Microformats burst onto the scene a couple of years ago and are fast becoming an essential tool for all professional web designers and developers. Imagine being able to integrate all of your web-based contact details, tagged articles, and geographical information seamlessly in web and desktop applications, without having to add anything extra to your websites except a little specialized HTML markup. Microformats provide a more formalized technology for adding commonly used semantics (such as contact details, location, and reviews) to today's Web. Unlike XML or the semantic Web, microformats use ubiquitous technologies like HTML and XHTML, existing developer skills, and current web tools, and, perhaps most important, they work in all of today's web browsers. This book is a comprehensive guide to microformats. It explores why, in Bill Gates's words, "We need microformats"; how microformats work; and the kinds of problems microformats help solve. the book covers every current microformat, with complete details of the syntax, semantics, and uses of each, along with real-world examples and a comprehensive survey of the tools available for working with them. the book also features case studies detailing how major web content publishers such as yahoo put microformats to work in their web applications. Written by one of the Web's best-known educators, John Allsopp, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 will help you painlessly get up to speed with this exciting technology.In this book you'll learn How to take best advantage of the built-in semantics of XHTML and HTMLHow to extend the semantics of HTML using microformats and open up a world of new possibilities with web applicationsEvery aspect of all the common microformats currently in useHow microformats help your websites and applications easily integrate with web applications like Google Maps, as well as desktop applications like iCal, outlook, and entourageWhat innovative publishers and services, big and small, are doing right now with microformatsSummary of Contents PART ONE: INTRODUCING MICROFORMATSChapter 1: What Are Microformats?Chapter 2: The State of the Art in MicroformatsPART TWO: USING MICROFORMATSChapter 3: Structural and Semantic HTMLChapter 4: Link-Based Microformats: rel-license, rel-tag rel-nofollow, and VoteLinksChapter 5:Microformat to Describe Relationships Between People: XFNChapter 6: Location Microformats: geo and adrChapter 7: Contact Information Microformat: hCardChapter 8: Event Microformat: hCalendarChapter 9: Review and Resume Microformats: hReview and hResumeChapter 10: Syndicated Content Microformat: hAtom.PART THREE: CASE STUDIESChapter 11: Case Study: Cork'dChapter 12: Case Study: YahooPART FOUR: DEVELOPING MICROFORMATSChapter 13: The Process of Developing MicroformatsPART FIVE: APPENDIXESAppendix A: Microformat Specification ReferenceAppendix B: Microformat Design PatternsAppendix C: People, Tools, Services, and Publishers

"Steve Baker puts his finger on perhaps the most important cultural trend today: the explosion of data about every aspect of our world and the rise of applied math gurus who know how to use it." —Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine (Wired Magazine )

An urgent look at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior — at work, at the mall, and in bed

Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our behavior — what we buy, how we vote — without our even realizing it.

In this tour de force of original reporting and analysis, journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're all entering — and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists — and lovers. The implications are vast. Our privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor and measure our every move (then reward or punish us). Politicians can find the swing voters among us, by plunking us all into new political groupings with names like "Hearth Keepers" and "Crossing Guards." It can sound scary. But the Numerati can also work on our behalf, diagnosing an illness before we're aware of the symptoms, or even helping us find our soul mate. Surprising, enlightening, and deeply relevant, The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor — the mathematical modeling of humanity — will transform every aspect of our lives.

STEPHEN BAKER has written for BusinessWeek for over twenty years, covering Mexico and Latin America, the Rust Belt, European technology, and a host of other topics, including blogs, math, and nanotechnology. But he's always considered himself a foreign correspondent. This, he says, was especially useful as he met the Numerati. "While I came from the world of words, they inhabited the symbolic realms of math and computer science. This was foreign to me. My reporting became an anthropological mission." Baker has written for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his portrait of the rising Mexican auto industry. He is the coauthor of blogspotting.net, featured by the New York Times as one of fifty blogs to watch.

Every stage in the design of a new web site is an opportunity to meet or miss deadlines and budgetary goals. Every stage is an opportunity to boost or undercut the site's usability.

This book tells you how to design usable web sites in a systematic process applicable to almost any business need. You get practical advice on managing the project and incorporating usability principles from the project's inception. This systematic usability process for web design has been developed by the authors and proven again and again in their own successful businesses.

A beacon in a sea of web design titles, this book treats web site usability as a preeminent, practical, and realizable business goal, not a buzzword or abstraction. The book is written for web designers and web project managers seeking a balance between usability goals and business concerns.

* Examines the entire spectrum of usability issues, including architecture, navigation, graphical presentation, and page structure.
* Explains clearly the steps relevant to incorporating usability into every stage of the web development process, from requirements to tasks analysis, prototyping and mockups, to user testing, revision, and even postlaunch evaluations.

How many times has your PC crashed today? While Gordon Moore's now famous law projecting the doubling of computer power every 18 months has more than borne itself out, it's too bad that a similar trajectory projecting the reliability and usefulness of all that power didn't come to pass, as well. Advances in information technology are most often measured in the cool numbers of megahertz, throughput, and bandwidth—but, for many us, the experience of these advances may be better measured in hours of frustration.

The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it's into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge. Not that these guys are Luddites—far from it. Brown, the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid, a historian and social theorist who also works with PARC, measure how information technology interacts and meshes with the social fabric. They write, "Technology design often takes aim at the surface of life. There it undoubtedly scores lots of worthwhile hits. But such successes can make designers blind to the difficulty of more serious challenges—primarily the resourcefulness that helps embed certain ways of doing things deep in our lives."

The authors cast their gaze on the many trends and ideas proffered by infoenthusiasts over the years, such as software agents, "still a long way from the predicted insertion into the woof and warp of ordinary life"; the electronic cottage that Alvin Toffler wrote about 20 years ago and has yet to be fully realized; and the rise of knowledge management and the challenges it faces trying to manage how people actually work and learn in the workplace. Their aim is not to pass judgment but to help remedy the tunnel vision that prevents technologists from seeing larger the social context that their ideas must ultimately inhabit. The Social Life of Information is a thoughtful and challenging read that belongs on the bookshelf of anyone trying to invent or make sense of the new world of information. —Harry C. Edwards

Knowing everything you can about each click to your Web site can help you make strategic decisions regarding your business. This book is about the why, not just the how, of web analytics and the rules for developing a "culture of analysis" inside your organization. Why you should collect various types of data. Why you need a strategy. Why it must remain flexible. Why your data must generate meaningful action. The authors answer these critical questions—and many more—using their decade of experience in Web analytics.

Bill Buxton and I share a common belief that design leadership together with technical leadership drives innovation. Sketching, prototyping, and design are essential parts of the process we use to create new products. Bill Buxton brings design leadership and creativity to Microsoft. Through his thought-provoking personal examples he is inspiring others to better understand the role of design in their own companies—Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft

"Informed design is essential." While it might seem that Bill Buxton is exaggerating or kidding with this bold assertion, neither is the case. In an impeccably argued and sumptuously illustrated book, design star Buxton convinces us that design simply must be integrated into the heart of business—Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Design is explained, with the means and manner for successes and failures illuminated by engaging stories, true examples and personal anecdotes. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton clarifies the processes and skills of design from sketching to experience modeling, in a lively and informative style that is rich with stories and full of his own heart and enthusiasm. At the start we are lost in mountain snows and northern seas, but by the end we are equipped with a deep understanding of the tools of creative design.—Bill Moggridge, Cofounder of IDEO and author of Designing Interactions

"Like any secret society, the design community has its strange rituals and initiation procedures. Bill opens up the mysteries of the magical process of design, taking us through a land in which story-telling, orange squeezers, the Wizard of Oz, I-pods, avalanche avoidance, bicycle suspension sketching, and faking it are all points on the design pilgrim's journey. There are lots of ideas and techniques in this book to feed good design and transform the way we think about creating useful stuff". -Peter Gabriel

I love this book. There are very few resources available that see across and through all of the disciplines involved in developing great experiences. This is complex stuff and Buxton's work is both informed and insightful. He shares the work in an intimate manner that engages the reader and you will find yourself nodding with agreement, and smiling at the poignant relevance of his examples.—Alistair Hamilton, Symbol Technologies, NY

Books that have proposed bringing design into HCI are aplenty, though books that propose bringing software in to Design less common. Nevertheless, Bill manages to skilfully steer a course between the excesses of the two approaches and offers something truly in-between. It could be a real boon to the innovation business by bringing the best of both worlds: design and HCI. —Richard Harper, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

There is almost a fervor in the way that new products, with their rich and dynamic interfaces, are being released to the public-typically promising to make lives easier, solve the most difficult of problems, and maybe even make the world a better place. The reality is that few survive, much less deliver on their promise. The folly? An absence of design, and an over-reliance on technology alone as the solution.

We need design. But design as described here depends on different skillsets-each essential, but on their own, none sufficient. In this rich ecology, designers are faced with new challenges-challenges that build on, rather than replace, existing skills and practice.

Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understood-by both designers and the people with whom they need to work- in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values.

Grounded in both practice and scientific research, Bill Buxton's engaging work aims to spark the imagination while encouraging the use of new techniques, breathing new life into user experience design.

. Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;
. Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;
. Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;
. Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips (www.mkp.com/sketching) that demonstrate the principles and methods.

About the Author

Trained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio an on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology. He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that they employed. This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton participated in pioneering work in collaborative work, interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. He then went on to become Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront, where he had the opportunity to work with some of the top film makers and industrial designers in the world. He is now a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research and helping make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture.

* Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;

* Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;

* Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;

* Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips that demonstrate the principles and methods.

This charming book is an engaging introduction to a range of traditional crafts and activities. Almost 100 skills are described and illustrated, from trout-guddling to lacemaking, beekeeping to dry-stone walling. Whether wanting to learn a new craft, explore social history or reminisce about pastimes from a bygone age, readers of all ages will lose themselves in Lost Crafts. And with more of us choosing green and ethical lifestyles, there has never been a better time to rediscover these sustainable pursuits.

Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more. Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

An excellent book for anyone who wants to understand why so much software is so poorly designed — and an even better book for anyone who wants to DO something about the problem. Must reading (and doing!) for programmers of any level.

It’s 50 years before the settlement of the city of Ember, and the world is in crisis. War looms on the horizon as 11-year-old Nickie and her aunt travel to the small town of Yonwood, North Carolina. There, one of the town’s respected citizens has had a terrible vision of fire and destruction. Her garbled words are taken as prophetic instruction on how to avoid the coming disaster. If only they can be interpreted correctly. . . .

As the people of Yonwood scramble to make sense of the woman’s mysterious utterances, Nickie explores the oddities she finds around town—her great-grandfather’s peculiar journals and papers, a reclusive neighbor who studies the heavens, a strange boy who is fascinated with snakes—all while keeping an eye out for ways to help the world. Is this vision her chance? Or is it already too late to avoid a devastating war?

In this prequel to the acclaimed The City of Ember and The People of Sparks, Jeanne DuPrau investigates how, in a world that seems out of control, hope and comfort can be found in the strangest of places.

From the Hardcover edition.

What happens between the hopeful spring weekend spent planting seeds and the warm summer morning when the gardener wanders back into the rows of vegetable plants with picking basket in hand? Plenty! Every healthy vegetable garden represents an entire world of activity and every vegetable gardener, no matter how experienced, wants to know more about what's going on in those tidy rows and how to handle any growing quandary that may arise throughout the season.

The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book has all the answers, gathered together in a sturdy little book for handy in-the-garden reference. Gardeners will find helpful, uncomplicated responses to questions on planning and planting a vegetable garden, improving soil, caring for crops, and organically controlling pests and diseases.

The second section of the book takes readers on a veggie-by-veggie tour of the most popular crops, offering detailed advice on everything from starting seeds to knowing when to harvest. Having trouble choosing tomato varieties? Need advice on staking beans? It's all here in easy-to-access answers to everyday questions.

The popularity of vegetable gardening is at an all-time high. Homegrown vegetables taste great, nourish body and soul, and provide the additional security of knowing where the produce comes from and how it was grown. The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book feeds readers all the insider's tips and tricks, practical advice, and organic wisdom necessary for growing the very best crops.

Dashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.

This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how to: Avoid the thirteen mistakes common to dashboard designProvide viewers with the information they need quickly and clearlyApply what we now know about visual perception to the visual presentation of informationMinimize distractions, cliches, and unnecessary embellishments that create confusionOrganize business information to support meaning and usabilityCreate an aesthetically pleasing viewing experienceMaintain consistency of design to provide accurate interpretationOptimize the power of dashboard technology by pairing it with visual effectiveness

Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.

Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called "Processing." Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you: The seven stages of visualizing data — acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details Several example projects with the code to make them work Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want toconvey about your data set The book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents — why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.