Mosaic's 15th Birthday

I suppose it's official. I'm an old-timer now. I was infatuated with the possibility of the internet when there were still only Gopher sites. Archie and Veronica were the cool search tools of the day. As with other "pre-Mosaic" techies this day, 15 years ago today, was when the world changed. Mosaic, the first graphical browser was "officially" released.
I learned HTML that summer, and for me, my life changed.

Launching New Windows: Part II

Almost a year ago I wrote that I thought that users would soon be comfortable with sites that launch new browser windows. When a link takes the user away from the current site to completely new information there are times it makes sense to open a new window. An example of this would be an intranet where a user is tasked with learning a new product line. There are times when it is expected that the user may click numerous times while exploring the new product line. After finishing examining the product how will the user get back? Back links do not always work as there may be numerous places from which the user came. Will the user click the back button 20 or 30 or 40 times? Will we expect this user to go into his history and find where he was? That's not necessary if the other window is still open. Opening new windows is analagous to someone opening up yet another book on his desk and flipping through this second or third book while still having the first book opened.

It is possible to come up with another method aside from opening up a new window? Yes we can pass a parameter with the "original" page and add it to the navigation. I struggle to see how this is a better method. It would not be. Even expert users would get lost in an ever shifting navigational schema. Following the "open book" metaphor opening a new window, making it smaller than the standard window to stand apart is a clear and simple means of providing distinct data to the user.

And yet a year later I still see intelligent, highly educated, but unsophisticated computer users getting lost using tabs and not using tabs to organize their browsing. As of now Jakob Nielsen's warning regarding the user of new browser windows stands.

The Coiner of the Phrase: "80/20 Rule" Died

Joseph Juran, 103, Pioneer in Quality Control, Dies

It's funny how often I've said, or heard, the phrase "80/20" and only now realize that the Pareto Principle was coined popularized by Joseph M. Juran. Pareto, I've just learned, was a Classical Liberal Economist of the 19th C who made the observation that twenty percent of the population owned eighty percent of the property and this truism held across time and culture.

80% of a company's profits come from 20% of their customers

80% of their complaints come from 20% of their customers

80% of crimes come from 20% of the criminals

and

80% of users use only 20% of the features

20% of software bugs create 80% of the errors

The 80/20 rule may or may not be another "Golden Ratio" myth but it has certainly entered the lexicon.

The Privacy Paradox

Forbes has an interesting article regarding privacy.

"Consumers express a lot of concern about their privacy online in surveys. At the same time, very few engage in privacy-protecting activities," says Leslie Harris, executive director of the privacy advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology. "There's a real inconsistency."

...

So, do users value the convenience of having a search bar beside their e-mail more than protecting their sensitive information? "There's a growing market pressure to do right by privacy," insists Harris. "But do I think the market alone will fix this? No. At the end of the day, we still need legal protection." Part of the solution, she says, may be a national privacy law.
The Privacy Paradox

I agree - part of the solution may be privacy laws. Facebook ought to have no more say over your data than does the journal in which you jot down notes.

Another Way to Save Articles

I just found out about a new web application - Instapaper that seems wonderful. Marco Arment, the lead developer, describes the project in the following way:

You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.

You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.
Tech Crunch

This is perfect for someone like me. My bookmarks are completely out of hand; I often scrape articles I want to read and when I most want to read them I am away from my computer.

My only fear is quickly bumping up against storage limits (both in space and time span). Here's hoping this site takes off.

Which Meta Tags Will Get My Site Rated Higher?

Fortunately or unfortunately there are no major META tags that will help your site be ranked higher. Anybody that says so is trying to sell you something.

Several years ago there were two META tags whose expressed purpose was to help you describe your site.

<meta name="description" content="Place Description Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Place Keywords Here" />

Developers and SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) quickly started to take advantage of the tags. One of the more eggregious ways that people took advantage of these tags was by putting highly ranked search terms in the tags even though those terms had nothing whatsoever to do with the site in question.

The logic behind this was that people would find and see the site even though it had nothing to do with what the people were searching for. This may or may not have been effective for the sites who were abusing the system but it annoyed people who were using the search engines. It also annoyed the decision makers at Google and other search engines. The result was that these two meta tags became deprecated: search engines no longer valued the information in these tags.

Once again, anybody who says there are meta-tags that will help your site be rated highly is -- at best -- many years out of date.

Is there anything you can do to get your site ranked higher? Yes, there are many things that can be done but none of them include META tags.

If You are Into Geeky Humor:

This guy has some great comics: xkcd. It's worth going through the archives.