Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.

Outsourcing Life…

I have decided that in the spirit of the dot-bomb, I should outsource some of my normal, daily operations. I am not talking about business, I am talking about life.

What it really comes down to is that I don’t have time to do everything that I’d like to do, and there is even more that I would like to do, and in fact soon will be doing! To this end, I realised that it would be worth listing out everything that takes up time in a normal day/week of my life, and analysing what, of that list, can be outsourced to someone else (no doubt at a price).

I’m not talking anything strange like getting someone to brush my teeth for me, I am talking easy stuff like cleaning my apartment, doing washing, cooking perhaps, that sort of thing. When I’ve figured it out a bit more, I’ll post the list of things that I plan on outsourcing, and personal suggestions regarding where I am going to find a “vendor” here 🙂

Another International Collaboration Project

After posting to peterme.com about how I’d like to see more tools available for the IA community, I got an email from Lisa Chan from Stanford saying that she was also looking into creating a Search Log Analyser, and that if I was going to be working on one, why don’t we work together! This is really cool, I love how the Internet allows things like this to happen. I am here in Perth, WA, knowing all of 2 other IAs personally, and yet I will now be collaborating with another IA from one of the largest Universities in the US to build a tool to help all IAs.

You rock Internet.