April 4, 2007 12:03 PM
Updated: May 6, 2007
As of now, our two major bugs are:
- Our topics aren't normalized. We intend on combining synonymous topics, like "UX for children" and "designing experiences for kids," setting on a preferred term and listing variants. This should result in a far more useful topical index.
- False hits for authored books. We also intend to weed out books that Amazon mistakenly thinks were written by UX Zeitgeist participants. This will especially be a problem for names like "Jane Smith," "John Jones," and, oh, "William Shakespeare".
It's hard to call these bugs; they're really just tasks that are waiting on some fixes to be made to our back-end administrative interface.
We also know that the number of search results that is associated with a content source (e.g., "See all 75 results" for Mentions in Books) isn't always quite correct. That's often due to timing; we may be a day or more behind. But this type of discrepancy seems to be true of just about every Web 2.0 service; we're not sure we can do much about it.
We also know that there are a few true bugs; for example, the "Participate" link is broken.
What have we missed? Please let us know by commenting below.
Comments
another bug, maybe ... where's the RSS feed for the zeitgeist blog?
the RSS link on the uxz.cgi page leads to the whole-site feed, not the feed specific to blog it is positioned next to. The auto-discovery link in the html also leads to that same, wrong, feed.
Posted by: Eric Scheid | April 10, 2007 12:59 AM
Some nitpicking:
http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/zeitgeist/
this URL gives me a directory listing.
Maybe have it automatically redirect to
http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/zeitgeist/blog/ ?
(or is it a UX 'feature';)
Regards
JJ
Posted by: JJ Halans | April 10, 2007 1:53 AM
Eric, good find; we're working on getting our RSS feeds in order, and it might be as soon as today.
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | April 10, 2007 6:46 AM
JJ, we'll take a closer look at how we're handling the URLs that folks might guess at (and how well--or not--we're protecting directories. Thanks!
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | April 10, 2007 7:34 AM
Perhaps a way to control for non-UX hits for people's names mentioned in books is to create a filter for the books themselves: for a book to be counted as a legitimate mention of an author's name, it should meet at least, say, 5 other criteria such as: the book appears in the zeitgeist book list; the book references at least two *other* people in the zeitgeist book list; the book references a book in the zeitgeist book list; the book contains certain keywords in large enough quantities to count as a UX book.
Of course, you can also rule out books published before a certain date -- for sure 1950, but maybe even as recent as 1990 (although that would cut off some classics, the names in those classics are now either irrelevant or they are still relevant by virtue of mention in more recent titles anyway). This could also be a sliding scale -- books published recently give more points than older books.
I used to design games, so devising point systems is in my blood, I guess. :-)
Posted by: Christopher Fahey | July 19, 2007 2:35 PM
Chris, that's a fascinating idea. Definitely a UX Zeitgeist 2.0 task, and maybe a tad self-referential, but pretty neat.
Posted by: Lou Rosenfeld | July 23, 2007 10:21 AM