Fellow Construction Workers

One of the most attractive aspects of the Web for me is the community approach to town planning in that everybody gets a crack at contributing to the onward development and construction of the Web.

If you feel like it, you could devise a new idea, notion, open standard or concept and if it's good enough, or not as is sometimes the case, you can then effect its acceptance, more or less single handedly, to a planning comittee populated in most part by your peers and fellow cyber engineers.

Whilst some conventional market forces do prevail in this process, like competition for example, and the particular flavour of marketing that relies more upon the inherent credibility of the proposal, its referral and endorsement by others than it does mass marketing techniques like spam, its mostly a brave new world founded on the cornerstones of creativity and first mover advantage and governed by the prinicples of democracy and meritocracy.

It is with this grand vista in mind that I propose the following definition requirement for the approval of the committee - I'm recently given to thinking that we need a name for the action of clicking on a hyperlink by mistake and falling foul of the all too brief time that's available to you to move your mouse pointer to the browser's Stop button in a futile attempt to prevent your browser session launching off in the wrong direction. This is especially frustrating if you've been filling in a form of the kind that loses its memory when you inadvertantly leave it and attempt to get back to where you left it by clicking the Back button, only to find it's previous contents have disappeared.

A blink? A flink? A fluck? Doh-link? Diaperlink? A Slap-link?

What would we call the moment between realising that you misclicked a link and when your browser heads off in the wrong direction away from your current page?

The Win-Doh?

What, Exactly, Does The Inside Of a Fibre-Optic Cable Look Like?

Why, when we find a place that's broken or an empty 404 link on the Web, do we not get to see behind the scenery?

But in my mind we should see something more elegant than just lots of garbage code flitting backawards and forwards, from continent to continent. We should see a beautiful vista, as if someone had punched a whole in the outer-shell of the Web to reveal what actually lies behind all the scenery department's fine work. Like a city-scape at night, shot from 30,000 feet and sped up to show all the lights glistening and flashing past below. Or from the viewpoint of of travelling data and the view it would have from inside a fiber-optic cable, as your bits pull over and stop for a few moments to take in some scenery at a random point in the global network somewhere. Or from a position floating just above the earth.

Our data gets to see all the good stuff.

(There are, admittedly, all the dark underground tunnels too, but data can't have it all ways, can it? And, yes, I am aware that Fiber-Optic cable has an opaque casing around it which would prevent light leakage and, therefore, the ability to see outside it but, what worth is a world without romance?)

Live Fast, Die Young

Or, How Jakob Neilsen Killed Concorde.

If there's one good thing to come out of the the last flight of Concorde on Friday, it's that at least France got three hours further away from the USA, something I know will warm the hearts of many fellow citizens. Being British, nae Scottish in fact, I have to say that the French have always been held in a certain high regard by Scots under the terms of the "Auld Alliance". In simplistic parlance, both the Scots and the French used to like to gang up on the English and slap them about a bit, until the Act of Union took all the fun out of it. But I'm not supposed talking about the French, I'm supposed to be talking about Concorde which, I suppose, is a French word and was a French concept to start with, so cut me some slack.

Concorde (the supersonic passenger jet) was designed to make the world a smaller place and therefore with it's passing, the world must have just gotten a little bigger. That is, of course, unless you happen to be the crew of a Blackbird SR-51 spyplane. We know that the Web too, was supposed to make the world a smaller place - a "global village" to use the vernacular of the times.

Could it be that poor old Concorde could just no longer keep up with the new planetary dietician on the block - the Web? Or, more likely, have we just gotten too good at saving time in almost everything that we do, so efficient and fast as a species by virtue of great design and usability (see Mr Nielsen) ; in our cars, mobile phones, with our traffic reports, our washing machines, video recorders, text messages, emails, web sites, 24 hour news channels, fast food, RSS news aggregators, quickie divorces, drive-thru chapels of love in Vegas and so the list would go on - if I had the time - that we just can't save any more time? So much so, in fact, that a three hour transatlanic time saving just doesn't cut it these days.

Thirty years ago Concorde was about the biggest time saving device on the planet. Today it isn't, quite literally since you can't fly on it now - but you get the picture.

In other words, Concorde had gotten too slow for us, it never kept up with the times, actually the more I think about it, the more I see an equation emerging; a slower and bigger capacity 747 Jumbo with 400 passengers each carrying a mobile phone or a PDA, probably saves at least twice as much time as 100 passengers on a single Concorde flight over the same distance.

Whomever they choose to design the next generation passenger jet - Jakob Nielsen would be a good place to start - they should ensure that the time saving characteristics of the plane should not simply be confined to it's stupendously ridiculous airspeed.