Kress Consulting

Chartbeat looks interesting.  At $10/mo., realtime analytics for your website.  How many people are looking at your website right now? How many of them are writing (i.e. focused in a form field), how many are reading?  As a bonus, you get an alert if your website crashes, hits a simultaneous user threshold, or slows to a crawl.

I’m pretty excited about Google Wave.  It promises (threatens?) to overturn the paradigm of online communication — taking email, instant messaging, collaborative documents and turning them into a new, well-integrated thing.  As I understand it, a “wave” is a dynamic conversation that can incorporate all of the above, plus photos, links, etc.  Among the interesting features:

1. Replies and comments are shown in context — so that it’s clear exactly what part of a message is being replied to or referenced — without having to “quote” or repeat parts of the original message.
2. Replies and comments are live — like instant messaging — so you can see the conversation evolve as it proceeds, rather than waiting until someone finishes typing.
3. Conversations include revision history, so you can “replay” the conversation from start to finish.  You can see who said what, when, and who changed what, when.  Especially great for people who come into a conversation late.
4. Waves are open — with APIs and extensions that let you incorporate waves into other pages or locations, and add new functionality to waves.

Looks like something to watch.

Google is making half a million books, unprotected by copyright, available for free on Sony’s (SNE) electronic book-reading device, the companies were set to announce Thursday.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-03-19-google-sony-e-book-deal_N.htm

I’m pretty excited that Amazon has released Kindle software for the iPhone.  I’ve been interested in the Kindle, an ebook reader that comes very close to what I would consider an adequate book-reading device.  But I’ve got too many gadgets already.  Running the Kindle software on my iPhone means I can have most of the advantages of the Kindle, plus the advantages of the iPhone, plus one less device.  It sounds great.  I need to see if it really works the way I would want it to, though. Downloading now…

This article in Library Journal was written for libraries, but it transfers well to nonprofit organizations and, for the most part, businesses as well.  What are the essential ingredients for a library homepage?  Brian Mathews says:

• Self-promotion (Orange County Library System)
• Segmentation to separate audiences (Colorado State University, Buffalo State College)
• Visual cues (North Carolina State University)
• Inspiring photos (Seattle Public Library)
• Search boxes (Free Library of Philadelphia,   University of Virginia)
• Mobile-friendly pages (Kankakee Public Library)
• Feedback mechanisms (Oklahoma State University)
• Redundancy (University of Washington)
• Analytics (Google Analytics)
• An easy way to ask for help (University of Tennessee)

I am a connoisseur of top-ten lists, and this is a really good one.

Google has released 1.5 million public domain books, part of its Google Books project, in a format designed for iPhones and Android phones.

http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/

The Importance of Being Earnest.  Oliver Twist.  Epictetus.  No Stephen King, though.

Userfly lets you add a line of javascript to your website and record your visitors’ mousing and typing behavior.  I can see how that would be useful, but it feels creepy to me. Should we tell our visitors if we are watching them that closely?

Have you seen the new image from the Google-sponsored satellite? It’s amazing. Google Maps has already changed the way we orient ourselves in the world. I wonder how 50-centimeter resolution will tweak that orientation.

Jakob Nielsen’s latest study of web habits finds that people are more impatient than ever. They don’t want to be distracted by features or promotions; they just want to get what they came for, and leave. They are task-obsessed.

On the way to completing their task, they want to use search engines to get to the exact page they want to go to, rather than going to a home page and navigating, or using a bookmark.

They tend to be annoyed, rather than charmed, by widgets and applications that are supposed to make websites more user-friendly.

This is satisfying on one level, as it confirms my own anti-bling web preferences. On another level, it confirms my concerns about library webpages — as I’ve written before, library resources must be visible to Google in order to be findable.

No one wants to navigate their way through a library website to a book record or a news article. We want to be able to Google a book title and end up on a page with a “Get it” button. Online catalogs need to open up, or be supplanted by a search tool like WorldCat.

O’Reilly Radar pointed me to this slide presentation about the mobile web. It’s worth watching, both for some context on how big the mobile web is going to be, and for basic information about how websites need to be designed to optimize access on mobile devices (i.e. cell phones and web-enabled PDAs).