–Engage

My fave blogs (no aggregators)

1. Ok-Cancel – a comic strip, great articles, and a rabid commenting community make this blog one of my favorites.
2. Functioning Form – One of the most intelligent bloggers on design of digital systems I have met and read. Covering these topics: visual design’s importance to UX, social-technologies, AJAX/RIAs
3. Borkado – A great blog on the state of Web 2.0
4. Ajaxian – while they concentrate a tad too much on the state of the technology of Ajax, they are still an indespensible resources for anyone dealing with any side of AJAX-based web applications.
5. Web 2.0 Central – Besides the very inventive URL, this is agreat source to learn about the latest releases, rumors, and such around the “startup” craze within the web-based software community. I think they confuse AJAX for Web 2.0 a bit too much, but despitet he blog title, it is a fun resource that I depend upon. In this category of blogs, I have to give an honorable mention to Emily Chan’s eHub.
6. Good Experience Newsletter – While I prefer the newsletter format of this “blog” I have to give it mention here as Mark Hurst’s writings are definitely an important part of the every week experience.
7. Berkun Blog – Scott is a great thinker regarding both project management and user experience.
8. All this chittah-chattah – Steve Portigal’s constant updates have a spattering of some great insights and critiques.
9. knemeyer – Musings on design and other high-level thinking, Dirk’s blog while spartan is a good read to keep track of.
10. PingMag – I forget how I found this recent add-on to my OPML file, but I find their topic matter around design to be different and inspiring.

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BarCamp an “unconference” as the organizers of the orginal in Palo Alto called it has been organized in NYC in January. Check out the details here.

I particularly like the organizing a conference on a wiki.

Recently, Gmail came out with a new interesting and for me unexpected feature. They call it Web Clips. It’s a fairly basic piece of functionality whereby a user sets up a bunch of RSS feeds (subscriptions). Then whenever you view a list like your Inbox, or a conversation (a message) at the top of the panel that displays the list or panel is a link title of an article that would have been called up from one of your subscriptions.

It looks like this:

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Recently Jensen Harris, Lead Program Manager of the Microsoft Office User Experience Team, gave a very excellent presentation to BayCHI Jensen’s Office UI Blog”>(get it here).

I have also been following closely Jensen’s Office UI Blog with great interest. At this point though I have a few questions on a theoretcial level:

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A few months ago I submitted an article to UXMatters.com. Today that article about RIAs is finally published. Take a look!

A while back I posited a question “What is white-space in Interaction Design (IxD)?” I had no answer then, but a discussion on the IxDA discussion list about non-US examples of design brought up an example out of Sweden’s Interaction Institute known as Brain Ball. Brain Ball is a game where the person who relaxes the most wins. Using brain patterns to determine the level of relaxation, a ball between two people will move based on those measurements. Go to the above link to read more about it.

In reading about Brain Ball it occurred to me that a allegory of relaxation is “inaction”. In this case it is at an almost unconscious level, so it is not exactly stillness of motion, but also stillness of thought. I compared this idea to something that Robert Fabricant of Frog Design said recently at an IxDA event in NYC. He spoke about what he called the “feedback loop” between user and product.

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