Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Steady Hand at the Tiller


  • Chad mentions in a comment:

    There are lots of blogs by scientists in my RSS feeds that haven't seen a new post in months.

    I don't get the whole thing about maintaining any kind of regular posting frequency. It's a blog! It's not a daily newspaper or a weekly magazine. And we've got RSS feeds, so it's not like you waste time checking if there's something new...you get notified. For the same reason, I never apologize about not posting. Rather, I'd argue that blogs should be measured by signal-to-noise. I've never dropped a blog because it doesn't post enough, but I certainly have stopped reading a number of them that post too frequently.
  • Some cool pictures taken from high above.
  • I'm generally pretty reticent when contacted by the media. There's just so many ways something can across the wrong way. Even more so when communicating electronically. But of course my contact is minuscule compared to that of Sean at Cosmic Variance who seems to be the goto guy for a cosmology quote. So it always surprises me when he adopts such a defensive or hostile tone in his comments section.
  • I'm chairing a committee, and I sent around an email of a meeting in a month. One person responds asking if I can send a reminder the day before the meeting. Another seconds that saying that would be a good idea. Am I crazy for thinking these faculty members idiots? Don't they have calendars, electronic or paper? Are they not capable of keeping appointments?
  • I'm amazed at the poor design of websites. I went to Gucci's website (don't ask). For starters, the site instructs me to get a "new" browser, despite mine being the latest release. Next, it takes a few more clicks to get a listing of store locations for the US (despite having already picked a country upon first entering the site). Fine, maybe I'm an American looking for a store in Europe. But then, and this really is the kicker, it gives me a list of stores without links to any maps! Keep in mind this is a very fancy and expensive looking website (but of course!), but yet clearly no one is thinking in terms of function. The text isn't even selectable so I have to type in the address to Google Maps.

4 comments:

CarlBrannen said...

Greyhound bus just underwhelmed me with their website.

And getting back to signal to noise, when I found myself wasting too much time reading human interest posts at physics blogs, I went through and eliminated most of my links. One of the criteria was looking at the most recent 4 posts and checking to see if there was anything interesting. Another was that they had to have at least one post in the last 3 months.

Angry said...

Carl,
I just don't see why you cull those who don't post at least once in 3 months. I get rid of feeds when they reach a few hundred unread and I just obviously don't have enough interest in what they have to say. I actually much prefer those who post only every few months because then I can hope to keep up. To each his own.

CarlBrannen said...

Angry,

It's cause I don't use feeds.

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