Michael Zimmer.org

Beth Noveck of New York Law School argues for the development of a deliberative interface to “translate theoretical ideals about the goals of deliberation into…new media to enable individuals to participate in new and more effective social groups.” She presents a design heuristic to help ensure the values of deliberation are built into future interface designs – an excellent example of how values can be embedded in technology design.
Here are some stimulating passages from her keynote talk presented at the recent Stanford University Conference on Online Deliberation:
…as we move from …

Yahoo! Research Labs released a beta version of a new search tool called Yahoo! Mindset allowing users to filter results on an axis of “shopping” (i.e., commercial) vs “researching” (i.e., non-commercial) sources. From their site:

Find the results you like.
Sort the way you need.

A Yahoo! Research Labs demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).
Given how search engines have …

Korean and Finnish university researchers have conducted a new study into how cultural differences influence computer interface requirements, focusing on how Korean, Japanese, and Finnish people responded to different mobile data services and how those responses matched cultural aspects. The researchers designed their survey to rank people’s responses in four basic cultural dimensions: Uncertainty avoidance, or the effort people take to maintain predictability; context, or the amount of information needed to fully understand something; individualism vs. collectivism; and the proclivity to multitask.
The teams from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, …

Today’s New York Times article “Your Internet Search Results, in the Round” features Grokker, the graphical search engine interface that presents results in a spatial map.
Currently, the major search engines have all limited displays to ranked lists of sites. The weakness of this method of displaying results is that few surfers ever go beyond the first page of results even when there may be thousands of related links to their query.
Groxis executives say that by showing categories instead of a ranking listing, searchers may uncover gold they would have otherwise …

Insdie Google points to Lee Gomes’s article “Folders That Now Seem So Yesterday May Be Very Handy Tomorrow” in today’s The Wall Street Journal arguing that Google and others, revolutionizing individual computing by eliminating folders, are actually making things less useful, not more. Gomes admits that while folders and subfolders, arranged in a neat hierarchy, don’t work very well for the Web, they still contain utility when organizing e-mails or files on our own computer.
The money line is “Like a hammer seeing everything as a nail, Google seems to see …

There’s a discussion at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine about what term should be used to describe “blogs” (the assumption being, apparently, that “blogs” is too techie, or has a negative connotation, or something like that). Jeff has frequently used the term “citizens’ media,” but Bill Keller suggested perhaps “peoples’ media” is a better fit. Jeff’s current offering is Volksmedia: “I like that. It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude.” An almost certain response was the connotation between “volks” and Hitler. So, toss that out.
I …

(via Question Technology)Ellen Ullman has a great op-ed in the New York Times today about computers and attention:
There are unused icons on your desktop”: this message sometimes appears in a balloon on the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen. I can’t imagine why I should be alerted to this fact. The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it. But no matter what I might be doing at the moment – writing, reading, coding, thinking or (God forbid) simply letting my thoughts trail off …

(via Slashdot)The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. They state:
mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.
mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person’s interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.
An mSpace presents several associated categories from an information space, and then lets users manipulate how …

SphereXP is a 3D desktop anhancement for Microsoft Windows XP. In their words, it takes “the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level. It offers a new way to organize objects on the desktop such as icons and applications.” Check the videos and screenshots to get the idea. [Servers seem to be down due to a Slashdot effect]
While I’m very much in favor of new interface designs that help us break from the strict hierarchy of a traditional file tree structure (which GUI doesn’t really accomplish), this …