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Julian Smith’s Techno Jeep video is a fun way to spend or perhaps waste a couple of minutes today. Is this what people in the high-tech industry call “aligning the synergies“? Maybe so.

Tags: Random access by GD
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If a police investigator finds Facebook photos that prove that you were in a Hawaii triathlon last month, at the same time that you were receiving disability payments from your home state, has the investigator broken the law?

San Francisco Chronicle journalist Bob Egelko examines a few such cases and writes that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit this week to help define those legal limits. Along the way, he speaks with Shane Witnov, who has helped write “guidelines for lawyers’ use of social networking sites.”

Sources

. Bob Egelko, Suit Wants Details About Cops’ Online Probes, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 5, 2009.
. “Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking,” a conference held on Oct. 23, 2009, UC Berkeley School of Law, MP3 recordings and readings.
. David Lee and Shane Witnov, Handbook on Conducting Research on Social-Networking Websites in California, Dec. 1, 2008.

Tags: Reading, Tech by GD
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Jakob Nielsen provides some interesting information about computer users’ tolerance for interactions on web sites in the Alertbox posting “Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience.”

Writes Nielsen: “0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen.”

Worse yet: “The average page visit lasts about 30 seconds, but the more experienced the users are, the less time they allocate to each Web page.”

If you’re posting a video, he writes, don’t run anything longer than 1 to 2 minutes.

Lighten up, babe.

Source

Jakob Nielsen, Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience, Alertbox, Oct. 5, 2009.

Tags: Reading, Tech, Writing & editing by GD
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