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Attention-Worthy, Week of 2009-09-27

My weekend has been focused on EuroIA, the early European information architect conference, this year held in Copenhagen. As you’d expect, I had a great time and met a lot of cool people!

A good way to start off this week’s link mania is with some impressions from the conference. Jeroen van Geel over at Johnny Holland did a good job summarizing many of the sessions; check out day 1 and day 2! Few people have had time to put their presentations online, this one, from The Architecture of Fun, is interesting.

I’ve actually had some time to collect links before the conference.  Let’s continue with another set of slides, this time from SeedCamp Week in London. Startup Metrics for Pirates, expands a bit on the AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) acronym - and uses a lot of funky colors. On the same topic is 7 Things I Learned From My Startup Failing, which talks about skill and focus as keys to success.

Some different types of research also caught my eye this week. This presentation, titled Developing and Modeling Mobile Application [PDF] is really about more than the title suggests. It describes KLM, Keystroke-Level Model, which predicts how much time it takes to execute a task. This seems to be a quite complex system, but heavily researched and empirically validated. Also about mobile is The Google App Market - An Analysis. Since I own an Android phone (and can confirm that most apps are not that good…), I find this article especially interesting.

Not related, is the fact that I found out about webcredibility.org - and the fact that it doesn’t exist anymore. The site was run by a Stanford research lab and published, among other things, guidelines for achieving credibility online. These guidelines can still be read though, thanks to archive.org. Make sure to read some of the related papers as well; I liked What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study [PDF].

I’ll finish up with two random links. First, logoblog.org goes through a list of college and university logotypes. Secondly, The story of the Gömböc is just plain weird - a shape with an apparent mind of its own.

Final note: I experimented with automatically importing my Google Reader shared item into the blog. Ultimately, I decided against it - follow my shared items here instead.

Attention-Worthy, Week of 2009-09-19

I a world where micro equals better, it’s sometimes nice to focus on just one thing for an hour or two. Here is a collection of links to longer form content that I’ve found interesting over the past week.

Longest, and my favorite, is From Nand to Tetris in 12 hours. In this 2007 Google Tech Talk, Professor Shimon Schocken describes a one semester course in which students build (simulated) hardware and software, for a fully functioning general purpose computer. It’s an inspiring video, both from an educational point of view, and because it gives an insight into the inner workings of computers.

Even more technical is Rich Hickey’s presentation, A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]. You don’t have to understand it all to appreciate it—it covers a lot of the general design of object-oriented programming, and how that’s based on several assumptions of time.

Next, I’m happy to note that the book Dive Into Python 3 is released as a free download. A great resource for Python geeks looking to learn about version 3.

Website of the week is Russell Beattie’s blog, a title which he earns with two awesome posts. The first is Mobile Web Browser Thoughts, a monster post on design principles of mobile browsers (exemplified by Mozilla Fennec). The second is Empirical User Experience Design Through Action Costs, a new (?) way of measuring usability.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with two absolutely non-technical links - a reddit post correctly titled Random thoughts from people our age [our age being late teens to late twenties] and beautiful illustrations on sleep by NYT’s Christoph Niemann. ❧