that checkpoints assured data integrity throughout.

The grid above, for example shows the visual layout of the thumbnails that would appear in the cover-flow style playlist inside the player. Deep linking was provided so editorial users could create pointers on the MSNBC/NBCSports sites. Drag and drop allowed us to reorder objects to maximize the visibility of prominent players.

Each level of user had various modal windows to insert data. Even imagery was uploaded first to the staging, processed for size and then sent to production.

Because of the nature of edge servers, we also had to purge the cache after any update, so we provided a three-section grouping that allowed us to send the feed XMLs to production and clear the cache in one shot. And to make THAT process even easier, we built it so that it was accessibly by mobile phone so even if I was in transit, I could still update the CMS in a timely fashion.

Finally, the live streams had the ability to be toggled on and off so that the matrix of available feeds, particularly the Smooth HD stream, was optimized and prioritized. To be sure, there was still much room for improvement but given that the whole CMS was built in 6 days and now, five days into Wimbledon, has eased us into a steady, smooth workflow, speaks volumes for making it easy to use, intuitive (for example, the color designations on the player match the ones in the CMS, big text and extensive micro-transaction Ajax created an interactive environment), and overall a good experience.

Starting June 27, it will also feature live feeds including up to five simultaneous live feeds (of course the UK being 8 hours ahead of me means some extremely early morning admin).  The live feeds (and subsequent VOD archives) will feature at least one Smooth Stream, Microsoft’s new adaptive streaming technology that will bring you hi-definition video at 2950k (it looks really sweet).

The 2009 Wimbledon runs through July 5th.

The five of you that actually read this blog will notice that the URL is no longer Mobimeet.  After a reasonable offer and a little soul searching (about 20 seconds worth) I’ve decided to sell mobimeet.com to a Ukranian mobile phone game developer.  Sounds silly because the whole name “mobimeet” really means absolutely nothing for me in terms of anything I actually do … it was just a name I plucked out of thin air … but over the last four+ years it has more or less become my identity so I am now having to spend a bit of time swapping out my registrations and identities to various sites though I won’t bother with all of them.

Which brings me to the Facebook issue.  A good number of you found me on Facebook and sent the friend request but I don’t really do anything on Facebook so I haven’t bothered (and won’t bother) to approve anyone.  Anyway, students, it would be a violation of the school’s fraternization policies for me to engage on a social network in this manner, as I’ve mentioned before, so don’t be offended by my lack of response (isn’t listening to me rant for 4 hours a class enough?) on Facebook or LinkedIn.

So Mobimeet is officially being transferred.  My email address will remain for a short period but please update your records to the appropriate iStreamPlanet or AII or UNLV addresses instead.

It’s no secret that social networking as a whole fascinates me, but in a different way than most.  To this day, frankly, I still haven’t figured it out.  I’ve been in this game long enough to remember SixDegrees and watch the MySpace explosion, see the mess that Second Life and Facebook are becoming and now, there’s Twitter.  At least with SixDegrees and MySpace there was an actual theme, and even with Second Life and Facebook I can almost understand why, but Twitter is a conundrum in itself.

Being the professional that he is, I couldn’t say it all any better than he did, so here is Mr. Ridley’s post/comment:

At the risk of sounding like that old guy in Gran Torino telling those “young punks” to “get off my lawn,” it’s gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.

I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

To be honest, I think tweeting jumped the shark long before ultrahip CNN got into a Twitter match against superdown Ashton Kutcher. Back when politicians started live-tweeting responses to the president’s demi-State of the Union address, Twitter had already taken on all the cool of your mom getting a tattoo.

I imagine, I hope, twitterers are ultimately headed for the social networking retirement home that’s the current residence of Second Life and MySpace.

But my real issue with social networking sites isn’t their faddishness.

It’s the hypocrisy that goes with them.

We claim to be a nation of people who take our privacy very seriously. Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation.

But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

Seriously, does valuable broadband space need to be taken up with announcements in that creepy Facebook third-person-ese that “John is enjoying two-for-one margaritas with the rest of the IT Team at T.G.I. Fridays”?

Where is the expectation of privacy anymore? Or, more correctly, where is the expectation that people will keep their private nonsense to themselves so that those of us who still like to communicate personal information with one person at a time don’t have to get caught up in somebody else’s e-mail circles or listen to their one-sided cell phone conversations?

No, I don’t know what’s hipper; to Facebook or to Twitter. I just know for me, personally, discretion never went out of style.

To be sure, Mr. Ridley, like myself, operates a blog which most people view no differently than Twitter might be, but there is a distinct difference.  For him, the blog isn’t an outlet for sharing personal details and interacting in a social sense so much as it is a platform for discussing social concerns where technology comes into play, just like this blog is a sounding board for issues that affect areas that I teach.

Of course Mr. Ridley’s post was lambasted almost immediately in the comments.  The one that got my gourd was “I say keep your old-fashioned opinions to yourself and off the air.”  There is a certain virtue to old fashioned opinions, and just as the person who wrote the comment feels it appropriate to air his discontent over the post, Mr. Ridley certainly has the right to voice it.

[read "Keep Your Tweets To Yourself" here]

WordPress is often thought of as just a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Even WordPress’ documentation includes an entire section on using WordPress as a content management system. Because WordPress is such an easy-to-use platform, it makes sense to consider using it as a platform to build just about any kind of website, a portfolio website included.

Whether you’re a photographer, graphic designer, Web designer or any other kind of visual artist, WordPress makes an excellent starting point for developing your online portfolio. And with the wealth of plug-ins and ready-made themes available, you can usually get a perfectly presentable website up and running in a matter of hours.

So get on the bandwagon, listen, learn, try, play and get some stuff done!

To wit I ask – do we really spend waste that much time reading blogs?

As more and more major newspapers fold, in the face of dwindling advertisers and subscribers, bloggers are usurping their roles in record numbers. According to The Wall Street Journal, over 20 million people now blog in the United States. Of those, 1.7 million earn money doing so, while 450,000 primarily earn their livings through the blogged word.

Those statistics indicate that there are now more professional bloggers than there are computer programmers or firefighters. Career bloggers now also rival attorneys in number, which leads us to a question. When bloggers outnumber lawyers, who is going to file all of those libel and slander suits?

The authors, Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, investigate some intriguing aspects of this journalistic shift. For instance, they ask whether or not bloggers deserve an official union, along with health and unemployment benefits. They also manage to throw in a few condescending and elitist shots at the blogosphere, accusing bloggers of having “limited standards and, for most, no formal training.” It must be humbling to lose readers to the unwashed, untrained, and ethically-challenged masses.

Maybe, the unemployed, professional journalists, with their high standards and firm grasps on ethics and morals, can go back to law school to even out the attorney-blogger numbers. Regardless, our primary concern is with this blogger’s union becoming a reality. We’re ready for our union-mandated break. [From: The Wall Street Journal]

Nonethless, it’s pretty indicative of the way things have gone, the power of the social media and the possibilities of the future.  With several regular jobs, I find it tough to make time to even post once a week (obviously) but then again, I don’t get paid for it either.  I think it would be pretty damned interesting to know what that would be like.  Do pro bloggers whose primary income comes from posting have the same worries about hitting deadlines as traditional journalists?  Or does the laissez-faire attitude change that perspective as well?

In the meantime, inasmuch as I would love to be able to post on a daily basis here as Jen does on her blog, I guess I don’t really have much of a point in doing it except to keep exalting the virtues of good web design, better user experiences, and DRM.  I must be kookoo.

Probably one of the best stated defenses I’ve read for UX comes courtesy of this post in Smashing Magazine.  In talking about the brand loyalty of Apple users…

How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.

How true. This week I’ve been tossed back and forth between clients and bosses struggling with all the wants and demands and needs and the bottom line came down to making sure everyone realized that it has nothing to do with personal preference and like and dislikes, it’s about experience, and more than that it has to be tangible, palpable and reach the emotion of a human in a way that makes it memorable, or at the very least engaging.

I first encountered Silverlight 2 years ago when it was first released at NAB as version 1 (the Javascript version).  Quickly iStream assimilated into the Silverlight army and helped push several products into the forefront with Silverlight 2 over the last year+ including several prominent public jobs and some to be released shortly.  Now, just 23 short months later, SL3 promises some great stuff.

For all those that say Flash still kicks SL in the ass, maybe true, but with a 10 year head-start I would’ve thought they’d still be leaps and bounds ahead.  The fact that SL is quickly catching up and becoming a prominent player especially in the business forefront says something about its acceptance and viability.  Don’t take me wrong, I too still develop plenty of Flash apps and here at iStream we take strides to develop interfaces concurrently on both platforms but the sheer speed at which SL has come to adolescence speaks volumes about what it may bring in the near future.

At this very minute I am sitting in a waiting room while my car is being serviced. I am IM’ing with my staff about projects, Twittering, surfing for some t-shirts on eBay while downloading YouTube vids for playback later, and typing this blog entry … all from my phone. And it isn’t because I have some phenomenal mobile device (G1 from T-Mobile)…it’s the norm nowadays. This is maybe the first time I’ve ever really tried to multitask on the little device but the fact that it can all happen is just amazing for someone like myself who started in tech back even before cellphones were a common device.

Yes, there is a lot to learn and it can be daunting, but with new technology and services comes more jobs and more exciting things to get into. Embrace this future…despite the economy, eventually things will turn around.

Now if my Android would learn to make my coffee right, we’d be all set.

iStreamDirector is both a digital asset management (DAM) system and a content management system (CMS) that does such things as media ingestion, transcoding between multiple formats, metadata management, live event management, Silverlight and Flash player creation, playlist management, rights management and so on.

Photo of Obama by Jennifer’s sister, Jeannette Ramos – shot while campaining in Las Vegas before the election. See her website – JeaShoots.com – here & if you’d like to own one of the Obama images, go to her ETSY shop.

Every day that we eke out our survival we know that there is some actuary or scientist working out whether it’s worth us ever trying.

Professor Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard, punched in a few numbers, posited a couple of suppositions, and declared that two Google searches generate as much CO2 as boiling a kettle.

You would, I hope, not expect me to spout the numbers at you, but apparently the fact that Google transmits every search inquiry to more than one server doesn’t help. And, worse, even though Google believes it is the most efficient of search organizations, our desperate and faintly pathetic need for speed means that by searching we are burning up the planet like Nicolas Cage in Gone In Sixty Seconds.

Naturally, even though I have not finished my morning muffin, Wissner-Gross’ numbers are already being disputed.

Does a cast iron kettle generate more or less CO2? I think I’ll Google it.

(Credit: CC IMorpheus)

While he believes that looking at simple Web page like this one throws up 0.2g of CO2 per second, the folks over at Carbonfootprint.com (a site I try to avoid only because I care for my world) put the deleterious generation at between 1g and 10g per second. Apparently, much depends on whether you have to turn your PC on first.

So we cannot merely depend on our ability to stomach hybrid cars that make golf carts look sexy. We have to limit our searches to only the things we really need to find. Not the latest speeches from Al Gore. Not the latest supposed topless shots of Elisha Cuthbert. Not those meaningful updates on the latest couplings amongst the cast of Twilight.

And let’s not even think about Twittering about the vast meaninglessness of Twitter.

Oh, conservation. It just seems so dreadfully conservative. I think I’ll make myself another cup of tea. No, wait.

ROFL!!!
What good is having life if you can’t live it?  At least a little bit.
And sorry, I’m no Harvard physicist, I have no idea how much CO2 is produced by a boiling kettle, and I’m pretty sure that Google at least has taken some serious efforts to actually reduce that output.
But what do I know?

Web design isn’t art. It involves a whole collection of different skills — from copywriting and typography to layout and art — all fused together to create an interface that not only features a pleasant aesthetic but that communicates function and facilitates easy access to its content.

But in order to combine all these elements of Web design together and achieve successful results you must have a clear direction, a direction that will guide each and every aspect of your design towards common goals. You must think strategically.

What is strategic design?

Strategic design is the fusion of your organizational goals with every aspect of your design process. You aren’t simply designing a user interface that looks good and is usable and accessible. You’re designing an interface that will help you accomplish your organization’s objectives.

There are many websites out there that look fantastic and sport the latest trends in design yet often fail miserably in their intended function. Design trends are, of course, important because they give you fresh inspiration and new techniques, but the implementation of those techniques and styles needs to be intelligent and focused. For example, a blog isn’t a marketing brochure; you should focus on usability and readability rather than style. Similarly, a promotional website for a computer game should feature graphics and styles that portray a specific feel and style; the aesthetic is very important here.

When the designer simply implements a look and feel that is fashionable at the moment (think Web 2.0 trends) without any thought of how they fit the function of the website or the business behind it, the end result is unlikely to be very effective.

Web design is all about crafting an interface that communicates function, is usable and accessible and exudes the right emotion and feeling. Effective Web design needs all of these elements to be in tune with the goals of your website and in sync with the organizational objectives behind the website. Strategic design is all about identifying those goals and using them to guide your design.

Implementing Strategic Design

Let’s take a look at how we can use six steps to think strategically about a Web design project:

1. Establish your goals

One of the first things you need to do before starting work on a Web design project is to be clear about your client or organization’s goals. What are you trying to achieve with the new website or redesign? What is the website’s main purpose? Ask your client, your manager or yourself what those are. If they or you don’t know yet, then they should be discussed and agreed upon. A clear direction is essential if you want your design to have a purpose.

Remember that a website isn’t a piece of art; it’s an interface that serves a function. That function may be to sell products, to deliver informational content, to entertain, to inform or to provide access to a service. Whatever that function is, your design must focus on fulfilling it. Goals are also important, especially if you’re doing a redesign. Ask why you are doing the redesign: are you looking to grow the number of sign-ups, decrease the bounce rate or maybe increase user participation?

Take a look at the design of the New York Times website above. Its function is to deliver informational content. The minimalist interface serves this function beautifully by fading into the background.

In contrast to the New York Times, AdaptD is a Web design studio, so the goal is not to deliver a lot of content but to impress visitors with its design, showcase a gallery and advertise the company’s services. The visuals are very important here, and AdaptD delivers a browsing experience with beautiful imagery and strong colors.

2. Identify your audience

Who your audience is will play a big role in how your website should look and function. There are many demographics here that can influence your design, ones like age, gender, profession and technical competency. A computer game website for a younger audience needs a different style than that of a serious business journal. Usability should play a bigger role for older and less technically savvy audiences.

Who your audience is will not only influence the general aesthetic of the website but will also determine a lot of smaller details, like font sizes, so make sure you’re clear about who will be using your website.

This is the unsuccessful jQuery rock-star redesign. The designer went too far in trying to create excitement and so failed to cater to the more serious, techy audience. Since then, the rock-star graphic has been replaced with a more conservative look.

Disney’s target audience is kids. The intent is to entertain and involve this young audience, and the design does it by wrapping the content in a fun, colorful interface with a lot of visual and interactive elements.

3. Determine your brand image

A lot of designers tend to get a little too inspired by the latest trends and then implement them without thinking first about what sort of image they really should be conveying. Glossy buttons, gradients and reflective floors may work for some websites, but they may not be right for your brand.

Think about color. Think about the feel you want to achieve and emotions you wish to elicit. Your design should embody the personality and character of your brand. Everything has a brand; even if you don’t sell a product or service — for example, if you run a blog — your website still has a certain feel that makes an impression on your visitors. Decide what that impression should be.

Carbonica is a website aimed at helping people reduce their carbon emissions. The environmentally friendly image of the website is crafted using a lot of recycled paper images and textures, as well as earthy green and brown tones.

Restaurantica is a restaurant reviews website. Its design illustrates this by taking on the look and feel of an actual menu you would see in a restaurant.

4. Goal-driven design direction

You’ve established the purpose of your website, set some goals you want to achieve, identified your audience and determined your brand image. You can now proceed to implement it. So how do you make design decisions sync with your strategy? Let me illustrate this with a likely example.

Suppose your main objective is to increase the number of subscribers to your Web service. How can your design help accomplish this goal? I can see at least three things here that will make a difference:

• Make the “About” snippet on your landing page as clear and concise as possible. Your visitors must not have any confusion about the function of your website.
• Use color and contrast to make the registration button or link stand out. If people can’t find it, then you won’t get many sign-ups.
• Streamline the registration process by removing unnecessary and optional elements; people can fill those out later. If the form looks long, people may be put off of filling it in.

These are just three ways you can lead your design towards accomplishing the goal of increasing the number of sign-ups to your service. Your goals may vary, but the strategy is the same: shape and focus all the design elements towards meeting those goals.

The same strategy applies to your brand and audience: design the aesthetic that best suits it. If your website’s focus is entertainment, then create an “experience.” You are free to use a lot of color and imagery to shape that experience. On the other hand, if you’re designing a website that is focused on information consumption, for example, a blog or a magazine, then focus on usability and readability. Create an interface that fades away and doesn’t distract the user from accessing the content.

Stubmatic is an online box-office application. Their external website has two purposes: explain what the service does and get people to sign up. New visitors may only remain on your website for a few seconds, so if you don’t want to lose them you must be concise. You can do this by:

• Using large imagery and diagrams to illustrate the function of your product or service.
• Showing screenshots of your application. People will want to see what it looks like before they commit to a download or sign up.
• Providing a tour, using descriptive examples of how your service can help them solve a problem. Show a video if you can; the less effort people need to make to understand how your app works the better.
• Having the sign-up link accessible from all pages.

To succeed, the website must make the best use of the very limited amount of attention visitors will be giving it by not only informing but educating them about what your product does, and selling the benefits it provides. Stubmatic uses design elements effectively to pursue those goals.

TechCrunch is one of the more popular tech blogs. Its new design removes every single unnecessary graphical element from the page. What’s left is just the content, advertising and navigation. Subtle lines and grey shades give the page structure, yet the interface is almost invisible and places content straight into the front row. For a blog that posts several new articles a day, this format is ideal because it facilitates fast and easy access to the content.

5. Measure results

Once you’ve designed and deployed your website, it’s time to measure your success. This is just as important as the first two steps because until you test how well your design performs, you won’t know whether or not it is effective in fulfilling your goals.

If your goal is to increase the number of sign-ups to your service, measure it and see if your changes are making a positive impact. If you want to increase the number of subscribers to your blog, check your RSS stats. If you want to increase user involvement, see if you get more comments or more forum posts or whatever else is relevant in your context.

You can, of course, also ask people for their feedback, and this is a very good way to check if you’re on the right track. Be careful though not to implement every suggestion people make. Everyone has different tastes and wants, so everyone is going to have a different opinion about what your website should look like. If you do collect feedback, look for patterns; see if there are common issues that crop up and deal with those.

Measuring various website metrics is a whole science unto itself and is beyond the scope of this article. But however in-depth your analytics are at this stage doesn’t really matter; the important thing is that at the very least you have some way of measuring your key objectives. You can use this information to see if you’re moving in the right direction with your design and with any future changes you or your client make.

Even if you’re on a tight budget, you can use free tools like Google Analytics to get a lot of data on how your website is being used, including overlays of your pages to see what links people click on most as well as the ability to track conversion funnels.

6. Kaizen

There is a Japanese philosophy called “Kaizen,” which focuses on continuous improvement using small steps. When you work on your website, you should be thinking of Kaizen because the version you’ve just published is not the final version. There doesn’t even have to be a final version.

You can always make improvements, and the very nature of a website will allow you to introduce these at any time. This is because a website isn’t a magazine that you print and sell: once a magazine copy is out of your hands, you cannot make any changes or fix any spelling mistakes or errors. A website, however, sits on your server: if you find a mistake, you can fix it right away. In the same vein, you can introduce gradual improvements and updates to make your website more effective in serving its function.

Using the results of your measurements, you can identify problem areas. Perhaps your visitors cannot find the RSS feed link, or your bounce rate is too high or an important page on your website isn’t getting enough visits. Whatever the problem is, there will always be a way to improve things.

Conclusion

The main gist of strategic design is simply common sense: you’re making something for a specific purpose, so of course it should fulfill that purpose through its design. But it is actually very easy to lose track of your goals and end up with something that is beautiful but ultimately doesn’t work in its context. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of implementing the latest design trends just because they look attractive or shaping a section of your website to resemble another website that you really like without first thinking about why you are doing it or how it fits in with the purpose of your project.

Avoid falling into these traps by thinking through every design decision you make. Why is this button this color? Why are we using tabs? Why should we use icons here? Once you get into the habit of questioning your every design decision, the whole process will become much more focused. Think about the product or organization you’re representing. Think about the target audience and your brand. What will work in this context? What is expected? How can you use design to best fulfill the website’s purpose? Don’t just build a beautiful website: make a website that really works.

About the author

Dmitry Fadeyev is the founder of the Usability Post blog, where you can read his thoughts on good design and usability. (al)

The sheer momentum was palpable and it was moving to just be in it.  I have been an avid supporter since the beginning – I truly believe that whether it is the man himself or simply the ideal that he brings to the minds of a newly reborn America, he will be the catalyst for a much needed change in this country.  Congratulations to President-elect Obama.

In what may be a little slip, Motorola CEO Sinjay Jha mentioned Windows Mobile 6.5.  Partly after the announcement that WM7 will now not be released until mid 2009, this may have a sliver of truth to it.  Frankly I’ve been using this WM phone (originally 5 and upgraded to 6) and now, I just hate it.  Again, I’m not overly partial to the iPhone.  I love, more than anything else, the interface – slick and usable and the iconics and screen flow is, bar none, the best.  But it’s still gimicky.  WM6 has a lot of usable features but the flow stinks and its impossible to do a lot of things.  I would love to see what’s going to be included (potentially and allegedly) with this release, but in the end, who cares.  So I decided I’m just going to go buy a G1 instead – how can you beat a $148 price tag (Walmart – believe it or not).  I was really determined to wait for the Touch Pro but I’m just bored from waiting now, and the draw of being able to program Android apps in Eclipse is figuratively making me drool.

Moblin.  Know what it is, you know why it’s in a news category of its own.  Don’t?  Go look it up.

Blow out the candles.  iPod turned 7 today.  Wow.  Throw party.

Sarah Palin is still an idiot.  I actually feel bad for McCain having to grimace through every journalist asking if he regrets nominating her onto the ticket and daydreaming of just blowing up at one of them and saying “Of course I am, the woman is a train wreck!”

Jen, your blog is looking really good and I am very proud of you and your numbers.

Finally, Martin Cooper, an engineer from Motorola and one of the key inventors of the cellphone, says that today’s phones are too complicated…

[From switched.com]

The inventor of the cellphone says the iPhone’s ubiquitous, do-everything, jack-of-all-trades approach to applications, music and – oh yeah – phone calls, makes the Apple Computer superstar mobile device less impressive, not more.

Martin Cooper, who while working at Motorola made the first cell-phone call in 1973 with a device weighing two pounds and with only 20 minutes of battery life, says that cell phones today, especially the iPhone, are too complex. Speaking at a conference in Boston, Cooper said wireless companies and cell phone makers have the wrong ideas when it comes to making products people really need. Instead, he advocates cell phones with fewer features and functions, not more. He also says cell phone reception problems and dropped calls are a major problem for the industry and could be avoided with some better technology. (Cooper serves as chairman of a company called ArrayComm, which develops software to help antenna arrays more finely pinpoint cell phone location.)

Cooper’s main push is for simpler, specialized phones, such as the one his wife designed called Jitterbug, a cell phone with large buttons and extra large characters on the LCD screen for use by the elderly.

“A phone that’s an Internet appliance, an MP3 player, a camera and a whole bunch of other functions doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said. “You try to build a universal device that does all things for all people, and guess what? It doesn’t do anything very well.”

…okay, true maybe. Then why are we using computers instead of typewriters and graph paper? Technology changes people and people change technology. It, like evolution and natural ecologies, changes with needs, wants, conditions and the environment. It will get more complex and no matter how much we attempt to make it simpler, our fiendish need for gathering information (much like women hoard shoes) and gaining knowledge is one (or two) step(s) ahead of the ability to streamline the process of acquiring it. Build a better mousetrap and the world will come knocking at your door … at least until evolution produces a better mouse (on that note, did you know that a rat has 700psi of jaw force in its bite – that’s more than an alligator).

An appropriate followup to last week’s findings that television has actually altered people’s dreams (from black-and-white to color), now it’s that the Internet is actually causing our brains to develop differently.

DUH.

I mean, c’mon – that’s partly why I am even going back to school – to study that very subject.  The research, led by a team at UCLA, “discovered” that searching and text messaging has improved the brain’s ability to filter information (uh, isn’t that pretty much what the computer does so isn’t that basically “learning by watching”), but warns that it has a price if one fails to maintain social skills.

Make up your own mind.

By Belinda Goldsmith

CANBERRA (Reuters) – The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.

But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.

Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.

“We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills,” Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email.”

In his newly released fourth book “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.

Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.

He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.

“The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others,” said Small.

“We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution.”

Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.

He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls “digital natives,” are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.

“There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language,” he said.

“But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)