Juliette/SF

Over at linoleumjet.com I’ve posted some examples of my recent concert photography endeavors.

Rollingstone.com just published this photo I took of Ice Cube at his performance at South by Southwest.

Shot from the photo pit moments before Austin’s finest began shooing the photographers out. Settings: F4, 1/50, ISO 1600, 70-200mm lens at 185mm, and using a Canon 20D.

Mark Trammell interviewed Ice Cube today for the SF music blog Attacked by Jackets and I was there to record the moment. (There are more photos over at linoleumjet.com.)

An excerpt from the interview:

I was writing raps on the laptop at one point in my career, you know, earlier in my career. I think it’s always kinda been there. You know, when we started making music, they had one drum machine. It was an Oberheim DMX and that was it. Once all these different samplers came out, you know, that kinda turned us, somewhat, into techies. We had to go get the new drum machine to help us make better music. So, it just started expanding our minds on technology and what we had to do to make it work.

House-sitting for a friend has been cast as somehow scandalous by our friends over at Valleywag. These seasoned journalists deserve props for not only being able to write rhyming headlines, but for also clearly understanding how to leverage post-structural theory to avoid libel. Their marvelously vague terminology (the “latest name linked” to someone) puts the reader, rather than the author, into the position of construing/constructing the narrative: “since meaning can’t come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis.”

Glad that other people are reading Derrida and Barthes in Silicon Valley.

At Safari Books Online we have started a monthly Usability Friday — and you should, too!

The idea came from Steve Krug who outlined this model of running usability evaluations at last October’s Voices that Matter conference. He proposed that usability evaluation should be: regularly scheduled, attended in person rather than via webcast, and relatively fun and easy to manage. By making the process lightweight and inclusive (rather than formal and ponderous and overly documented) the evaluations are likely to be continued as part of a standard business process, rather than as a once-a-year hullabaloo. Specifically, he recommended having a morning of usability sessions (mostly in the form of one-on-one task analysis) followed by a team lunch to review interesting takeaways and next steps.

I posted the Usability Friday invitations on upcoming.org and pownce.com. The next one is scheduled for March 28.

Integrating regular usability review into your product roadmap makes sense — and this is a good way to start.

Photos from my trip back east are now on my photo blog, linoleumjet.com.

Educational technology of the future - unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.

There have been lots of good ideas being floated around at the
O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference for Publishing but I just heard one of the best.

At the conclusion of one of today’s sessions, an audience member asked the panel about the danger of releasing textbooks into academic environments without DRM. Ben Vershbow turned the question around. He responded that the entire notion of textbooks should be rethought, and that textbooks should be thought of as extensions of the classroom learning environment rather than as products — and as such, educational publishers should think of providing text books as a service rather than a product.

View of NYC from the conference site

Salon.com’s coverage of Britney Spears is great. “We’re only interested in the cultural manifestations of Britney-dom, we swear.” This article points to a Google Trends infographic which embodies the essence of good information display: lots of data pulled together in a way that tells a compelling story.

San Francisco, from the (middle of a) helicopter