User Centered

Inhabitat is a great site. I love the designs there and actually spend a lot of time going through all the posts there and reading about eco design. I don't really fancy myself a "green" person, although I'm always for less brown air, but I am very interested in "efficient" designs. As it turns out, these are often found on "green" sites.

Anyway- at the bottom of the page, there's the navigation, but they confusingly mix their metaphors. When you get to the bottom, you see "PREVIOUS PAGE" and "NEXT PAGE." But- "page" is ambiguous as a browser page, previous page is synonymous with "back" in my mind. I haven't previously seen any pages yet! Of course, it means "previous entries." All navigation schemes I can think of label it in terms of the articles/entries, not "pages."

Replace "page" with "entries," Or "previous/next" with "older/newer"

Publish and subscribe via XML make any sense to you? How about Copy & Paste? There's a cool demo and some work being done in this area which is being coined "Live Clipboard" that is much more palatable than my first sentence, and it's VERY interesting.

Read "Wiring the Web" for the background, but warning- that read can get just about as technical as you want it to be if you follow all the links through the rabbit hole. After that, try out the demo! Note, for reasons explained here, it doesn't work in Opera. But it's worth firing up Firefox or IE to have a look.. in fact, fire 'em both up and load the page in both- copy & paste data across browsers!

Why am I posting this here? It's the best "user-centered" approach to publish/subscribe I've ever seen and a compelling proof of concept.

Why should User Centered readers care? Well, in the demo, you'll see a clipboard icon. You can right click and copy that information like you do just about everywhere else on your computer. Still don't get it? Your not copying a string of text from a webpage, you're copying a Calendar item, or contact information and pasting it into another webpage that understands what to do with it (how to consume it). So, if google were to implement this in calendar page, I could copy the calendar events from the demo linked above, and just "paste" it into google as a new event. This allows each website the ability to "wire the web" themselves. Similar to the way that site authors can code their pages to hook you up with RSS feeds or as Opera has recently done, to announce a widget.

My first recommended use of this is: (in addition to the author's thoughts)
Have authors implement a "blog this" type button on each post... so if I want to reference say... Hallvors post on why it doesn't work in Opera, I can click the "Live Clipboard" button, hit control-C, and Paste it into my own blog posting all nicely formatted. Maybe depending on how or where I paste it, it will "consume" it differently-

Paste it *in* my own blog post, it will show up as a link:

...but if I paste it as a *new* blog post, it will show up in whole. (I'm not sure what happened to this image as I was working with it, but you get the idea)

...which I could see being useful for a "manual entry" for aggregator sites like Planet Opera. Put a post up without having to subscribe to the feed.