Web/Tech

Goodhart's Law and social web design (Jan 15, 2008)
A few weeks ago I came across Goodhart's Law, a rule-of-thumb in economics that has some application to the design of social software. In fact, it's particularly relevant to the creation of metrics and algorithms that model things like influence,...

Bootstrapping the social web on pennies a day (Jul 15, 2007)
Social websites often suffer from the cold-start problem--no one wants to use them unless other people are already using them. Attracting and retaining those first users is one of the biggest challenges faced by these sites. So I wasn't totally...

Tyranny of the box (Oct 13, 2006)
I've now worked on a couple of search interface design projects, and I feel for the people who do this every day. Google has so strongly defined the search experience that anything other than a single-box search interface upsets users'...

Earlier Posts

Web 2.0 tops the Gartner hype cycle (Aug 10, 2006)

How much wisdom is there in Digg? (Jan 10, 2006)

Web 2.0: my part is done (Oct 4, 2005)

Some thoughts on Ajax (Feb 23, 2005)

Web Accessibility in Canada (Sep 15, 2004)

Operational innovation and the Google datacenter (Aug 25, 2004)

The Rise (and Decline?) of Websites (Aug 17, 2004)

Learning from Sim Refinery (Jul 20, 2004)

Web Standards RFP (Jul 13, 2004)

How websites learn (Jun 13, 2004)

Word history (Jun 7, 2004)

Finally, a candidate I can support (Feb 13, 2004)

It's a shockwave life (Jan 28, 2004)

The New Harpers.org: Scary (Dec 7, 2003)

New ALA (Oct 22, 2003)

Building web teams (Oct 8, 2003)