Dave Catanese, political reporter for KY3 TV, began the KY3 Political Notebook blog in 2006 and was active in the local blogging community initially. He won a “Blogaroni” for Political Reporting in 2007, but came in second in the voting for Best Resource blog, losing out to my efforts with SGFsoccer.com
He took home a second Political blog award in 2008
I was surprised at the time that he was using Blogger to support his efforts, although there can be valid reasons for doing so. The best reason – it’s easy to get started and until you start, you won’t benefit. There are downsides to that approach however, and it seems Dave and his bosses have discovered them.
]]>“Transitioning” seems to be the thing to do right now, and we at the KY3 Political Notebook are doing it as well. We are in the midst of moving the Notebook to our new home on our TV Internet home of ky3.com. This move is weeks in the making, and I can assure you it is not occurring without questions, modifications, much attention to every detail — and, admittedly, a bit of trepidation.
The move is a bit bittersweet for me. Blogger has been good to us, allowed us to flourish and enhanced our creativity. But we believe that moving the Notebook to ky3.com will be beneficial for both sides. To be frank, my bosses would like to see the hits you grant us on their home site. And I would like to branch our political reporting out to a wider community.
Inuse has conducted a competitive usability test of the iPhone and 3 traditional phones that are operated by pressing buttons and function keys. (Simple through medium-complexity phone tasks were tested, ranging from “place a call” to “take a photo and send to a person in the address book”. No truly high-end mobile tasks were tested, such as connecting to an enterprise-level sales force automation backend to update a customer’s order status.)
The iPhone had the highest usability in the study, in terms of users’ ability to complete the test tasks. Also, participants’ subjective preferences were in favor of the iPhone.
The biggest difference between the iPhone and the traditional mobile UI devices came from the DIRECT MANIPULATION employed on the iPhone: you press the thing you want. In contrast, other phones use INDIRECT manipulation where you press various function keys to make things happen on the screen.
The difference is similar to that between a graphical user interface (GUI) with a mouse and a traditional character-driven UI where you push function keys that are divorced from the objects on the screen that they operate on.
Report from usability study (link downloads PDF)
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