learnandteachonline.com

Review sites like PC Mag and Cnet should weed out old reviews. Example. What are you going to do with a 2-year-old camcorder review? It's good they show the date, though (I guess), so you know not to bother with it.

I like eWeek's slideshows. This one's called "Online Sharing Dons Pinstripes." Catchy title that probably appeals to its audience though not so much to me.

Business Week and other magazines and news sites are doing this more and more to summarize articles. I think people like to page through short bits of copy and pictures. When I make them I always let the user have control rather than letting them run automatically, believing that people don't like to have the speed at which they read dictated by anybody else.

The only other complaint I have about the eWeek method of displaying is the show is I'd rather have it open in a new window. That way you don't have to scroll down each time you advance the slide. Annoying.

Yahoo Answers' design is all Web 2.0ish.

I don't know how to say this. It's going to sound conflicted.

I don't really like those little skinny buttons you see all over the place. Like this.

I think there have become too many of them.

But I do really like at least the idea of this tool for making them as PNGs online.

Actually, I think I'd like it a little better if it made the buttons in HTML with CSS, since they come out all unanti-aliased anyway.

An ad on the paidContent.org site might indicate that Web 2.0 design principles are creeping into advertisements. I popped over there from my aggregator to see if there was more on the Lucent story. Yes, but alas, no. There's only a link to a subscribers-only Wall Street Journal article. Lucent's an important employer in Naperville, my town. Or it was. It's sad to see the empty parking lots around those big buildings.

I love the graphics on Jeff Harrell's blog.

Love it. Notice the big icons and kicker bar associated with categories.

Couple days ago, Dave Winer made friends with a bunch of women by saying he was tired of people talking about how their mother wouldn't understand something.

In Philadelphia (the movie), the Denzel Washington character said "Explain it to me like I'm a 4-year-old." That might be a substitute for using "your mother" as the lowest common denominator user.

Anyway, sometimes I think too much is made of dumbing things down. It may not be just women of a certain age who are not respected by some confident young purveyors of technology tools. If they're thinking "we have to make this idiot-proof," aren't they thinking that their audience is the hoi polloi, the great unwashed?

I've been around that attitude in companies and organizations, and it makes me uncomfortable to hear employees disrespecting customers -- the source of their income, and their ultimate boss. I worry that the attitude may subsciously creep into dealings with customers or tend to dictate disrespectful strategies in approaches to them.

People will rise to the level of expectations of them. You shouldn't drag the majority down to the level of the least aware. It's insulting.

Here's a post from almost a year ago that tells about dumbing down instructions on the web.

I'm not saying you shouldn't write carefully, and you shouldn't make things as clear as they can be. But too often you get one or two complaints and you are tempted to change things to make sure everybody gets it.

Take the person in the linked post who was all up in arms on receiving a mailing list subscription confirmation. She thought I was trying to trick her into buying a magazine subscription. In the end there were more than 2,000 people on that list of community planners of local National Safety Month events. I should use this one paranoid, irritated user as the model for dealing with all the others? I don't think so!

Used to be Netscape was a good lazyperson's HTML validator. Code that looked fine in IE would be all messed up in Netscape (especially tables). Now with IE7, it seems in my limited testing that it's less forgiving than Firefox.