pelago

The information that shows up on the Web is part of the Web’s world. But you could never get to the world of the Web if you started only with information.

Red Hat’s software bundle focuses on the basics: the excellent Mozilla Web browser, the OpenOffice productivity suite (which read all of the Microsoft Office files I tried), and Evolution, an application featuring e-mail, an address book and a calendar that feels like a simplified version of Microsoft Outlook.

Smart businesses realize that they can take advantage of the Web to run certain distributed aspects of their operations much more efficiently.

While it’s true that anyone with a Web browser can access your site, your target audience really consists of the people that will most often make use of (read, search, shop, explore) your site. Because your site can’t do everything for everybody, its success largely depends on meeting the needs and expectations of this pre-defined group of people.

An intranet can deliver return on investment (ROI) by either reducing the cost, or expanding the ability, to communicate. By shifting manual processes to the intranet, the cost of accessing and processing information is reduced. The intranet speedily delivers information to large numbers of people. This gives the organization a greater capacity to change.

A draft bill seen by CNET News.com marks the boldest political effort to date by record labels and movie studios to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that they view as an increasingly dire threat to their bottom line. Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman, D-Calif., and Howard Coble, R-N.C., the measure would permit copyright holders to perform nearly unchecked electronic hacking if they have a “reasonable basis” to believe that piracy is taking place.

Believe it or not, we are winning the war for a more usable universe of products, software and systems. Over the past decade, we’ve seen huge usability improvements, from cell phones to accounting software to web sites. But don’t even think about relaxing. Now is the time to advance.

Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters which feel much more personal than websites. In usability testing, success rates were high for subscribe and unsubscribe tasks, but users were frustrated by newsletters that demanded too much of their time.

Sixty-one percent of all Americans go online at least once a month, compared with 59 percent at the end of 2001, the Conference Board said in its quarterly report on Internet usage. The private research firm is better known for its monthly survey of consumer confidence. The survey of about 7,000 homes, conducted with NFO WorldGroup and Forrester Research, found satisfaction levels rose across a spectrum of activities, including personal communication, shopping and game-playing.

If you are developing a navigation scheme, you will probably want to make it hierarchical if your content lends itself to this arrangement. Most people will call this a taxonomy.