Intrinsitivity

In my opinion, Jakob Nielson has always maintained an ugly website. Fortunately for him, he is a marketing genius, exploiting hype with hype and proving, once and for all, that image is more perception than percept. I gotta hand it to him.

But I don’t gotta hand my website to him, because his definition of usability is to create websites for the lowest common denominator. Yes, we Web developers should use alt attributes in our image tags. Yes, we should give end-users the ability to search our websites and to find the information they want in the fewest clicks.

Does this necessitate abandoning technologies like Adobe Flash or AJAX? Does research showing that most users passively observe content on social websites provide sufficient rationale for halting further development of those websites? 16.9 percent of the world is always offline. Does this mean we should abandon the Internet as a medium of communication? Second Life is in trouble.

Furthermore, does it not occur to Nielson that Web 2.0 might be evolving and that its user base might be relatively young because the technology behind Web 2.0 is itself relatively young? Does it not occur to him that a young user base might not preclude adoption by an older, wiser crowd? Finally, does it not also occur to him that it might be a subset of the older, wiser crowd called "managers" and "CEOs" who are pushing young Web developers to rapidly implement Web 2.0 design principles because most Internet users actually like not having to refresh their homepages to see new content? I wonder.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web 2.0 ‘distracts good design’

Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said.

As a rule, the proliferation of global communication networks have invalidated traditional business models that have relied on top-down production methodologies. The new, improved bottom-up business model works literally from the bottom up, from where end-users sit as monolithic boards of directors up to CEOs who do the former’s bidding or lose their cushy jobs.

Also as a rule, world leaders do not yet understand what the Internet means. Members of the U.S. Congress, for instance, are now notoriously known to conceive of the Internet as a set of tubes, as if it were a collection of interconnected television sets. This confusion is surprising, but, from a historical perspective, just another tumultuous technological transition.

WHO’S AFRAID OF GOOGLE?

Since going public in 2004, the Internet giant’s market value has grown to dwarf Disney and McDonald’s combined. Earlier this year, it became the most visited Web property in the world and was named the world’s most valuable brand. And its runaway success in search and advertising has big corporations like AT&T and Microsoft crying monopoly without a trace of irony.

PRESS RELEASE IBM Brings Nature to Computer Chip Manufacturing

First-Ever Manufacturing Application of "Self Assembly" Used to Create a Vacuum — the Ultimate Insulator — Around Nanowires for Next-Generation Microprocessors

IBM today announced the first-ever application of a breakthrough self-assembling nanotechnology to conventional chip manufacturing, borrowing a process from nature to build the next generation computer chips.

The natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth has been harnessed by IBM to form trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip.

In chips running in IBM labs using the technique, the researchers have proven that the electrical signals on the chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques.