May
9
The 1860 US Census is now available online (via) A wonderful historic document with great examples of culturally biased catgories.
May
6
Younghee Jung: “At an indian wedding, one of many activities that kept the bride busy
was answering mobile phone calls from those who could not attend the
wedding. several mobile phones were passed onto her ears from others as
well as her own since some remote callers were considerate enough to
call other relatives attending the ceremony that they knew, sparing the
bride from dealing with constantly ringing phones and carrying the
phone without any pockets on the traditional wedding costume.”
With this great picture:
May
6
“LiveJournal has decided that, in order to make certain that different
communities are represented, there will be two user representatives in
the Advisory Board. One will be elected to represent the Cyrillic
language community and the other will represent the non-Cyrillic users.
This may seem a bit odd, but it’s probably important to note that a
large percentage of LJ’s users are Russian and they engage in very
different practices on LJ than non-Russian users. To make sure both
sides are represented, we decided to divide things this way.”
May
5
Google: “Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another.”
May
3
In Google’s webmaster tools, you can set the (geographic) location of your site, which may help it rank better for local queries. Here’s a video explaining:
Mar
8
Jorge Arango: “One of the biggest challenges I face in my day-to-day work is that much of what individuals consider trustworthy (especially when dealing with a primarily visual medium, like the web) is obtained from subtle cues that are specific to their own culture. Japanese users expect a different visual experience than someone from the Middle East, or from Central America. There are many companies in Central America that are trying to reach out to international audiences (especially in the US), and expect their websites to have “the best design possible” (in other words, to present a trustworthy image). However, in many cases clients are unprepared (or unable) to judge the trustworthiness of a design aimed at a different culture because their gut tells them something’s wrong. (In the case of designs aimed at US audiences, the reaction I usually get is that “it looks too dry”, by which they mean that not everything is flashing and blinking and bleeping and blaring music at the user.)”
Dec
30
(via Steve Portigal): the profession of writing letters for illiterate people in India is fading away due to mobile phones.
