Why should I pay for a name?

Did I pay for my own name when I was born? No. Did you? I suppose not.
Why should we do it for a domain name?
I know, I know ... somebody provides a service. Well ... if we think a little we might found out that most people don't know what they are paying for and much more do not need the provided services.
Simply put we pay for somebody to intercept the request for your domain name and redirect that request to the registered IP. Who's doing that interception? Well ... actually the first server between you and the rest of the Internet is asking for directions to a bigger server until it finds out where you have to go and send you back the answer. Everybody can chose the name he wants as long as it was not already taken by somebody.
Very nice until now. Very nice until you ask yourself if you really need that and if the solution is really good?
It is used by people who one way or another know about my internet name and they trust that name already.

If the name is taken by somebody evil nobody can do anything about that.

That's OK but the personal names use a simpler method. When you meet somebody you don't know his name ... it is simply "that person". When you want to know his name you ask somebody you already know.
This way you find out not only the name of the persons bu also gather some opinions about that person, if it can be trusted and so on.
We already use that system on the internet because we ask Google for directions. Most users I meet do not enter the domain name in the address bar but in the search field in Google interface. They search for that name and then click on the associated link. The reasons for that are very different. Some do not trust their typing skills, others do not know about the address bar, etc.
Do we pay google for this service? Of course not. They earn tons of money from other sources.


Why should we pay a domain registrar and others in their ecosystem for services that can be obtain very easy the other way?
It is simply stupid.

Instead we can imagine an internet where you ask somebody you know to tell you who is the server with the name we heard about. The person we ask can be a big company like Google or a friend who offer such directions for a specific domain because he is an expert in that field. This way the internet becomes a much more trusted source because the name itself has to be recognized by some providers of directions.

The user interface and how a we WORK with the computer

Working with the current graphical interfaces is a way to strangle your imagination. We have to memorize positions of applications, use single point of focus, etc.
I've just found out about an initiative in this area. It is the continuum. Please go to http://10gui.com/video/ and see the video demostration. The ideea is realy nice. It's an evolution. Considering the folowing the iPhone interface draw it looks like this could have some success.

On the other hand I think that this is ok for small screen spaces.
It is also a nice aproach for a casual user the needs only 2-3 applications to work with.

What about the heavy duty area of the computer usage?
My backgound is in graphics, page layout and some sort of software development. For those areas such lite aproaches are ... well ... limited. Right now I'm working at a graphical interface for a vector application. I'm using a dual screen system. Sounds good but let me tell you that dual screen is stil limited. I have a screen to look at the code and a text editor with to do actions that have to be writen as I discover anything that has to be adjusted. The other screen shares an instance of the actual interface I'm working on, the web browser, an icon editor and for now that's all . If I look deeper I can also consider that the browser also has at least 10 tabs opened permanently. That makes for a very clutered screen space don't you think?

What can I do? Moving windows left and right is no better than tabbing throu the overlaped windows. A better aproach will be to increase the screen space and/or try to guess what the user want's to do at a specific moment. The second aproach sounds interesting but I can think about some situation when no system will be able to discern what I need from it.

So, we have to go back to the screen real estate we own. Some time I use two or three computers simultaneously and share the same keyboard and mouse using a very nice tool named synergy. That makes for a really interesting work station but also for a lot of noise and I hate noise.

Anyway the ideea of multiple screens and even complementing this with at least one more syncronized system is much more practcal for a heavy duty production station.

Improved reading

The following lines are in fact a reply to a forum post that tried to convince me that we can read the same on a device as our ancestor have done than on stones. As a reply I tried to image a few directions we can take in order to improve the way we communicate written information.

"Does there have to be a better way to read, besides scrolling and turning pages?"
If you consider reading just a repetitive action of understanding letters the current way of doing thing is OK.
If you consider reading as a method of acquiring information then the old fashion way has a lot of drawbacks.

Aren't you bored by the fact that after 7k years of evolution and 50 years of computer technology around we still read the same?

We have to change. Why do you use the airplane today when the horse was so good yesterday? Because is better.
Be sure that in 10 minutes we can find together better ways of doing things.

Think for a moment at the times when you open a book in order to learn something. At that moment you don't just read the characters. You have to link the ideas the you acquire with information coming from other sources. Compare things, check notes or supplementary materials, theorems, videos, etc. It's simply impossible to put everything in the space of a page and still keep it simple to navigate. And I'm not speaking here about small screens ... it's hard to do a good placement on a full page. I've done this for more than 20 years for newspapers, magazines and all kind of books. Believe me it's a hell to have good information architecture on a simple polygon of a given size and with a fixed amount of letters.

I am definitely not thinking at eye ball tracking. It is just about information architecture and marrying that with the capabilities of the support that now is dynamic not just a simple stone or sheet of paper.

My grandfather had to consider limiting the number of pages for economic reasons. On a display you don't have any limitation on size. And I'm speaking about any size (font, row, number of colors, etc).

Wouldn't be better if, for example, we will rethink the book so that we read not one page at a time but one phrase having around all the information related to it. It will be easier to have just a phrase on screen and all related info at hand than a page filed with side boxes, end notes, footnotes, headings, etc. I'm not saying that this is the way to go ... it is just an example of rethinking the book.

Now let's look at another aspect.
We all know how much the readability depends on the length of the row and the number of characters per row. The number of words on a row will influence also how easy it is to understand the idea.
What if we will adapt the layout to the current phrase.

Some ideas are hard to layout in a page and still transmit the importance of the fragment. We tend to extract them and place a duplicate as a side box or something similar. What if we will think the book as something dynamic not by placing a video betwen lines but having those lines adapt to their importance. Good design implies using a small number of font variations but if change helps in the process of communicating the idea be sure that every designer will understand.

It is not change for the sake of change. And we are not speaking about technology but about reading and information.
The name of the game is improvement and we have to improve the way we read (or the way we prepare information for reading).

Search another way

Compared with most of the people I am a heavy user of search engines. Instead of making me a good follower of the classic search engine trends I find each day that I really angry on them. Nobody on this market tries to make things different. There is just a miriad of google replicas.

They have a good reason to fight with google. Google has the money. Every other player want's a piece of that pie. Unfortunately they forget a basic rule of the business world. You have to be different.

What about patents

I'm really thinking for some time about a mechanism to distribute ideas for free.

I don't want to fight against the patents and the associated system. I just don't care too much about it. I've read some things about it. I have a book right here with detailed information about it.
It looks like something created for somebody who enjoy loosing his focus and most probably his hopes.

I don't have time and resources to enroll my ideas it this system. It does not make sense for me.
If you ask about protecting my ideas .... here is my opinion.

It is not fair to stop somebody from developing an idea just because you need more time to develop it yourself. If it is your idea you will surely know better how to succeed with it.

So, please enjoy reading this, involve in this discussion, post your own ideas and use my ideas free. We live in a free world wherever we are. Be free in whatever you do.
Let's share ideas and make them shine.

The Internet flaw

It's almost 2:00 in the night and I'm thinking about an issue that bothers me for some time.

To be fair I'm far from being in love with any search engine. I use google for casual searches and yahoo for some deeper searches. From time to time I use also different other engines. I don't like any of them. The idea of internet search engine it's a bubble. One that has to explode one day.

The search engine filters the entire web experience.
Remember Netscape ... what as the other name of the browser ... it was NAVIGATOR.
Riiiight ... we've lost the navigation factor. We try to get there by using various comunity concepts like facebook or tweter ... but that's only a location ... we've lost the road.