Language Problem at WashingtonPost.com

There’s an article in Monday’s online Washington Post about the cherry blossom festival and the need for Japanese speakers to help out with increasing number of tourists from Japan. The picture is my son, Renny, who’s fluent in Japanese. But that’s not the point of this post. What’s interesting is when you look at the blogs that have commented on the article....

We’re on a Mission from God

A few days ago I stumbled across this great article via Slashdot about a musician named Sandi Thom, who in lieu of physically touring to support her new album, uses an online service called Streaming Tank instead to host a nightly concert. Initially I had visons of some online cable access show that had all of 3 viewers (think Wayne’s World),...

Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems

Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable....

Paid Content: A $2 Billion Industry

I didn’t want to pay for premium content on The New York Times site. For most of college and graduate school, I started my day off surfing NYTimes.com website for free. So when I awoke one morning last year and was confronted by a gothic orange T guarding my weekly dose of Paul Krugman,...

Adventures in Image Searching

Here is the first result if you query Microsoft’s new image search engine for “bill gates“:

Here is the first result if you search Google Images for “bill gates“:

Searches were done at 5:00 pm EST on Saturday, March 18....