Thursday, May 20, 2004

PERMALINK

Microsoft Word's Baroque era For those of us working primarily on the Web, Microsoft Word's various "Smart" features (smart quotes, auto correct, auto format, etc.) have always been hydras whose heads one had to repeatedly lop off. Even if you didn't work in Word yourself, colleagues would submit copy composed in it, and you'd have to deal with the problem of introducing junk characters. Some of us have become reasonably familiar with exactly which boxes and buttons you need to press to "web-safe" a Word installation. Now Microsoft seems to have grown hip to how frequently we have to tell Word to "stop doing" the things its programmers have spent years enabling it to do. This is from today's New York Times review by David Pogue of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac:   Smart Buttons, descended from a similar feature in Word for Windows, are tiny pop-up menus that appear in your text whenever Word has something to offer you. For example, one appears whenever Word auto-formats something you've typed (a chronic sore spot with Microsoft customers): turning a Web address into a difficult-to-edit Web link, for example, or automatically numbering a list. You've always been able to turn off these intrusions in a dialog box or undo individual changes by pressing Command-Z. But Smart Tags put "Undo" and "Stop doing this" commands right in front of you where you can't miss them. I broke out laughing when I read this. Consider the baroque logic: Microsoft has now reached that rarefied state of software existence in which it can offer "improvements" in the form of new features that make it easier to turn off those annoying "improvements" of yesteryear that were hitherto too difficult to discard! But how deep within Word's menus must one hunt to turn off "Smart Buttons" if they get annoying? And is anyone at Microsoft going to flip the page of the newspaper section in which Pogue's review appears and read "A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple"? comment [] 5:31:27 PM | permalink

Technorati: 2.4 million and counting Yesterday evening I visited Technorati's first "developers' Salon," an event at which non-developer bloggers and "content producer" types like me were made to feel quite welcome. You can find blog notes about the event from JD Lasica and Christian Crumlish. Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks presented the latest stats from the "cosmos" of blogs that Technorati tracks: 11-12,000 new blogs are added each day. (Roughly 45 percent are abandoned over time.) Over 200,000 new blog postings per day. 2.4 million blogs total tracked. That's some serious volume -- though it pales compared to the total size of the Web that, say, Google surveys Technorati specializes in tracking, and keeping up with, the part of the Web that's constantly being updated. The blogs it follows provide a collective editorial filter on the news and the Web (see for instance the Technorati "Current Events" page). Among the most interesting graphs were those that demonstrated the size and dynamic importance of blogging's "tail end of the curve." There's a vast number of blogs that don't have thousands of readers or links; maybe they only have ten or a hundred people reading them and linking to them. But, both individually and aggregated into small relational groupings, they provide a wealth of data about what people care about and what's on their minds. Sifry said that Technorati is trying to figure out better ways to "expose the really interesting stuff that's going on in relatively small communities." The room was packed with three or four dozen developers and blog enthusiasts filled with pizza and beer and the unquenchable notion that their code could make a difference. Technorati is a small startup company (eight on staff now, Sifry said) with a clear and honestly communicated notion that it will at some point need to bring revenue in via advertising and subscription services. But right now it's at that happy moment when its programmers can just explore new ways of making their users' worlds more interesting. comment [] 12:41:08 PM | permalink