mediajunk

That the internet is polluted is not in doubt. Email spam is the example of pollution with which we are most familiar.

If you keep a blog, however, you may also be familiar with "comment spam", whereby malicious individuals post mass, automated comments to as many weblogs as they can, in order to get links to their own (usually porn, gambling or pill-pushing) sites.

Pollution also comes in the form of search engine spam -- the bane of a Googler's existence -- where individuals try to mischeviously manipulate search engine results (not to be confused with legitimate search engine optimisation, the topic of my own book).

As if all of this wasn't bad enough, we now have to contend with worm pollution which, according to Kelly Martin of The Register, is getting out of control:

Take a few short moments to watch the receive light on your modem or unfettered ethernet connection. Here in high bandwidth Canada, that flashing light now flashes almost solid. It's almost unbelievable. It's almost all malicious traffic.

... I am finding it increasingly difficult to explain to laypeople about security on the Internet. The situation is only getting more complex, and worse. My Aunt Fern pulls her old computer out of the closet and plugs it in. Big mistake. She'd be better off with a typewriter, I tell you. In a few minutes her machine is already 0wn3d, and she just flipped it on.

And the bad news? It's getting worse...

Linus Torvalds, once called the "creator of Linux" but now more often referred to as the "leader of the Linux movement" spoke to BusinessWeek a few days ago about open source and the future of Linux.

Here are some excerpts:

On Open Source vs. Commercial Software
I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.

Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.

On a Potential Legal Challenge from Microsoft

I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft (MSFT ) enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end. [CEO Steve] Ballmer and [Chairman Bill] Gates have pride in the fact that their competition may have tried to crush them with legal wars, but they overcame. I think they would have a hard time using legal tactics. They would be ashamed.

On Open Source Art
People have been playing around with using the open-source innovation model with arts and novels and even music. I have heard discussions, but I'm not a big believer. These things tend to be personal, and writing text is linear. It's hard to have more than one person working on it.

It's nice, for a change, to hear Jakob Nielsen sounding positive.

In an interview with CNN today, the man who made the word usability famous explains how the design of websites is improving, due a Darwinian effect he calls "survival of the easiest":

An easy Web site gets more clicks, people return to it, a complicated Web site people look at it once and maybe say, "Oh, it looks cool," and leave, so it gets no business, it goes away and it's not going to be here next year. So, ever so gradually, the easy Web sites get bigger, they remain here and the difficult Web sites die and they go away, and so over time, it's going to get better and better, and so that's the good news.

I don't always agree with Mr. Nielsen (who, incidentally, is a member of Google's Technical Advisory Council), as I think he is sometimes too focused on usability, sometimes at the expense of design aesthetics -- though he tackles that particular question well in this interview. I do, however, wholeheartedly agree with him on the following:

Web designers still ultimately believe that if they think it's good, it is good, and you just cannot judge your own design. You're not designing for yourself, you're not designing to get a design award, you're designing for the average person to come to the Web site and click and find what they want -- and you just cannot judge that yourself.

You've got to use usability techniques with things like user testing, see what normal people actually do when they are on a Web site. And even though some sites now are doing user testing, most do not.

Most Web managers have no clue what their customers do on their Web site, and if they ever saw, they would tear their hair out because their customers are leaving them in droves.

Shameless self-promotion: Learn about my own usability services.

Update 25 Nov 04: I removed various weblog links from this entry due to link rot.

For regular readers: sorry there have been so few postings of late. This is due to how busy we have been here at Mediajunk lately.

"Normal service" will resume as soon as things are back to normal.

-- m