Our online lives are increasingly spent staring at advertisements and commercials. Understandably so, we’re bombarded in hopes that we’ll click something, and someone, somewhere is making money off of our time this way. Traditional models of online advertising are pay-per-impression (per view on websites), pay-per-click (for clicking through), or pay-per-action (where users actually act on [...]
I was doing some experiments with Adam in the lab on Friday, and we discovered some interesting variations in the way that Firefox and Safari implement the HTML 5 Cache Manifest specification. I think this is a particularly important feature to have implemented consistently across platforms because it is the make-or-break feature of HTML5 that [...]
Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information [...]
Last April we presented results at CHI 2009 about how people used List-It, our open source Firefox plugin when it was released in September 2008. Since this initial study, we’ve had quite a few more users – we just hit our 13,000th registered account on September 1st, 2009! More importantly, more than 600 people have [...]
One of the most exciting aspects of the (in-progress) HTML5 specification is the number of data-centric features it contains. It’s almost as if the committee is saying a big, “OK, OK! We heard you!” to all the data-heads out there and is providing not one, not two, not three, but four different ways to [...]
For non-programmers, spreadsheets are usually the option of choice when it comes to keeping track of non-trivial amounts of structured data. This is seen in all kinds of settings ranging from the business world to public administration and academic research. Spreadsheets, however, can only capture one kind of data structure: separate tabular [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]