Experiencing Information

I started using Daylife just after it first launched. Since then I dropped if from my “Daily Stuff” tabs in FireFox that I usually open simulatenously when I go online. I liked a lot of things about the service, but it just wasn’t something that I needed at the time.
Just having revisited the site, I noticed some major changes to the user experience. The huge, page-filling image that previously occupied the start page has been removed in favor of more genre-conforming elements for online news sites. And for the most part, the site is far less image-rich than before. In areas like “Celebrity” this is unfortunate, but overall it’s probably a good move. With more focus on text and links, Daylife should be able to better expose and leverage their algorithms and entity extraction. And I like the basic information design on the site, so it works well.

A next step for them might be to expose more user-generated content and metadata. Comments, blogging, tagging, etc., would set it apart from other similar news services. (Now, there’s a good quesiton: how can tagging be leveraged on a current awareness service, where articles come on and go off the radar in a matter of days? With no time to incubate a collection of tags, what do you do there?). But their API is already a huge step in the Web 2.0 direction, so I’m going to knock them.

Anyway, I’m going to give it another shot and add it back to my daily tabs.

Spock is a new people-finding service available free on the Web. It is currently an invitation-only beta service, which means you must receive an invitation from Spock or a friend to sign up for the service. Apparently, their entity resolution technology is killer.

Any one get a login yet? I’ve requested one but am still waiting.

Scientists at the Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have an interesting new technique for improving online reading and comprehension. Basically, the human brain doesn’t deal with block text well. Instead, our eyes view text as if they’re peering through a straw. We only focus on a small area at once, the lines above and below can cause noise and distraction while reading.

Here’s the detailed study of the technique:
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/

Of course, we’re so used to reading block text, this might seem counter-intuitive. How could thousands of years of writing and printing be wrong? Well, physiologically block text is not the most conducive for humans to read.

Here’s an article about it with an example of the technique:
Live Ink offers better way to read text online
(Mark Coker, VentureBeat, May 10, 2007)

Be sure to check out the image of before and after formatting.

But do we really want all of our online texts looking like a haiku? For one, this would make pages many times longer. And printing would take reams of paper. So, solving one problem may cause others.

The interesting over-arching lesson from this, however, is that HOW text is presented affects how we read, understand, and interact with information. Information design is crucial to the user experience on many levels.

Maybe there’ll be a FireFox plugin to switch this kind of formatting on and off from your browser?