An article appeared on the Seattle Post-Intellegencer regarding a website that displayed the Seattle Live 911 website feed on a Google map. The city's response? Change the text to images in an attempt to prevent the map display for security reasons.

The Seattle Fire Department's Real-Time 911 Fire Dispatch response: Read more

I would like to make some obsevations on usability, or rather the lack there of in product design. For the past 12 months I have been working on a web-based electronic signature service. I sat on every meeting, discussing design, layout and usability. Making sure that our product 'made sense' was very important to me. What's very frustrating is seeing a huge company with very large developement budgets just simply fail to think things through. Read more

Google does have a great little notebook and it wants to share it with everyone.... along with its gmail, spreadsheets, maps, calendars and everything else. The problem, and personally its a huge problem is that while 'everyone' and do everything on Google no one person can do everything in one place. What is the benefit of using Google if all of their services are strung around like someone just spilled the jar of Google? I need a search engine/web portal just to organize all of my Google services. At least Microsoft 'integrates' MS Word with Outlook. Google does nothing of the kind. Read more

How to redirect non-www requests to the www.site to reduce risk of SEO penalty Numerous posts regarding SEO mention that search engines may punish sites for having 'duplicat content' even if that apperant copy is on your own site. For example a site might be available to both https AND http or http://www AND non-www. Due the magic of the internet this could appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Engines don't like seeing content copied for many of the same reasons that we don't like and often fear copies in the real world. Read more