Librarian of Fortune

Ground Zero calculator

OK, maybe I've just got a macabre sense of humor, but I learned about a site that will let you see how far away you have to go to escape the damage from a nuclear bomb (or, conveniently, an asteroid impact similar to the Chicxulub impact that caused the end of the dinosaurs). Type in a city and the kind of explosion, then click "Nuke It!" and see where you need to run to in order to avoid.

For your reference, here are the impact zones for the Little Boy bomb, a modern nuke, and an asteroid impact, should any of those land in Denver, CO.

So, if you see a very bright light, immediately go to this web site to get an idea of exactly how far away you should have been from impact.

via  AltSearchEngines

Letting users think more

Random thought... the ability to meaningfully interact with an information source is becoming a must-have for users. It's not just offering tons of features and lots of power that will keep an IP profitable; it's understanding that you don't know how your users are going to use your service. Let go. Be Zen. Relax. You'll actually gain all kinds of insights by imagining yourself as an anthropologist. Put your clients subjects in an information-rich environment and watch how they creatively use the tools they have.

I was playing around with Google Maps' directions feature and finally realized that I could drag any portion of the route to another spot by just dragging the route. I discovered it because Google Maps always routes me through the nearest town, even though I know it's faster to go another way. In a moment of frustration -- mostly, just acting out what I wished that Google could do -- I moved my mouse over the route and suddenly realized, OMG, it's moving the route!

Now I can use it as a way to plan out a series of errands on a map, by simply dragging the route to each location I need to stop at. I'm sure that most of you do this naturally in your head. I am, um, directionally challenged. I could get lost walking from here to the corner. Having a map with the entire route thought through, mapped out and printed off makes my errand-running a lot smoother.

The iPhone is another great example of giving users lots of opportunities to think for themselves in how they navigate through and use the various applications. Want to turn the display 90 degrees? OK! Expand this area? Sure. The philosophy is to let users interact as much as possible with the resource or tool.

So, I guess I'm thinking about how there is added value in an information provider  offering less structure and allowing more input (i.e., work) by the user. We usually expect to see more templates, more fields to search, and so on, but all of these require users to act and think in a certain way. What if they want to query in a different way? What if they want to show which terms to emphasize by visually highlighting them (see SearchCloud.net)?

I'm not sure if a user panel would ever volunteer "hey, let us do all the noodling around ourselves; we don't really want those navigational tools"; this is one of those features that has immediately obvious value but isn't something users articulate as a need.

SEO for the rest of us

In the course of some writing, I came across Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, published last November. It's clearly written and the advice looks sound, particularly for us small business owners who aren't interested in heavy-duty SEO.

Is California running a Ponzi scheme?

It seems that there's a delay in getting tax refunds from California until the state gets some more cash in. They're taking returns in, just not sending cash out.

I wonder if I can pull that stunt on my vendors...

Inauguration Day photo

Check out this aerial photo of the crowds that gathered to watch Obama get sworn in - that's over a million happy people (by some estimates, 1.6 million) all in one place. I don't remember anything this big since the Vietnam War protests.

 

Seize the Interstitials!

Thanks to insight from my personal Colorado Brain Trust, Marcy Phelps and Kim Dority, I now have a great way to visually remind myself of what I can do if I have a spare 15 or 30 minutes.

Like many of you, Marcy, Kim and I have laptops, docked with a large screen and ergonomic keyboard. Here's what you can do to have your visual reminder. Using Windows' Control Panel, select Display /  Settings /  Display:  [select whichever one lets you check Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor] / check that Extend my Windows.  Now click the [Identify] button. It's assumed that your primary monitor  [1[ is to the left of your secondary monitor [2]. If that's not the case, you can drag the numbers around on the screen to move 1 to the right of 2. Finally, click the OK button until you're done. If you do this correctly, you should have your regular display on your primary screen, and your desktop on your secondary screen.

Now, here's the cool thing, at least for those of us who have to see something to remember it. You can move one window onto your secondary display and have it sitting quietly in the corner, reminding you of something you can work on when you have a little spare time -- the 15 minutes before a conference call, the half an hour before you go to a meeting, the interminable amount of time you are on hold waiting to talk with a customer "service" agent...

To set this up yourself:
Open the window you want to keep open in the Restore Down setting (between Maximize and Minimize), then drag it to the edge of your primary screen and it will appear to slide off your primary and onto your secondary screen.  If, like me, you have a separate keyboard and monitor, you can simply use your laptop keyboard to work with the screen displayed on the laptop, and then move over to your desktop screen and keyboard and continue with your other work.

For some reason, I find that it's easier to resist multi-tasking if I keep my "other" project on a separate monitor and keyboard. I can work on it soon... I know it's there, but I don't have to actually work on it immediately.]

Every librarian/math geek's dream

I've been reading Indexed, a delightful book of hand-drawn charts, graphs and - yes! - even Venn diagrams that "make fun of some things and sense of others". Jessica Hagy, who also blogs these gems at Indexed blog, has an amazing knack for distilling thoughts into simple images, each of which fit on a single index card.

Take today's, for example. It'll take you a minute to parse out this diagram, and then...wham!
 
[For those of you who prefer text:
Big Budget + Big Names = Box Office Flops
Big Names + Big Events = Massive Layoffs
Big Budget + Big Event = Gastric Bypass Surgery
Big Budget + Big Event + Big Names = Today in DC]

Farewell to some Google apps

According to Google's Code Blog, Google will be killing off Dodgeball.com,its social networking service whose gimmick was that you could share your location with friends... yawn, and Jaiku, a microblogging service that will now be open-source.

On Google's Inside Google Book Search blog, we learn that they're 86ing Catalog Search, which was an early attempt at OCR technology.

On Google's Notebook blog, they're putting a stake in the heart of Notebook (although saving existing documents... better start archiving, folks!). IMO, Google simply got out-developed by other web-based collaboration tools; Zoho's my current fave, but they're a dime a dozen these days.

And finally, on Google's Video Blog, we learn that they will stop supporting uploads of user-generated content, although they will continue to index video content on the web.

None of these are particularly surprising; they're all aspects of Google's services/products that don't offer obvious, unique value, and Google is learning that just slapping "Google" on a product name doesn't guarantee that it will become the default tool.

And, random thought here... this is why Microsoft can still maintain its vast market share for software apps - right now, it's difficult for people to learn a new operating system or software application (word processing, calendar, etc), so whatever's shipped with your PC is what you use. Any application that is entirely web-based, like virtually all of Google's apps, are not yet so firmly entrenched in people's minds or PCs that they can't switch easily. Google gained market share when it first launched its search engine because it stood out -- it was clean, simple and worked far better than its competitors. No learning curve required. Everyone moved over to the easiest, best option and stayed.

Desktop apps, on the other hand, can't be as simple as a Google search box. They have to be complex or they wouldn't provide the power that people need for their basic office functions. And that means that people are far less likely to switch from one office app to another without a very compelling reason. As soon as Google moved out of the white-screen-with-search-box mode to offering relatively more complex tools such as Google Documents, it found itself in an entirely different competitive environment.