Free Report On Accessible Web Design From Jakob Nielsen

December 18, 2007 – 7:46 am

Free from Nielsen Norman Group: Beyond ALT Text, Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities, a report on web design for users with disabilities. “Seventy-five best practices for design of websites and intranets, based on usability studies with people who use assistive technology” According to the blog post, usability is three times [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (7)



The “Show of Force” Brand

September 17, 2007 – 5:10 am

A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “the ‘force’ brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands.”
Army, iraq, show of force, brand, identity, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches, Politics & Controversy | Comments (1)

NMC’s 2006 Horizon Report

February 12, 2006 – 3:02 pm

I’d never heard of the New Media Consortium before, but they claim a mission to “advocate and stimulate the use of new learning and creative technologies in higher education.” Anyway, their 2006 Horizon Report identifies the following trends among those shaping the role of technology in education:

Dynamic knowledge creation and social computing tools and processes [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

The Bathroom Reader

December 10, 2005 – 11:44 am

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (31)

GAO Report Confirms Election Fraud

December 9, 2005 – 10:12 pm

This should be no surprise — especially to those who’ve been appropriately concerned about electronic voting machines: Lyn Davis Lear is reporting on a GAO report that concluded the 2004 election was fraudulent and a Diebold insider is blowing the whistle (via Engadget).
What does the report confirm? Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman summarize:

Some electronic voting [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)



OCLC Report: Libraries vs. Search Engines

December 6, 2005 – 11:33 pm

So, the report was released Monday, and it’s actually titled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), but the part I’m highlighting here is the results of the question that asked users to compare their experiences with search engines against their experiences with libraries.
Here’s the quesiton:
Satisfaction with the Librarian and the Search Engine — by [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (4)

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

November 23, 2005 – 12:53 pm

According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:
On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.
Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (10)

AWStats

August 29, 2005 – 12:12 pm

As much as I like the bstat functionality of bsuite, I never intended it to be a replacement for a full server log-based stats application. That’s why I’m happy my hosting provider offers AWStats. The reports suggested ways to optimize my pages so that I could control my bandwidth consumption — up to 3.7GB/day before [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (0)

Disobey

June 2, 2005 – 3:19 am

Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (3)