Archive for June, 2004

Here are some photos I took over the last week. (They are snapshots taken with my Treo 600 camera phone.)

I usually work in the South Bay, but my company has hired an outside firm, Hillman Curtis, to help redesign our homepage. I’ve been working on location with HC in some rented loft space in the SoMa district of San Francisco. The firm’s from NYC, but they rented loft space in San Francisco, about a block from where I used to live and work.

Hillman Curtis is a guy — author, well known designer, pusher of Flash technology — and well as the name of his firm. There’s him, 4 other designers from his firm, an intern designer, a designer from our company who’s only been at working for us for a couple months, and me. In addition to brainstorming, pencil and digital sketching, and other design activities, I bring two things to the table. The first is a focus on technology. Being a Web Developer, I’m interested in the technical patterns and practices that make up the internet. The second thing I bring is a pretty deep understanding of my company. I’ve been working there for about three years now, and paying attention most of that time. I’ve worked in several different roles of the past years so I have a pretty wide view of the company — it’s needs, capabilities, tendencies, politics and vision.

Anyways, here are ten photos from about the loft.

Bill Gates talks clearly about the benefits of Blogs and RSS:

“This (weblogs and RSS) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.

And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.

And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there — this is about solving that. The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we’re progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.”