Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast’s support site.”

From the New York Times.

This is a fun and simple overview about how you might manage your online social networks. For me, the more interesting bit is the links to sites that help you create avatars, for example, Be Funky. Many of these effects you can get in Photoshop. I also liked the mention of the Firefox plugin, LeechBlock, that lets you ban specific sites (oh, you know, YouTube or Facebook or ___) during certain hours of the day so you can get work done.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.”

From Wired. There are a number of great engines to check out based on this article. Collecta looks useful for companies who want to find out what is said about them online while ParkingSpots can help you find a parking spot.

This article highlights the search trend away from generic search to topic specific search and action specific search. My guess is that some of these new search engines will be bought up by the bigger players like Google.

However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so does the effort needed to maintain the quality and consistency of the user experience. For many organizations, it is now impossible to assign much, if any, time of a user experience specialist to all implementation efforts, and experience has shown that the UI guidelines and principles approach to propagating a single user experience standard does not scale well.”

From Boxes and Arrows. Besides a quick discussion of issues around how traditional guideline documents don’t scale, and alternative solutions, this article includes an excellent set of links to UI pattern libraries.

From Typography for Lawyers. Found through The (Non)Billable Hour. This is a truly excellent introduction to typography geared towards all lay people. While it is hard to explain typography with words, showing people two examples of fonts that say the same thing, as this site does, explains it all to the average person.

My only quibble is that the layout is too wide even for 1024×768 screens. And you need to click into the site to get to the content, starting with the About page. However, that’s exactly the way legal documents usually work so it is no wonder.

From Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear in Science Daily. Found through HiveLogic.

Best part is that the tests were done in a noisy nightclub asking people for cigarettes. Probably the worst place to have a conversation. This research suggests that when you pitch your clients, you should always directly face their right ear.

However, articles like this are a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, some of these free services take up to 60 minutes to notify you if there is a failure. There also could be lag time between the time the monitoring service is notified and the time they send an email or SMS to you. At least one solution involves placing a file on your web server, which yields more detailed data to monitor. In short, the free option for many of these services is limited in ways that might not be useful. So it is caveat emptor, or buyer beware.

I have played with Montastic and Basic State. Montastic is fine. Basic State yesterday caught a server failure within fifteen minutes, which is great for free. Their daily status emails also are useful. I’d also check out the comments on these articles for more vendors. I found Server Density that way.

My recommendation is to compare all services, try the services that meet your needs and then, if you need to, pay for the service. Despite what these articles promise, it is possible but unlikely you will find a free service that does exactly what you want. But free is enough to try these services, to find what works for your website(s).

From FixOutlook.org. You’ll need a Twitter account to participate, although anyone can go to the Microsoft site and and complain/suggest they either fix their Word rendering engine or not use it in Outlook 2010. It’s rather odd, too, given the outrage a few years ago when Microsoft pre-emptively switched the HTML rendering engine to their crippled Word HTML rendering engine. While that decision made business sense — it’s less cost and less complexity to use one tool across multiple software packages, it is amazing they still have not fixed the very broken Word HTML rendering engine. They’ve had years.

In any event, the FixOutlook.org site also is interesting because they’re gathering all the tweets and avatars. So it’s a visual representation of the hive mind. Very cool. Now is a good time to speak up on this issue.

And, if you missed it, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft recently told Blooomberg that, in response to the Obama Administration closing a corporate tax loophole, “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.” While corporate profits are important, so is the ability of Americans to have high paying jobs so they can buy houses, send kids to school, take vacations, and buy stuff like Microsoft software. It’s a matter of balance. With this Outlook 2010 decision, and comments about destroying US jobs to avoid taxes, Microsoft seems very out of balance lately.

You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can debug your pages on multiple versions of IE on the same machine that you use for Web development.”

From the MSDN Blog about Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. Found while searching for the next best thing after Multiple IE, an earlier solution to let web designers and developers test their pages in multiple versions of the Internet Explorer web browsers. Multiple IE is no longer supported, and IE8 is out, so Microsoft’s Super Preview software looks like a decent alternative. (The only problem? Take a wild guess. The software is bloated, 250MB. Probably worth it since it is a Microsoft solution to a Microsoft problem. But you’ll need extra time to download their software.)

Other options appear to be IE Tester and Xenocode Browser Sandbox.

The most lightweight option probably is WestCiv’s X-Ray bookmark utility. It is hands down the slickest utility for web designers. Select the X-Ray bookmark then click any part of any web page and see all sorts of useful detail. I can’t get X-Ray to work with IE6, to show me all those nasty bug effects, but X-Ray does work on IE7, Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So it’s a very lightweight easy solution to figuring out how your pages are being rendered across multiple browsers. And how somebody coded a neat web page design.

From AllFacebook. This article nicely describes how to take advantage of Facebook for your business. It is extremely comprehensive, an excellent how-to and checklist for your pages.

In reading this, however, it struck me that Facebook does (or soon will do) everything a good corporate website must. A Facebook business page is a second website. Only it has better tools to connect with customers and a platform to expose your business to many more people than a search engine (see also John Battelle’s Searchblog article, The Conversation is Shifting).

Along the way we’ll share some of the tweeters, books, and resources we found useful for budding information architects. Even if you’re familiar with the discipline already, you can probably pick up something you’ve missed.”

From UXBooth. This article is comprehensive but the data is presented in neat little boxes, for example, links to the Twitter addresses for several information architects and links to software used to create information maps, not a ton of prose. But the insights are thorough. Information architecture is both a distinct skill set requiring you hire someone to do it and a skill that business and software program managers should possess.

Charles Simonyi, the brilliant programmer who co-invented WYSIWYG word processing, dated Martha Stewart, made a billion dollars off of Microsoft stock and went into space, first tried to solve the Mythical Man Month problem of organizing really big software teams by creating one super duper überprogrammer writing the top-level functions, while handing off the implementation of the lower-level functions to a team of grunt junior-programmers as needed. They called this position program manager. Simonyi is brilliant, but this idea, not so much. Nobody wanted to be a grunt junior programmer, I guess.”

From Joel on Software. This is an excellent, perhaps exhaustive, description of how best to manage software development projects. It’s a wonderful read, too. This article is excellent background for non-programmers as well as anyone involved in software programming.

In theory, software development should be amenable to the same processes used for any large scale creative project, for example, paintings where the assistant(s) set up the general work and the artist fills everything in, architectural photography (same dynamic: assistant(s) set up, the photographer comes in to add value), and so on. But software is notorious for failing when traditional organizational methods are used, as Spolsky notes in the quote above.

This article also has great insights, for example, making sure the program manager and programmers are peers and equals. This guarantees debate. Otherwise, if programmers report to the program manager or, worse, the development manager also is the program manager, then there is no debate among equals. Bottomline, the software program manager must be an advocate for the user and must earn the respect of the programmers and win them over to their user-centric solutions.