Color Conspiracy

Listera on the SIGIA-L list shared a link to "Prophetable Colors"in Teresa Nielsen Hayden's weblog Making Light:

"I’ve known people who think official color reassignments are a conspiracy theory. The short answer is that they are a conspiracy, but they aren’t theoretical. I submit as evidence the assigned colors for 2004, 2003 and 2002. And here are some recent specimens of the new range, to give you a better idea of what they look like when in use.

Who does this to us? An outfit, founded in 1962, called the Color Marketing Group. These are the people who wished avocado green and harvest gold kitchen appliances on America, and put the 1980s into those mauve-pink shades that looked so peculiarly horrible on so many of us."

Here's the communications/graphics color scheme for 2004:

COMMUNICATIONS/GRAPHICS

Swim-Jump into blue, a splashy reflection of cyber youth, clean and pure, yet with natural complexity.
See-Fresh with an inner glow. Ethereal becomes believable.
Tickle-A happy red-tickle makes the whole word giggle.
Jolt-Brace yourself for this neon citrus.
Grow-Sprouting with a fresh green confidence.
Touch-Feel the love … baby, with the warmth of skin and body contact.

Bad Search is Still a Problem

this news summary appears in the July 15 issue of RLG Shelflife. It actually covers other recommendations for website usability.

BAD SEARCH IS STILL A PROBLEM
Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen says that one of the most persistent challenges facing the Web is the difficulty in finding anything: "Bad search continues to be a problem today even though, from a technology perspective, great progress has been made. You can see this plainly when you use the public search engines. They're much better today than they were ten years ago. But the search on individual Web sites or inside intranets is, typically, still bad. [On intranets] things are divided up into different knowledge bases, so you've got to know where to search, and if you need to know where to search, then that defeats the entire idea. The other problem about search is the content, which is to say the individual pages, or units of information, are typically poorly described in terms of things like the headline and summaries, which is all people have to choose from when they get the search-results listing. So if there was just one thing we could fix on the Web, and for intranets as well, I would say let's fix search; that's still the number one thing that's causing people problems." Nielsen estimates that an average mid-size company (10,000 employees) could expect a return on investment of 1,000% and a gain of $5 million a year in employee productivity, simply by improving the usability of its intranet. (CIO Insight 1 Jun 2004)

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1610163,00.asp

Incipit.

This is my first post. I was inspired to try this out by Deborah Coates' article "Weblogs as a Disruptive Technology for Extension" in the June 2004 edition of the Journal of Exension. I'm hoping to use this medium to keep track of and share information that I come across that is professionally interesting.