links for 2009-05-05

The next London IA Mini event will be an informal night at The Sense Loft in Soho. We are expecting it to feature presentations or workshops from Jason Mesut, Luke Perman, Angel Brown and Leisa Reichelt. The plan is to make it much more informal than the last event, and we'll also be having some guests from UX London there including Jared Spool and people from Clearleft. Limited tickets will be available from 13th May. Props to Matthew Solle for doing the organising legwork.

"Hopefully, you've run out of excuses – usability testing doesn't have to be expensive, and once you start putting it to work regularly, you'll never know how you lived without it. The next time you hit a wall with your website development or run into conversion problems, take an hour to check out some of these resources, and I promise it'll be time well spent."

Great post about how to find business opportunites amongst search terms, and about getting the metrics around search behaviour right: "You might be unhappy with the bounce rate for a particular page but sticking promotions for other content above the content the user came looking for is only going to increase your bounce rate."

"But Home Office figures also show two MEN die every three weeks at the hands of a partner or ex. One in five men suffers domestic violence, although this would include attacks by gay partners and relatives". Oh well, if it is only those gays attacking each other in the home, who cares eh?

"I just received a very unusual, and refreshingly candid, message from a known scammer in Senegal."

"A protracted war between authors of two of the most popular add-ons for the Firefox browser has prompted calls for changes in the way extensions are written, after one of them admitted he added camouflaged code that disabled features in the other's program. In a heart-felt apology posted Monday, Giorgio Maone admitted that he added a small piece of code that worked around the EasyList filter used by Adblock Plus. The code, which was obscured so it wouldn't be noticed by people who maintain the Adblock filter, was designed to ensure that commercial ads carried on Maone's websites continued to be displayed on browsers that use the popular ad-blocking extension". There is an essay to be written about internet-savvy users and trust here...does this look like a 'long con' attack vector to you?

Mark Beaumont did not please Robert Smith of The Cure with his recent article.

Following Robert's wrath, his fell army of goth commentators have been out in force in this thread. Mark, the author, has engaged in the thread and issued a couple of entertaining ripostes including: "I'm always amused by comments that liken journalism to musicianship. If 20,000 people were willing to pay £50 per head to come to the O2 Arena and hear me read out my articles because they like them so much then yes, I would happily allow them to be published for free".

"Google’s inclusion of historical Japanese Maps in Google Earth has caused an outcry in Japan. According to the AP these maps were already on public view and online. But Google is taking heat from rights organizations as well as the Justice Ministry in Japan". More map politics...

"Although work on Crossrail is now firmly underway, there are still those who question whether it should go ahead at all. The latest to comment on this issue is Simon Jenkins over at the Evening Standard, in an opinion piece entitled 'Crossrail will eat money. Kill it, Boris, and save the bankrupt Tube instead'". Tightly argued riposte to the Simon Jenkins Standard piece in three parts.

"It isn't enough for UXers to say 'UX matters'. Because sometimes it doesn't matter enough to stop someone making money. You have to have a developer otherwise you won’t have a site. But it is possible to launch a successful website without a UX designer and even without a particularly good UX."

Depeche Mode have a contest to remix forthcoming single "Peace". However, the price structure and the quality of the samples available have set off a torrent of grief in the comments section.