Is it just me?

Is it just me or is the usability of the Ubuntu website really awful?

I just finished updating my Ubuntu server to the latest Edgy Eft. As always, vowe has been a reliable source when something important happens – and it even told how to dist-upgrade with one simple command.

Problem is, this simple command works only for the desktop version, so I went to the Ubuntu website to find out how to dist-upgrade my server. So this is where I get to the core of my rant: while I absolutely love Ubuntu for the cool and well organized distribution it is, I’m in a constant battle with its website. Somehow the way their site is structured just makes it a pain for me to find any information. For my task, checking the “Support” page turned out to be fruitless, instead I had to go to Community, then spot the link to the forums in the right aligned navigation (*sigh*), search for a matching post, and finally be directed towards this page.

It wouldn’t have taken a lot of effort to provide a link to the upgrade howto right next to the link to installation howto on the homepage.

Taking Nicola to the next level

One of the authors who has impressed me throughout my studies is Nicola Döring. Her bookchapters in Batinic (1999) are still a milestone when it comes to social interactions in an online world. However, as her theories are mostly based on chat, IRC and MUDs, the online world has changed and the buzz of Web 2.0 has hit the streets. Today, it’s cool to write blogs, to listen to podcasts, and to have one’s video on YouTube.

Yet Nicola’s theories can be taken into this new world of computer mediated communication. Nicola confronts theories of channel reduction and social filtering with theories of social information processing, simulation, and imagination. In a nutshell, she says what we “loose” in comparison to a face-to-face conversation in real life can be made even (or even surpassed) by the way the internet allows us to verbalize our messages and the richness we have to construct online identities.

Several of her concepts taken from the “old” internet to the new one still work: on the one hand because those forms of communication (e.g. IRC) are still available and are being used, and on the other hand because the new forms of communication follow the old theories. Think about lurkers. I bet that the rule “most people on YouTube are lurkers” applies as well as it did/does to online forums. On MySpace we see how much effort people put into the creation of their online identities. The story of lonelygirl15 is an example of an online experiment with a fake personality. However, in my eyes nothing expresses the richness people develop when it comes to present themselves online as this most recent YouTube video shows:

Although one may argue that a lot of things on YouTube are trivial and boring, I am impressed by the diversity of people who participate and the way non-verbal communication is now being transported through the WWW, too. Looks like in CMC we really need to start our engines for the qualitative and quantitative research of web movies. An overview of how that can be done is to be found in Bortz & Döring (2002). A short introduction can also be found in the wikipedia.

Batinic, B. (1999). Internet für Psychologen. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
Bortz, J. & Döring, N. (2002). Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation. Berlin: Springer.

Hypertext structure

Although seven years are somewhat close to eternity in the fast paced World Wide Web, Gerdes’ (1999) book chapter on hypertext from a psychological point of view is still a standard. Gerdes says that a hierarchic hypertext structure is superior vs. linear and fully networked structures.

Today I found a cool applet that displays any given website as a graph. The picture above displays the hierarchy and complexity of parcival.org (the black dot is the root node). How complex are you?

Gerdes, H. (1999). Hypertext. In B. Batinic (Ed.): Internet für Psychologen. Göttingen: Hogrefe.

EDIT: On a second look, after my excitation has calmed down, I realized that I am talking nonsense. The applet visualizes the complexity of a webpage and not of a website. In other words, the applet is not applicable to the findings of Gerdes – but it’s a cool tool to visualize the complexity of a webpage instead.

EDIT: On a third look, I know why I fell for that mistake: Aharef doesn’t know the difference between a webpage and a website. However, since the author is German speaking, it’s easy to do the mistake. In German, the word “Webseite” (= webpage) is very similar to the English word “website”, but the meaning’s different.

EDIT: On a fourth look, I found an applet that visualizes the structure of an entire website. Unfortunately, it’s a perfect example for why “cool looking” isn’t always the same as “clearly understandable”.

The picture above visualizes the complexity of parcival.org as a website and is applicable to Gerdes. Unfortunately, the applet offers no zoom and rotation functions so its information is close to useless.

The Battle of the New Atheism

In the Wired magazine they now feature an interesting article on how the new atheist movement challenges theism. No matter if you are an idealist, an agnostic, or an atheist, this article provides quite something to think about.

Various Shades Of Red

Genox is at it again and he’s doing extremely well. His latest addition, Various Shades Of Red, surely will excite his fans all over the world again. In his download area you may also download his tracks of days long gone by.

I have to say I don’t like his tracks all equally, in my iTunes they range from two stars (Klep) to five (Pulse, Icestorm Desert, Breaking Shiva). Various Shades Of Red directly went from zero to five stars. Keep ‘em coming.

Oh, and he has shot the best pictures of my hometown I’ve ever seen. If you reload his site a couple times, you’ll cycle through them.