contentious.com

Here is a bunch of cool tools, tips, and techniques that caught my attention over the past month.

TOP OF THIS LIST: Pretty purple states. Lately, dualistic, polarized thinking and debate of all kinds has been bugging me big time. The recent slew of inane “red state/blue state” chatter concerning the US election is simply one example of this. Why can’t we embrace complexity and spectrums wholeheartedly? Why can’t we talk about shades of purple, rather than divide our political landscape into red and blue?

Well, that’s exactly what Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the Univ. of Michigan have done. Check out Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results. They use cartograms (maps distorted to represent weighting by factors such as population) to visually convey a far more nuanced and accurate version of the 2004 election results. The electoral college may be a flat red and blue, but the reality of the US electorate has a subtler palette. Bravo!

Read the rest of the list…

1. Google Desktop Search: You’ve probably already heard of this new free tool from Google, which has gotten a lot of press and buzz, both pro and con. It’s and interesting concept – Google search for the files on your computer, including the web browser cache. Personally I can’t use it because it’s Windows-only ( I use a Linux desktop machine and a Mac laptop). However, I know people who use it and love it. I think it’s especially useful for writers and editors, who are notoriously disorganized about where they’ve saved files. At first, many people had privacy and security concerns about this tool. However, security expert Bruce Schneier put these to rest fairly definitively, I think, in a Nov. 29 eWeek article. Fredrick Marckini raved about it in Clickz. If you’re a Windows user, you might want to try it.
2. GoogleFight: So simple, and so much fun. Type in any two keywords, and this tool will search Google and display a side-by-side comparison of the number of results. Incidentally, God is kicking Satan’s virtual butt: 115 million results for “God” vs. only 2.89 million for “Satan.” (Thanks to James Governor for this link.)
3. A hosted content management system (CMS): In case you didn’t realize it, if you want a CMS that will manage your site you don’t necessarily have to deal with a major software purchase and installation. There are hosted CMS options. Live Storyboard is one. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say how I like it, but people should be aware that this approach exists. (Thanks to CMSwire for this link.)
4. What’s in a (domain) name? Lots. If you’re a non-geek wondering what exactly domain names are, or if you need to explain this crucial aspect of the internet to non-geeks, check out Domain Name Basics: An Introduction, by Lee Underwood. It covers all the basics succinctly, in fairly plain language.
5. Wikalong: This extension to the free open source web browser Firefox embeds a wiki in the browser siderbar. That wiki is indexed off the URL of the page currently being displayed. This review says, “It essentially lets you take notes on a web page without printing it out and annotating the printout, or writing things down in a notebook or file you’ll never open again. A wiki within Firefox.”
6. If I was a CMS vendor: Getting feedback, by James Robertson, Column Two, Nov. 11. I’ve heard this a lot of times from various people, but it’s great to see it spelled out so clearly. During the tendering part of the deal process, communication is incredibly important. So tender tenderly!
7. Meeting a User’s Emotional Needs, by D. Keith Robinson, Asterisk, Nov. 1. While this article focuses on usability in system design, the concept actually applies to many other sorts of endeavors. Back in March I wrote a similar article from the editorial perspective, Emotions Belong in Business Writing.
8. Dave Winer explains Outliners: Lately I’ve been hearing the term outliner tossed about in diverse circles – from knowledge management to podcasting. It’s a category of software tool used for organizing and sharing information. Outliners manipulate outlines. In this context, an outline is: “…an XML document in a special format called OPML. [Outlines are] designed to allow different outlining software to transparently read and edit documents produced by other outliners.” (Thanks to Column Two for this link.)