This map was produced by Fernando Gabeira’s (a Rio de Janeiro mayor candidate) campaign staff. It shows all the outlaw forces that actually run Rio de Janeiro. The government is just a pathetic figure that focus on other stupid things rather than trying to stop violence growth.

Want to come to Rio? Think twice before you do.

Despite the new audacious interface design (I’m not pretty sure about it’s efficiency), the central question is that it lacks the basic: content. After the first impression, when you start to use it, there’s no new offer. Taking Google as a benchmark for user navigation behavior seems to me a little misconception. A so hidden navigation menu is a rupture that I’m not sure people are ready to face.

The new ESPN Brasil Homepage. Audacious interface design, but is it efficient?

An internal page, built upon searching a pre-configured tag. Impressive, but lacks rich related content

The only thing that seemed to me an interesting feature is the related content ‘mind mapped’ at the end of the page, with the related tags represented with photos. That’s a cool navigation system I would like to study more deeply to check it efficiency. Choosing Tags as a central navigation system without a semantic tool or controlled vocabulary to support it is quite a risk. Specially when you have a very poor relation between the items (volley has only three related terms).

The mind map navigation system for the topic Volley

And there are some implementation problems. As you try to break the tag search, you may reach a page that has no picture to illustrate it, and you get the content left miles away from the top of the page.

A fragile URL building rule system makes the page miss the opening background image

At the end, the new ESPN Brasil website intends to use a (somehow) new user interface design, but fails on offering clear navigational paths. Using search is not as fluid as pointing and clicking, and putting all the bets on related tags doesn’t guarantee a flow. Nice work, good experiment, but still with lot to be improved.

I took noticed about Silverback through a blog witch I sincerely don’t remember now (sorry). And using it own words:

Silverback makes it easy, quick and cheap for everyone to perform guerilla usability tests with no setup and no expense, using hardware already in your Mac.

Yeah, you read it…just for Macs. It was to good to be true.

And what’s up with the gorilla? Well, that’s the coolest part that the clever guys from Clearleft thought about. They will donate 10% of all profits from Silverback to saving the gorillas.

Well Usability guys that use Mac, check silverback out and tell me your impressions!

So, who’s gonna protect us citizens from our police force?

The overcrowded Location bar in Firefox 3.0

I first got very shocked when saw the new version. It seemed to me too much unnecessary cluttered information. The previous version shows only a list of the URLs. The new version brings me Favicons, URLs, Site name…but the new layout does not make it easy to read and rapidly identify the URL in the middle of this so overcrowded information. Things got so messy that they decided to put some lines between the items in order to “help reading”. Ouch!

The elegant and simple location bar in the previous Firefox 2.0

It seems that this isn’t my only and lonely impression. As you can see, there’s an add-on to revert exclusively the location toolbar to the older version.

The second “improvement” that seemed to be a bad move was the Downloaded Items list. The poor design of the new version with big fonts, heavy contrasted colors between selected and unselected items, less space between the items, cluttered and unnecessary information, and a mysterious search field (search where?) again show that some bad decisions were made.

The horsy downloaded items dialog box in Firefox 3.0

The more elegant downloaded items dialog box in Firefox 2.0. Somebody, please give me a link to an add-on to use this older version!

I surely prefer in general the Firefox 3.0 with all its technical and performance improvements, but in therms of usability and interaction design, the community really have to go back to work a little more.

Now we’re going to the same way with mobile phones, waiting until somebody’s brain burns out.

Don’t have any way to make some pop-corn? Try calling to your own mobile phone!

update: so, what’s the real story? Did I go through an April’s fool joke?

updated: 06/16/2008 - The mystery revealed: it was just a viral campaign from a headset company. And a very good one. They caught me, but I really liked it!

Dave McComb, from Semantic Arts opened with a presentation basically highlighting the basic concepts that would be discussed along the event. Some are pretty old, like False positives and False negatives on search results, but the approach was obviously how semantic apps could help improving these questions. The shift from the web as we know is inevitable, due to the great amount of unstructured data is generating noise and it’s getting hard to work with the relational data model. Data must shift to Information, as information means knowledge. And some of the most recent efforts are on the Entity Extraction, with lots of tools for finding and associating entities found in text with concepts on ontologies. At the end, these information would allow the systems to make inferences and discoveries that wasn’t initially declared.

Ivan Herman, specialist from W3C on semantic web, made a broad presentation of what they’re focusing at the W3C, which are the discussions that are burning at the community and talked about some technologies that they are putting their bets on. As far as I saw, Dublin Core and FOAF are a common sense at the vocabulary level, as they appeared as good examples in both presentations and in every book about semantic. SPARQL is the Query Language that with RDF and WOL OWL seems to be under the spotlight now.

Ivan talked a little about an interesting project called the ‘Linking Open Data Project’, which Goal is to ‘expose open databases in RDF’, setting RDF links among data items from different databases and setting up SPARQL endpoints to query the data. The first practical project One of the projects of this initiative is the DBPedia: by extracting data from that “infobox” on wikipedia pages (right columm) from a City, for example, and integrating with the city information on the US Census database they can build a stronger an richer knowledge of that city.

At this elaboration stage there are still lots of issues, but these were the ones Ivan talked about: security, trust, provenance; ontology merging, alignment, term equivalences; Uncertainty. The most important for me were the ontology merging and uncertainty. The web as we know was build on sharing and linking documents. Now, on the Semantic wave the same concept must be applied. There’s no need to build a complete new ontology on geonames, for example. Just link to an existing and build one just for your own knowledge domain. I firmly agree with this vision.

But was we already know, documents published on the web are hard to control, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there forever. A 404 result for a document search is no big deal, but when it comes to build an application based on an external ontology maintained for a third part that you have no relation, there’s a huge difference. That was an issue that I personally asked Ivan, and he said everybody is asking the same question, that’s a big problem that the W3C itself is worried about, but unfortunately there’s no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Who’s gonna take care of the integrity of all these dependencies?

Ivan’s presentation for the SemTech2008 is available for download at the W3C website.

updated: Daniela Barbosa shared on her delicious some links from this first day.

James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone: “Arrested”. Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt - the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier - were alerted that he was being held.

Obviously this is another incredible real history about Twitter and the many ways it can become a usefull communication tool. Holly swiss army knife, Batman!

Read the full history about James Karl Buck and twitter at CNN.