MaisonBisson

Here: have at it with a Swedish nuclear power plant simulator. Raise and lower the control rods, turn pumps on and off, open and close valves, just make sure you don’t blowup anything.

Go look at the Chernobyl tour to see what happens when you mess up.

The original page includes this context:

The control-room operators of the Kärnobyl nuclear power plant are telecommuting and are running the plant through the Web. However, the mean time between failure for the components of Kärnobyl is not great. Try to keep the reactor stable when component failures occur!

I won’t link to The New York Times anymore, but when Ross Mayfield quotes them, I don’t have to.

The story is that life is full of interruptions. The typical office environment today apparently allows workers “only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else.” Worse, “each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet.”

Interesting stuff. Mayfield points it out as a reason to build more awareness of this in our communication/social software. He also popped this link to Jon Udell’s post on attention economics.

I said “identity management is the next big thing” back in September. That was before I’d seen Sxip founder Dick Hardt’s presentation on Identity 2.0. Zach peeped me the link and told me I wouldn’t regret watching the presentation. He was right. Everybody, especially the people who don’t yet care about identity management, should take a look.

Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

Then, while Googling for something else I ran across a post in Branding Blog

If you’ve heard me speak publicly, you’ve heard me say, “Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.” Do you know the language of your customers?

Connected, no?

Tech Tuesdays: Blogs and Blogging

onOne Software‘s Genuine Fractals

[How-To: Automatically download and convert TV for your iPod – hackaday.com

]1

Ross Mayfield says Web 2.0 is “made of people.” Tim O’Reilly tells us it’s about participation. And to Marc Canter, it’s the connectivity.

More to come…

International Urban Glow – Europe Underground

From Ross Mayfield in Many2Many:

this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private

Whale Watching On Lake Michigan?

Way back in 2003, ClassroomHelp.com published a story on whale watching in Lake Michigan. As it turns out, the info was based on content on a Geocities.com member page that suggests they book trips to see and swim with marine fauna in the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, ClassroomHelp.com later posted a retraction saying “we thought it was true …it looked so real. It looked like a legitimate Web site.” Jim Wenzloff notes

we asked some marine biologists in Michigan if they knew anything about whales in Lake Michigan. They didn’t know what we were talking about. Searches on the Internet were not very fruitful. Of all the information floating around cyber space, we found only three sites on freshwater whales in the Great Lakes.

Finally, he “contacted the [whale watch] company, and they told us that their web site was farcical (not real) and for entertainment.”

Thanks to Andrew Mutch for the pointer in a message to the Web4Lib group.

“Web Pages That Suck: learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design.”

Where are the MIT Weblog Survey Results? They were supposed to be out September first, but they’re still missing… All I can find is this older page from Fernanda Viegas.