Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox no longer rebelling against past excesses
"For 18 years, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column was published on his useit.com website. ...
This was a good run, but it's now time to unify this content with the main Nielsen Norman Group website. Thus, the old Alertbox columns have now been moved from useit.com to nngroup.com and future columns will be published directly on nngroup.com. ...
Even after the dot-com bubble burst, there was a long period where the barebones useit.com design stood out and elevated the site above many latecomer UX websites. Cutting through the clutter is an important value on the web, which has so much more information than anybody needs.
However, eventually it makes less sense to rebel against the excesses of the past. Also, with almost 500 Alertbox columns published, it became clear that more navigational apparatus was needed. One solution could have been to redesign useit.com to make it more like other sites. But why bother? If a big change was needed anyway, it was better to use the opportunity to integrate the articles with the company information and host all the material on the same website with a single navigation structure and a single search. So that's what we did: no more microsite for the Alertbox."
(The Nielsen Norman Group, 31 December 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market
"For the past decade, the LMS market has evolved from providing tools that were purchased at the departmental level to enterprise-class systems purchased at the institutional or even system-wide level. However, since about 2004 the market has been fairly consistent, dominated by Blackboard corporate strategy.
Blackboard went public in 2004, signaling a real market worth of investors' attention. In 2005 – 2006, the market was dominated by Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT, the number 2 player in LMS, resulting in a somewhat extended Department of Justice approval cycle. Starting in 2006, Blackboard was awarded the infamous '138 patent and subsequently filed suit against Desire2Learn, the new number 2 player in LMS. About this same time, open source started to become a viable alternative to proprietary systems in general, and Blackboard in particular, in the form of Moodle and Sakai. From 2006 – 2009, open source became fully established for campus-wide or system-wide LMS deployments. In late 2009, Desire2Learn successfully fended off Blackboard patent lawsuits, ultimately resulting in all 38 claims being ruled invalid by a US Court of Appeals. On the heels of these efforts in 2009, Blackboard purchased Angel, taking another competitor out of the market."
(Phil Hill, 4 August 2011, e-Literatee-Literate)
Fig.1 "LMS Market Share", [http://www.deltainitiative.com/higher-education/lms-strategy]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Open Archives Initiative
"The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.
The OAI-ORE Executive provides overall leadership to the project and holds primary responsibility for the project budget and the ultimate success of the work. Carl Lagoze - Computing and Information Science, Cornell University, Herbert Van de Sompel - Digital Library Research and Prototyping, Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library.
Funding and Support: Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906)."
(Open Archives Initiative)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Zootool: a social bookmarking tool
"Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet.
We are a small, bootstrapped startup, located in Mannheim, Germany. Driven by a passion for design, web, code and all kind of nerdery, we are working hard to built the most awesome bookmark tool for geeks like us and people who love the web."
(Bastian Allgeier, Hartmut Wöhlbier and Nicolas Cormier)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
What is Pervasive Media?
"For more than a decade, scientists have promised a world of devices and services that infuse the landscape of our daily lives with experiences that are designed to fit the needs of the situation. Beyond the laboratories, computing and communication technology has created a world in which people carry small, powerful, wireless computers and phones that are connected to the internet almost all of the time, from almost anywhere.
From gaming to outdoor displays, performance to public transport, pervasive media is delivered into the fabric of everyday life, tuned to the context at the moment of delivery. It sits at the emerging intersection of mobile computers, media technology, networks and sensors and offers significant opportunities for new types of digital media content and services, especially those linked to an awareness of place and location.
Pervasive Media is basically any experience that uses sensors and/or mobile/wireless networks to bring you content (film, music, images, a game...) that's sensitive to your situation - which could be where you are, how you feel, or who you are with. Oyster Cards are a simple pervasive device: so are audio guides at tourist attractions, which can give you extra information according to where you are and which bits you've been to already.
Pervasive Media is Digital Media delivered into the fabric of real life and based on the situational context at the moment of delivery"
(Pervasive Media Studio)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
