Stuart Robinson’s Weblog

Here’s facebook getting it wrong by providing application developers with a way to trick users:

Menus are an impossible to avoid area of information design. I don’t want to get into graphic design or typographic minutia, largely because I would have very little of interest to say. Instead, something I’ve not seen discussed elsewhere: the order items are listed in.

I’ve started to find alphabetically sorted menus boring. OK, they are optimised for findability, but surely eating/drinking out should offer a bit more mystique than deciding you want something, finding it alphabetically and then asking for it.

Signature dishes or drinks often get the top spots, but I can think of a few ways to sort the remaining offerings:

• price of ingredients / markup (helps profit)
• time to make (for cocktails - allows greater throughput)
• popularity (most user-friendly?)
• reverse chronological (to give new items a fair shot)
• random

Has anyone experimented with A-B testing on their menus? Steven Levitt thought he’d caught an example but it was just an old menu lurking.

relative densities of Internet connectivity

Light pollution

Fascinating stuff:

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it’s not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can’t help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.

A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp (GG) was in trouble … most analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold. Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle. Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property, McEwen did something unheard of in his industry: He published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The “Goldcorp Challenge” made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates.

Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration

From The Secret Letter From Iraq

Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied “Yes, you.”