Traffic Log Patterns

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for July 10 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/traffic_logs.html
	
Summary:
The relative popularity of a site's pages, the number of visitors referred
by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue to follow a
Zipf distribution.

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Intranet Design Annual, call for participation

Think you have a good intranet? Enter it for the competition to find the
world's ten best-designed intranets.

Deadline: August 21

  > http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2007

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Usability Week 2006 conference

  > Sydney, July 16-21

In-depth training:
  > 3-day Intensive Camp: Usability in Practice
  > 3-day Immersion: Tog on Interaction Design

10 specialized full-day tutorials

DEADLINE to save $200 through advance registration: This Friday, July 14.

Because of the cost of traveling to Australia we can only visit every two
years. Next chance 2008.

More info and full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

Sydney media sponsor: ZDNet.com.au

STUDENT VOLUNTEERS needed in Sydney: contact [email protected]

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Last month, I mentioned a British study that found that spending money on
books raise elementary-school students' grades twice as much as spending
the same amount of money on computers.

Some possible counter-arguments:

   * Maybe British teachers don't know how to use computers in education
   * Even if computers are too expensive now, they will get cheaper

Both points have some truth to them, but they would have carried more
weight in the 1980s when schools started using computers big time.
Computers are already very cheap, and we have more than twenty years'
experience with large-scale educational use of computers. In fact, we have
forty years' experience with educational use of computers, when including
early experiments, so it's sad if we still don't know how to use them.

The real cost of using computers is not the price of the hardware, but the
cost of software, systems integration, support, and user time lost
struggling with the interface. These costs don't seem to get any cheaper
over the years. Still, computers will get even cheaper, and they will
hopefully also get cheaper to install and support as vendors turn their
usability efforts to total cost of ownership.

I have written two books about hypertext and three books about the Web,
for a total of five linear works about non-linear media. I believe in both
formats. Linear is usually better for learning, but non-linear is better
for many other purposes.

The challenge is how to integrate linear and non-linear information, so
that they can supplement each other. Eventually computers will take over
from print as the home of linear expositions, even though computers are
currently poor for sustained, in-depth study.

Talking about books: If you have read my new book, Prioritizing Web
Usability, please post a review to your favorite online bookstore (reviews
and e-commerce are two things the Web is good for).

Book info:
   > http://www.useit.com/prioritizing