Indiana Jones and the Desecration of the Temple of Doom

A friend was a archeologist, until he got tired of rainy days digging through mud and dirt making cultural importance assessments on the sites of future roadways and construction projects.

He supposedly found some interesting things in his digs, but nothing quite like the what you see in the Indiana Jones movies. When antiquities collectors "find" artifacts from the past, and send them to dealers, who sell them to collectors, there are a whole range of questions to ask. These include:

• Who "owns" the works in question?



• What laws are in place to protect that ownership, and what is the potential risk in violating those laws?



• What international impacts can the movement of such treasures have upon political relationships between countries?

Reasononline takes a careful look at the subject in Reason: Ancient Treasures for Sale: Do antique dealers preserve the past or steal it?

Interesting classification of three different groups involved in the debate:

• Academics, dealers, and collectors who want cultural artifacts to be able to move around the globe in a regulated manner, so that they can be shared by people and learned about with the exposure.



• National officials and academics who believe that these cultural artifacts are tied to the place where they were found and are part of the history and identity of that culture.



• Archeologists and historians who believe that such cultural treasures are only part of the picture, and should be left where they are, so that they can be studied in context, and tell us about the past.

If you where hiking along in the local state park, and you found something of potentially historical significance, would you:

• Take it home with you, and display it on your mantle?



• Take it, and contact your local historical society, or a government official?



• Leave it where it is, make a note of the location, and contact your local historical society or a government official?

Would it make a difference if it were an arrowhead, a saber from the civil war era, a piece of colonial pottery, or something else?

Another friend recently had me helping inventory some of the contents of an antique shop, where the owner had past away, and the contents of the shop needed to be sold. Some of the items in the shop were more artifact than antique. It was amazing seeing works produced 500 or more years ago. The attraction to sharing these pieces of work is understandable. It would be great to share them with as many people as possible.

With an opening like this, I was predisposed to enjoying the paper that went along with it:

It is with some regret that I submit this thesis for storage in Avery Library. It is a dingy underground hole that refuses to lend the books, even though it is generally impossible to make photocopies with the broken copy machines. Perhaps that doesn't matter, since so many of the books cannot be found after checking the three separate places where they "normally" might be and spending an inordinate amount of time checking with the librarian. It has been nothing but a source of irritation, aggravation, and general frustration. I hope that nobody every finds it necessary to descend into that pit in search of my work. Perhaps one day Columbia will be enlightened enough to digitally archive theses and dissertations, making them available online.

I wasn't disappointed. It is a thoughtful and entertaining look at how people interact with the social places that surround them, and the redevelopment of Times Square in New York City - Visual Order in Times Square: The Social Regulation of Urban Space (pdf).

Sponsored Search Video

Nice Google Tech Talks presentation:

Challenges in the Design of Sponsored Search Auctions

Ubisoft Making Movies

A friend forwarded a link to a Wall Street Journal article which mentions plans by game maker Ubisoft to start producing full length movies.

It makes sense that they would. Wonder if they'll be able to match the skills and stories of Pixar.

The Value of a Mentor

I really like the positive and enthusiastic approach that Penelope Trunk follows in her post: You need a mentor now, here's how to get one

I wish that I had found a mentor early on, in one of my many careers. Some nice advice here from Penelope on how to find one.

Berkeley on Google Video

The University of California at Berkeley has released over 250 hours worth of video with educational content, including classes, symposiums, and events. (Hat tip to Tara Calishain)

The press release from Berkeley has more details:

UC Berkeley offers courses and symposia through Google Video

I'm finding myself excited over the Information Systems 141 - Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business videos, which include speakers from Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft, as well as others.

Government writing in plain language

When your audience is a broad spectrum of the citizenship of the United States, part of your mission is to communicate with them in a language that they can understand.

A movement within the federal government to help writers use easy to understand language led to the creation of the Plain Language website. There are some nice tips on the site for anyone who writes to a wide audience on their page about Usefulness in Web-Writing.

There's a column at the site of The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) on the development of the plainlanguage.com pages from one of the folks instrumental in its redesign of a year or so ago. One of the fun aspects of the redesign was that it was a project bringing together graduate students at Johns Hopkins University with the federal government.

The efforts of those students, and the feedback the site has seen has led to the creation of a new site, and guidelines for people who write web sites for the federal government: Webcontent.gov. If you're interested in usability and accessibility, this site is worth checking out. If you're interested in writing in a way which will make it easier for visitors to understand your message on your website, it's also worth a visit.

A Druid on Rugby

When the national poet writes scathing poetry about your rugby league's management, you know you have some problems: A poet speaks of rugby shame, of wooden spoons and who's to blame

Reflections of leadership in everyday encounters

An excellent article from USA Today on Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management, titled CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character.

All thirty-three of the rules are listed in the article, yet I found myself sending for a copy of the actual booklet, which is free. There are a few folks I want to share it with...

Early money problems for the colonies

In honor of tax day, an early look at money problems for the colonists:

History of Colonial Money (pdf)

The whole system was off to a rough start:

The lack of coins and currency forced the colonists to barter. The English leaders felt that colonial exports, such as animal skins, dried fish, and tobacco, should be paid for in English goods. Colonial exports would be accepted in return for an equal value of such goods as fabrics, window panes, pewter dishes, and mirrors. This barter arrangement - an exchange of goods or services without using money - seemed ideal to the British but was increasingly unpopular with the colonists, who preferred coin for their exports to gain more independence over their buying power.

I'm afraid that in some ways, we're still looking for more independence over our buying power.

Ads from around the world

Some really great images on Ads of the World.

I tracked back to this original source from a post on Adverblog on some creative Nike images created by Chinese artists.

A long timeout

If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything

- a fortune cookie from yesterday

I've been on a long hiatus from here. I'd like to kick start this blog, and use it more than I have. One post in five months really just isn't enough. I have been busy blogging on other topics at another blog, but I miss this one.

I'm probably going to broaden the scope of this blog a little to include more topics than only business related ones. So, if I point to Swimming Ants here, or a new way of looking at museums.

Brilliant Photo Essay on the Design Process

PingMag has an enjoyable article on The Website Development Process.

It was good enough to get me to break out my camera, and wander around aimlessly with it for a couple of hours this afternoon.

What's your Marketing IQ?

An interesting Marketing IQ Test, worth taking a look at.

Somehow, I got twenty out of twenty correct. According to the results, that makes me a "marketing genius." :)

So, what's your marketing IQ?

Are accessibility guidelines enough when designing web sites?

The IBM Systems Journal takes a look at the problems with usability and accessibility guidelines, and the limitations of those guidelines when it comes to designing web sites.

It's a long, and thoughtful discussion on the topic, and worth reading by anyone who designs sites.

See: IBM SJ 44-3 | Are guidelines enough? An introduction to designing Web sites accessible to older people.

Analyze This Business

A nice look at business analytics in an editorial from CIO magazine, Analyze This, doesn't tell you how to perform analytics for your company. Instead it describes when and where an analytic approach might be helpful. Something to think about.

Findability and design

There's an excert to Peter Morville's book Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks over at A List Apart that's worth a visit. It's nice to see someone with a prominent place in the usability and information architecture field taking a look at how web sites are found by people on the web.

As a bonus, there's a link at the bottom of the article to the first chapter in the book. Looks like a good one.

What can a good copywriter do for your online business?

Sometimes you see something on the web that infuriates you.

I did when I saw a blog post from Bob Bly, who has written a number of books about copywriting, titled Why I Don't Believe in SEO Copywriting. In that post, he recommends that if you are going to write copy for a web site page, that you write it first as if it were a stand-alone document, and then you stuff the keywords in the appropriate places, if it really must be ruined by a need to be found by search engines.

I wrote a response there, which I'm going to reproduce here:

I think that your definition of SEO copywriting shows that you don?t really understand SEO. The primary focus is the audience. Search engines are just the way that they arrive on a site, at least if you are good enough at SEO copywriting.

There are a lot of writers on the web who fail to see the framework within which they work. Good writing doesn?t exist in a vacuum. It anticipates not only who the audience is, but how they will get to your site, which path they will follow to the page, whether or not they have other browser windows open, and if they will arrive at a site through the home page, or be delivered, as most people are, to an interior page by a search engine.

When you fail to consider which words an anticipated audience expects to see upon a site, and when you ignore conducting research that can help you use search engines to pull people to a site?s pages, you're sabotaging your own efforts, and potentially harming your clients.

I understand that Bob Bly has a reputation as a fine copywriter, and has written a number of very well received books on the subject. So it surprised me a little to see his words. Then I recalled looking around the shelves of my local Borders at books on copywriting, and picking up his book on "Online Copywriting" and being very disappointed that he didn't seem to have any knowledge of things such as the way people look at web pages, scan text, juggle multiple windows, and often enter sites somewhere in the middle of the site rather than at the front page.

I believe that book has been out a couple of years now, and I suspect that more than a couple of people have read through it hoping to get an idea of how to write for web sites. So, it comes as no surprise to read about the experience the Jeremy Zawodny, from Yahoo! had recently when speaking about search engines to a group from the Direct Marketers Association, in his post, Future On-Line Advertising Growth, based on DMA Conference experience:

In talking to some of the Search Engine Marketing folks that were in sessions on Saturday, I discovered that the vast majority of DMA folks are very, very, very new to Search Marketing. I'd go so far as to say many of them are incredibly clueless about the process, benefits, costs, etc.

I suspect that Rand is spot on in his assessment of how folks outside of SEO might view how search engine marketing works in a post of his today on Mainstream Press and SEO.

Back to Bob Bly's view on the differences between writing copy, and writing SEO copy. He claims that you can only focus upon one audience, and it should be the people reading the pages. If you try to also write for search engines, then your copy loses focus. I can't even begin to agree.

Search engines do not read web pages, they index them. They are not an audience, but rather part of the framework in which you write.

Search engines can help deliver people to those pages that you want your audience to read, and if you can't consider them when you write, then you should stay away from writing for the web. There's a nice recent grokdotcom article that can help you find someone who can write that copy for you: A Persuasive Online Copywriter is Worth More

A look at the man behind Teoma

I remember a few years back hearing about a search engine startup in New Jersey, of all places, created by a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

The search engine had the odd name Teoma, and didn't jump out at capture public attention in quite the manner that Google had a few years earlier. But, it was good enough to capture the attention of the folks at Ask Jeeves, who ended up purchasing it, and using it to power their search results.

There's an nice article about the man behind Teoma at David vs. Google. If you are interested in the personalities behind some of the best technology on the web, this is a good place to look.

(via SEO Book)

IM Merger between Yahoo! and MSN a Great Idea

It doesn't sound like the IM programs that Yahoo! and MSN provide will look any different in the near future. But they will change.

An announcement from both companies tells us that Microsoft and Yahoo will link IM networks.

I use IM everyday at work. It's a useful way to communicate some ideas quickly, and a great way to share URLs with others. It's not the perfect communication tool, but it has its moments.

This "merger" will mean that people on the IM clients from Yahoo! and from MSN will be able to see and interact with each other.

I use the Yahoo! IM program at work, and communicate with some folks on the MSN network at home. The linking of the two networks makes life a little easier.