Global Nerdy

I saw this story on the local news in Toronto, but it's now caught the attention of the New York Times:

When Detective Sergeant Jorge Lasso of Hamilton, Ontario, wanted to circulate a surveillance video while investigating an apparent murder near a hip-hop club, he thought of his own children, who are in their 20s.

“They get all their news from the Internet,” he said. “I realized if I was going to communicate with this demographic, we were going to have to go that way.”

So rather than just giving the video — which shows two men whom the police want to question entering a nightclub — to local television stations Sgt. Lasso also posted it on YouTube.

Here's the video in question:

As Federated Media puts it: “Another example of crowdsourcing, but then good police work always has been.”

Links:

• New York Times article: Fighting Crime Using Videos on YouTube
• YouTube: Club 77 Hamilton security video

(You might want to see this earlier article, News Flash: Hollywood Depictions of Hacking and Cracking are Not Accurate!)

Although Star Trek often got computer interfaces wrong (remember the monotone voice saying “Working…” whenever the Entriprise's computer got set to a task?), there's a great truth about UI in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

In that movie, Captain Kirk and company must return to Earth in the late 1980's to retrieve a pair of humpback whales. There's a scene in which Mr. Scott asks to use a plexiglass manufacturer's computer — a Mac Plus — with funny results. First he tries speaking to the machine, which has no result. He is then handed a mouse, which he looks at quizzically and then assumes is a microphone for voice commands. Finally, he's told to just use the keyboard, to which he replies “A keyboard? How quaint!”. The odd thing is that he starts types at something resembling 200 words a minute, although it's likely he's only seen a keyboard in the 23rd century equivalent of a history book.

User interface guru Jakob Nielsen points out this nitpicker's detail — “Time travellers can use current designs” — in his top ten list of Hollywood UI bloopers. I've listed his bloopers below, but for details, go visit his site:

1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs
3. The 3D UI
4. Integration is Easy, Data Interoperates
5. Access Denied / Access Granted
6. Big Fonts
7. Star Trek's Talking Computer
8. Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls)
9. You've Got Mail is Always Good News
10. “This is Unix, It's Easy”

Of course, like the Hollywood depictions of computers that I blogged about earlier, these bloopers exist because they're good storytelling devices. That doesn't stop people from expecting computers to work this way, but then again, everything I know about American jurisprudence I learned from Law and Order…

Link

Steve “Micro Persuasion Rubel” points to a Comscore Media Metrix study that shows that Canada has the largest percentage of blog readers in their online population, followed by Spain, France, the U.K., Netherlands, the U.S., Italy and Germany:

As the Canadian half of Global Nerdy, I'm getting the sudden urge to re-jig my Google Ads layouts. It's Christmas, you know.

Links:

• Steve Rubel's article: Canadians, British Read Blogs More Than Americans Do
• Comscore media Metrix: The Score: Blogs Gain Favor Worldwide

When I get a new computer, I generally put away the mouse that came with it and plug in my trusty Logitech MX 500 mouse. Whether it's for filling out TPS Reports, blogging or coding, it's the one mouse I swear by (actually, two mice — one for the Mac, one for the Windows box, but they're both the same make and model). I hear that its button action isn't that hot for games, but since I prefer console gaming these days, thats not a really big problem for me.

As both my Logitechs approach their fourth year of daily use, one of them is showing signs of poor motion tracking while the other's button action is getting a bit “bouncy”. I've been eyeing replacement mice, and the recent new York Times piece on the MX Revolution caught my interest. The article describes it as…

…a high-end mouse designed not for those shooting games, but for an activity far more fearsome: handling the vast pile of reports, Web pages, spreadsheets, e-mail threads and other materials that the average desk jockey can face each day at the office.”

Implicit in that description is that it'll make going through code and ebooks — and I'm going through increasing amounts of them these days — like a hot knife through butter.

The speed boost comes from a new scroll wheel, “a heavy, finely balanced wheel that spins through distances that would normally require many scrolling motions and many minutes,” and software that allows for high-speed “coarse” scrolling — great for zipping through hundreds of pages at high speed — as well as standard “fine” scrolling, when you want to scroll line by line.

As a bonus, it's cordless, unlike my current MX 500s.

The MX revolution requires some software to be installed to take advantage of its hyper-scrolling capabilities. Windows XP is supported out of the box, you have to download the Mac OS X software and there's a Vista beta available from their site (the final version of the Vista driver is promised for January 2007).

The price tag is a bit steep — the Logitech site prices it at US$99 — but considering that I recently blew $60 on an XBox 360 wireless controller that I use nowhere nearly as often as a mouse, it might be worth it.

Links:

• New York Times article: A Mouse on a Mission in the Document Maze
• Logitech's page for the MX Revolution mouse
• Michael Parekh's blog entry on the Revolution MX

You've probably heard by now that we — er — “You” are Time magazine's person of the year. Let me tell you, this wasn't how I planned to get that title.

I'm that this title will please some people, make some others groan and will probably annoy the hell out of one of their advertisers. Case in point: if you were to navigate to Time's “Person of the Year” section as of this writing, you'll be treated to this Chrysler Sebring ad first:

Here's a closer look at that video window in the center of the page:

Well, if there's something positive to say about this, it's that it would appear that there is a “Chinese wall” between Time's editorial and advertising departments…

(Found via Reddit, via Daily Kos.)

Link

Cisco/Linksys picks a fine time to introduce an "iWhatever" product. Ripping off Apple's marketing 11 years ago has finally paid off! Gizmodo opens the Giz-kimono on their "iPhone on Monday" tease:

It's not what any of us expected. The iPhone is a voip phone made by Linksys. Cisco, their parent company, has owned that trademark since 1996. And they're announcing their product in a few hours.

So the iPhone is a VOIP handset, and not by Apple. Now, the bigger story presents itself: What will Apple call its cellphone?

 I guess the "i" in Cisco's "iPhone" stands for "instant letdown." As for what Apple might call their own iPhone, now that the name is taken, my guess is they'll call it an iPod, since one way to sell a $300 handset is to sell a $250 iPod with a $50 phone attached. If you call it a phone, people start comparing it to the thing from Samsung that Cingular is giving away for "free."

Tags: iPhone, Cisco, Linksys, iPod, Apple, Gizmodo

In The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, they've got an article that talks about points that were covered in the Images and Search Engines session at the recent Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference. The panel apparently had some great points about using images on your site, and we're passing these points along to you:

• Don't put the bulk of your text as images. Search engines can't read text in images, and neither can readers, whether RSS or readers for the blind. If all the text on your pages is graphics, it's effectively unindexable and inaccessible.
• Use descriptive alt tags for images! “Image1” and “logo” aren't descriptive — use alt tags like “Chart showing the path of stock X” or the name of your company if the graphic is your company's logo.
• Don't overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don't stuff it with extra keywords.
• If your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. “Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.”
• Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? Try looking at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?
• Shoppers often use image search to see the things they want to buy. “If you have a retail site, make sure that you have images of your products (and that they can be easily identified with alt text, headings, and textual descriptions).”
• Opt into enhanced image search in Google's webmaster tools. “This enables us to use your images in the Google Image Labeler, which harnesses the power of the community for adding metadata to your images.”

Link

(Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog)