Blogger now allows a blogger to export and import blogs. I exported the posts of my “Ergo Dada” (usability criticism) and “Topical Jokes Daily” into this Freewheeling blog. Whoo.

I appreciate that Blogger enabled that function. It would have been even more convenient if during the import, you could tag all the posts. I would have tagged each Ergo Dada post with “usability” or “ergo dada” and all the TJD posts as “jokes.”

One blog is plenty for one person. I am okay with a single identity but I like the name Ergo Dada. Maybe I’ll write it a song.

So now I have a lot of posts here dating back to late 06. You can use the search tool at top of page to find posts on a LOT of subjects. I look forward to writing about usability as part of my review of the world.

I also added a photo of Bob Dylan’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album cover, which lent this blog its name.

blogger, ergo dada, Google, usability

It’s becoming common for computer systems to be on speaking terms, but not the owners. You may have noticed various social networks offering to search your email addressbooks in order to make it easier to enter those email addresses into the social system. It’s a popular example of open-access, remote logging. You enter your username and password, and authorize the System at Hand to pull information or publish information to an External System. We can assume it is secure because the Big Heavies–Yahoo, Hotmail,Google–are cool with it. But what are we to make of one system that doesn’t know the present name and condition of an external app, yet syncs with that system without a glitch? Doesn’t the ignorance of that system’s management erode our trust in its ability to connect to the other. That was my experience when I set up a Flickr account and permitted it to publish to my Blogger account. Flickr refers to Blogger as Beta Blogger, a status that has been inaccurate since Google upgraded it to ‘live’ 8 months ago.

What’s going on? The machines are doing their jobs, but where humans are needed, the humans are failing. The system’s are speaking to eachother via XML. Yahoo Flickr is properly transmitting to Google’s specs. It knows the tag names. It knows how to authenticate users. So, we know that these things were set up properly by the engineers. But some things are not contained in xml. This would be information of a higher order, of a singular or irregular fashion. It requires real eyes and ears to stay in tune with such info, and to make manual edits to HTML content. Apparently, such content is not regularly reviewed by the likes of Flickr. The dismissal of the beta status was big news at Blogger and impacted its millions of users, but the news fell between the cracks at Yahoo.

Perhaps the news occured between Content Updates at Flickr. It’s unfortunate. Each system need not trumpet any marketing initiative of the other, but each does need to be informed of the basics. Perhaps such basic info should be included in the XML, as a tag that is agreed to by the Heavies and other players. That way, the ‘Name of Service,’ or ‘Service Image’ would update itself. Otherwise, these various networks are going to have to hire folks to more often update HTML landing pages.

beta blogger, blogger, Flickr, Google, remote access, shared data, social networks, xml, yahoo

Ahh, Blogger. I’m back! I’ve been away for a week, in Ireland, and in that time I have forgotten one of the things which bugs me about Blogger: it allows just one profile per user, rather than multiple profiles, to be assigned to various Blogs to which the user contributes.

Pretty confounding, the policy. A blog is specialized, geared to a particular interest from a unique point of view. Should not the Profile likewise be customised to fit the blog?

I have a second blog, in which I ramble about most anything, in a ‘freewheelin’ manner. The blog can be a bit informal and insulting, providing a bulwark against me ever obtaining employment by a company that has U.S. government contracts. Readers of the blog who click “About Me->profile” will see that I’m a “user interface designer.” Why? Because that is the profile I created when creating this here blog. When I realized Blogger was all about a UNIFIED BEING, enforcing a one to many relationship among profiles and blogs, I retained the new profile.

Now, I think I’ll remove the “modular” altogether, and insert custom HTML in each blog’s pane, that identifies a unique profile.

In the meantime, the brains at Google might consider allowing multiple profiles.

blogger, blogs, blogspots, profiles

Technology writers love to compare standards competitions to the famed Beta / VHS duel. Recently this nostalgiaparison was gucked onto the Blue Ray – Super Duper DVD battle. It could also be applied to the burgeoning divergence between the Widget and Gadget delivery systems. Will Google buy its way out of its unusual position of being the less accepted technology? Will staid platforms like Myspace learn that Javascript modules are the Least of their worries (far less damaging to user experience than the megabytes of ads)?

There is another high-exposure conflict in the tech world. In a limited view, it is a name game: Labels versus Tags. Both words are taken to mean “keywords”: any number of adjectives, nouns, verbs (y’know; the ‘Big Three’ of words) that are descriptive of an object, or symbolize analogous and related objects. At least, that is MY take on the purpose of a Tag aka Label. Although producers and consumers are increasingly encouraged to tag and label objects, most venues do not provide instructions. Indeed, for a prompt, usually a short example is all we get. This is what Google’s Blogger (yes, the very tool I’m using now) gives as a prompt:

“Labels for this post: (e.g. scooters, vacation, fall)”

Not much, eh? On the other extreme is Amazon.com, which gives a thorough education in Tagology. At the bottom of each product detail page is a heading “Tag this product” accompanied by the intuitive ‘What’s this?’ link, opening a pop-up page that includes an introductory paragraph followed by answers to “So how can I use tags?” and other questions. Since Amazon is heavily invested in tagging, it should place tags (and the ‘add a tag’ feature) atop the page, next to the image and product title.

When adding a tag at Amazon, the prompt itself is helpful. It reads: (“Separate multiple tags using commas”). There are 2 things important about that message:
1. It explicitly states how to separate multiple tags, compared to the Blogger prompt, which merely implies via an example.
2. The reality it conveys: commas as separator. Comma Separation of values works great for tags and labels (but not for all records of data—text that includes commas causes Quirks when separating with same. That’s why I’m a pipe delimiter).

Some tagging and label venues do not use the comma separator, but demand a Space between each tag. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The venue gives no explanation for this decision, nor any guidance for what to do with compound words. It is especially harmful, because tags are also used as a Search tool. And when searching, a consumer prefers to use plain English. Is the consumer expected to seek out “fishingRods?” I don’t know what these venues are thinking. Among them is the popular bookmark service “del.icio.us” If Delicious gets swallowed by Google Bookmarks, it will learn that “inferioirTechnology” can outdo a “headStart.”

Amazon, blogger, gadgets, Google, javascript, labels, modules, Myspace, tags, widgets

Update on the post from April 23rd: the issue has been fixed.

But see how I just linked to a previous post? It wasn’t easy. Blogger makes users enter a URL just like any link. There should be a way to reference earlier posts. Both your own posts, and posts belonging to fave / bookmarked fellow bloggers (note: there is no such Bookmarked Blogs built into Blogger, but there should be!).

A ‘reference post’ button would pull up a list of past posts…. check the one you want. Wouldn’t that be helpful?

Here’s what I had to do instead:
1. open my blogspot (View Blog link) in new Tab/Window.
2. Click on the post I want to link to.
3. Copy the Address.
4. Return to Edit Blogger Post.
5. Highlight text.
6. Click “Link” button.
7. Paste URL.
8. OK.

blogger, invalid parameters, link to other posts, reference posts, YouTube