Friday, August 31, 2007
I have the DSL Tools book!
It's very strange to see part of your work in someone else book...
Thank you Andrés for the book!
I will take the book to the conference to read during my loooong flight to Seoul. I will post some thoughts about it when I come back home.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
MIT Sketching
Take a look to this video. I am wondering why I didn't have this tool during my physics classes in the university.
The video's comments don't seem to agree with me ;)
Labels: Physics, Technology
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Pay-per-crawl
One of the first things I understood after I created this blog was that Google is using their power (position) in a very insane way. To say in their words, they are being a little evil.
People think Google indexes the web, but really, they don't make too much (after they created the brand and the PageRank algorithm). Some studies say 30% of the web isn't indexed. That is, 1 of 3 pages you are looking for, is not present in any search engine.
Believe me, you have to work hard just to enter in a search engine (one month or more from your submission), and then, if some day they decide to include your website, you have to hire a SEO to make Google work properly, and appear in the first page when the user type your name... Google should be indexing the web in the right way, not you (by hiring a SEO for them), or Google should pay for it.
It is a vicious circle, you pay a SEO and Google get more people working for them to get the top-5 positions for the "britney spears" search entry. Then, that word becomes more competitive and you need another SEO to keep your position. It is ironic, everybody doing the Google's work while they give 20% to their employees to create Orkut for Brazilians and play ping-pong ;)
But if it is not enough, Google consumes your bandwidth (money) every time they crawl your site. Ok, you may think it isn't too much waste, they are just using a little part of your bandwidth... but, what would you think if 1 million of companies start crawling the web and your site, just like Google does. Clearly, that is different, because the abuse becomes obvious. On the other hand, you can't use a robot to consume their money (i.e. writing a program to auto-click adSense advertisements) because they may sue you. So, why can they waste my money but I can't waste theirs? Do you think it is fair? I know, I can write a robot.txt file to avoid the crawler, but why should I waste my time for them? Why are they assuming they can use my bandwidth?
I think it will be a problem in the long run. But don't panic, it won't happen for a while. Some day, if everything continues as it goes, people will notice that Google is not producing accurate results for their searches, because SEO's are manipulating them, and a fairer search engine will emerge. Google is becoming a advertised menu, and I don't want to search stuff there.
Let be sincere, Google is not producing the web, they are just getting money from your production and using your resources to do that! It could be a fair model when they were a start-up, but nowadays, that they are earning billions of dollars with your customers and your bandwidth, and you have to outsource a SEO for them, I think it can be considered evil, don't you?.
I can think in two solutions to this problem on the top of my mind: Google should pay-per-crawl your site, and they should crawl your site only if you specifically allow them (crawler should be disabled by default). But I will keep thinking, in Internet you always can do something to avoid the use of the power.
What do you think? May be, I am the only one thinking that this model is wrong.
Labels: Crawlers, Google, Internet, Technology
Thursday, August 16, 2007
I'm going to the MDUCDE2007 in Seoul
I am traveling to Seoul (South Korea) to present "HIMALIA: Model-Driven User Interfaces Using Hypermedia, Controls And Patterns" in the first workshop on Model-Driven User-Centered Engineering 2007. The presentation is programmed to be on September 5 at 14:00hs, after the launch. I am expecting to meet interesting people there, and have some productive interchange with other similar-fields researchers to enrich ourselves.
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I made this map to show the straight and VERY LONG flight. It is difficult to measure the amount of time on-the-fly because of the different time zones, but in any case, it isn't less than 30 hours!!! I hope not to experience very much jet lag, but I think it will be impossible to distinguish between jet lag and 30 hours of flight ;)
So, don't expect very much activity in this blog from 1st to 9th September. I will share the photos and surely some comments when I came back home.
BTW, if someone knows the people in the DICyT, could you hurry up them? I sent them an one-page-letter three weeks ago, but they didn't have enough time to see it yet... came on! it's one page! They should be receiving like 1000 letters a day to argue that, and I don't think it's the case.
Labels: Acedemic, Conference, Himalia, MDUCDE, Travel
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Navigation != Presentation
BrowseGoods (via elAbra, via dirk) presents the same navigation model than an usual e-commerce shopping, but, with a different presentation approach.
For both cases the Navigation Model should look like a traditional hierarchy composed of menus and indexes of goods. But this time, it is presented in an only zoom-in-out control, instead of using traditional controls as does -for example- Amazon (i.e. menus, grids, search boxes, etc.).
The Navigation Model exposes the navigation paths the user have to follow to reach each concept; the Presentation Model just defines where and when render each concept and specifies which control to use for each case.
It can be a good example to show the power of the separation of concerns exposed in the Himalia's meta-model (that was taken from older hypermedia methods). I will add it to our Mingle.
Labels: Himalia, Hypermedia
Monday, August 06, 2007
Plastic figurine as input
Fisher-Price has launched the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad. The kid can interact with the computer safely by introducing different figurines in a USB hub. For each character a different website is loaded into the browser.
It is another case of reducing the power of a platform for a very focused niche, or the less is more principle.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
New user interface for search engines!
I am really tired of listening about "new user interfaces paradigms" when people is just adding tabs to the existing and old paradigm (i.e. Mozilla, Internet Explorer, etc.). But I know, I can still understand the difference between promotion and paradigms...
No Food Here is a "futuristic search engine" that changes the old search engine user interfaces, incorporating (guess what) tabbed searching...
Anyway, adding tabs looks like a good idea also here.
Labels: Usability
