links for 2010-02-23

"Back when I was a boy, I bought a children's book at my town's library book sale called "2010: Living in the Future" by Geoffrey Hoyle. Written in 1972, it had been withdrawn from the library's collection by the mid-80s, when I picked it up. I've somehow managed to hang onto it for 25 years and now, suddenly, here we are: 2010. I'm reproducing this long out-of-print book here to see how we're doing. Are we really living in the future?" [via Stephen Abram]

"Buzz had been under test by 20,000 Google staffers for 18 months – that’s fine if you want to roll out a conversation tool to only the sort of people whom Google employs. The problem is that the 38,000,000 gmail account holders Google chose to roll it out to aren’t like that. They’re normal people."

"This was an analysis of code and content in which I looked for very big and obvious errors. They were easy to find, and most of them are cut-and-dried: A news-article photo without an alternate text is not accessible to a blind person, for example. Very few of my findings are matters of opinion."

Disgracefully, CAF went ahead with the draw for the 2012 Africa Cup of nations without Togo being in the pots. Banned for being the victims of terrorism, it is unclear whether the whole draw will have to be redone if the CAS finds in Togo's favour.

4 minutes to type in the names of all 13 Cure albums - no cheating - I took 1'44"

"The complaint of regional bias in news reporting is, more often than not, concerned with the media’s fixation on the capital’s institutions and populace. What basis is there for this argument? And is it possible to determine the extent of regional under representation whilst proving London enjoys near constant attention from the UK media?  The Newsography project was initiated to answer these questions". And uses Guardian data to do so...

Are we rapidly approaching commodity user-testing? "Recently, Optimal Workshop, the creators of the online, card-sorting tool Optimal Sort, released two new information architecture evaluation tools: Chalkmark and Treejack. Though these tools are not perfect, they do provide the ability to quickly and easily test early designs and information hierarchies with large numbers of participants."

"A triumph of visual designers... No usability activites at all... Unbelievable...". You can't please everybody it seems.